There is a moment I return to sometimes when I am working with clients who have spent years trying to think their way into understanding why they do what they do.
They describe the anxiety that shows up in their chest before a difficult conversation. The tightness in their stomach when they walk into certain rooms. The way their breathing changes when someone raises their voice, even slightly. The exhaustion that arrives after social gatherings, even pleasant ones. And then they apologize for it. As though the fact that their body responds before their mind can intervene is evidence of weakness or irrationality.
What I often say in response is this: your body is not confused. It is doing exactly what it was trained to do, and it started that training long before you had language to describe what was happening.
The body learns first. Always. Before a child can think about safety, before they can analyze a situation or weigh options, their body is already responding. It is reading the room, tracking shifts in tone, monitoring the quality of silence, and adjusting accordingly.
This is not conscious. It is not a decision. It is the nervous system doing what nervous systems do, which is to detect threat and organize behavior around survival.
A child does not need to understand why their stomach tightens when they hear footsteps in the hallway. They do not need to know why their shoulders rise toward their ears when an adult’s voice shifts from calm to irritated. They do not need language for the way their whole body braces when they sense that something is about to go wrong.
The body knows. And it responds. This is somatic intelligence, and it is older and faster than thought. It operates below the level of conscious awareness, processing information through sensation, muscle tension, heart rate, and breath before the thinking mind even registers that something needs attention.
For children growing up in environments where the adults are unpredictable, emotionally volatile, or unable to provide consistent safety, this somatic intelligence becomes highly refined. The body gets very good at reading subtle cues. A certain quality of silence. The sound of a door closing. The way someone sighs or sets down a glass.
These signals do not come with explanations. They arrive as sensations. A flutter in the chest. A knot in the stomach. A sudden alertness that makes it hard to focus on anything else.
And because children do not yet have the cognitive capacity to name what they are sensing, they simply adapt. They learn to move quietly. To stay small. To read faces and adjust their behavior accordingly. To become hypervigilant without ever knowing that hypervigilance is what they are practicing.
The body is teaching them how to survive, and it does so without asking permission or waiting for understanding.
What makes this so complicated is that these adaptations work. The child who learns to sense danger before it fully arrives is safer than the child who does not. The nervous system that can detect a shift in mood and adjust in real time is doing its job.
But here is what happens next.
As the child grows, the thinking mind begins to develop. Language arrives. The capacity for reflection emerges. And at some point, usually without realizing it, the person begins to override what the body knows in favor of what the mind thinks should be true.
They learn to rationalize. To explain away the tightness in their chest as anxiety that does not make sense. To dismiss the sick feeling in their stomach as overreaction. To tell themselves that they are being too sensitive, too dramatic, too afraid of things that are not actually dangerous.
This is where the split deepens. The body is still responding to real information. It is still tracking threat, still signaling danger, still organizing behavior around survival. But the thinking mind has been taught to distrust those signals, to interpret them as problems to be managed rather than information to be respected.
I see this constantly in therapy. People who describe a lifetime of ignoring what their body was trying to tell them, only to realize years later that their body was right all along. The relationship that felt wrong from the beginning, even though they could not articulate why. The job that made them physically ill, even though it looked good on paper. The family gathering that left them depleted, even though everyone else seemed fine.
In each case, the body knew. It was sending clear signals. But the thinking mind had learned to override those signals in favor of what seemed rational, reasonable, or expected.
And here is the part that carries the most grief: many of us learned to override our bodies because listening to them did not make us safer.
When you are a child and your body tells you that the adult in front of you is dangerous, but that adult is also the person responsible for your survival, you cannot simply leave. You cannot set a boundary. You cannot protect yourself in any meaningful way.
So you learn to tolerate the sensations. You learn to stay present even when your body is screaming at you to run. You learn to smile even when your stomach is churning. You learn to perform calm even when your nervous system is in a state of high alert.
This is not a failure. This is an adaptation to impossible conditions. But the cost is that you learn to stop trusting what your body knows. You learn that the sensations are not useful information. You learn that the safest thing to do is ignore them and rely instead on what your thinking mind can rationalize.
And that habit does not go away just because the conditions change. Even as adults, even in relationships and environments that are objectively safer than the ones we grew up in, many of us are still operating as though listening to our bodies is a luxury we cannot afford.
We push through exhaustion because the thinking mind says we should be able to handle more. We stay in situations that make us physically uncomfortable because the thinking mind says we are overreacting. We ignore the signals our bodies send because we have been trained to believe that those signals are not trustworthy.
But here is what I want you to consider: what if the signals were never the problem?
What if your body has been trying to tell you something true for years, and the only reason it feels confusing now is because you were taught to stop listening?
The work, then, is not about fixing the body or calming the nervous system into silence. The work is about learning to listen again. To notice what the body is saying without immediately dismissing it as irrational or inconvenient.
This is harder than it sounds, because it requires slowing down enough to feel. And for people who have spent years moving fast to avoid feeling, that slowness can be deeply uncomfortable.
But the body does not need you to understand it before it will speak. It is already speaking. It has been speaking your entire life. The tightness in your chest when you are around certain people is not random. The exhaustion you feel after performing competence all day is not weakness. The way your breathing shallows when you walk into a room where you once felt unsafe is not overreaction. It is information.
Your body is still tracking. Still responding. Still trying to keep you safe in the only way it knows how, which is to send signals that something is not right. The question is whether you are willing to listen.
I think about this a lot when I watch clients begin to reconnect with their somatic awareness. There is often a moment of recognition that feels both relieving and devastating.
Relieving because they finally understand that they are not broken or irrational. Their body has been making sense all along. It was responding to real threats, real instability, real danger.
Devastating because they realize how long they have been ignoring those signals. How many years they spent pushing through sensations that were trying to protect them. How much they sacrificed in order to stay functional in environments that required them to override their own knowing.
But here is what I have seen again and again: once people begin to trust what their body knows, something starts to shift.
They stop forcing themselves into situations that make them physically uncomfortable just because the situation looks fine on paper. They start honoring the signals that say this person is not safe, even when that person has done nothing overtly wrong. They begin to recognize that the exhaustion they feel is not laziness but their nervous system telling them that something is costing too much.
This is not about becoming hypervigilant or paranoid. It is about restoring a relationship with the intelligence that kept you alive when thinking was not yet possible.
Your body was paying attention long before you had words. It still is. The sensations you feel are not problems to be solved. They are information to be respected. And the more you learn to listen, the more you will realize that your body has never stopped trying to tell you the truth.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: When Feelings Are Information, Not Problems
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
