When Healing Becomes Hiding: Trauma, Identity & the Body’s Cry for Truth

How the Body Stores Trauma, Beliefs Become Symptoms, and Awareness Isn’t Enough 

You’ve done the work.
The journaling. The nervous system regulation. The trauma-informed coaching.
You can name your patterns, track your cycles, and explain every emotional trigger with precision.

So why... does it still feel like nothing's landing?
Why do you feel disconnected from your body, your truth — and the joy you thought healing would bring?

In this raw solo episode, I’m sharing a truth I never expected to uncover:
👉 That healing itself had become my new form of avoidance.
👉 That I had built an identity as a crystallized healer — and was bypassing my own pain using breathwork, awareness, and even somatic healing.

This is where I’m at — in the gray zone.
Not on the other side, not with a five-step plan.
But in the descent — where the body speaks what the mind tries to avoid.

We’ll explore:

• Why your body is your subconscious
• How unprocessed trauma becomes physical symptoms
• The descent of consciousness — from belief to energy to biology
• Why the nervous system overrides mindset, and how emotional repression leads to illness
• How to identify when you’re performing healing instead of embodying it

This episode is for the woman who:

• Is healing “so well” she’s forgotten how to feel
• Can teach nervous system healing but can’t seem to land in her own body
• Feels like she's done "everything right" — but still can’t hold peace, joy, or success
• Is ready to stop performing growth and start living in her truth

If you've ever felt like your healing journey is keeping you safe from what you actually need to feel — you're not alone.
This is the truth behind the mind-body connection that no one’s talking about.

💌 DM me on IG or leave a comment on Spotify — I’d love to hear what landed.

🫀 Your body already knows. Your truth already lives in you. And healing isn’t about doing more — it’s about feeling it all.

🔗 CONNECT WITH LAUREN MICHELLE JEWEL

✨ Instagram → @laurenmichellejewel & Lauren's Facebook
💌 Join the Embody This Collective → Join Here
🌐 Website + Work With Me → https://msha.ke/laurenjewel
🎁 Free Resources → Grab All My Freebies
🎙️ Podcast Hashtag → #EmbodyThisPodcast

💬 DM me on Instagram and tell me what resonated most with you from this episode.
📣 Share the show and tag me so more women can reclaim their body, identity, and f*cking life.

⚠️ Disclaimer:

This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, or replace professional medical advice or mental health care. Always consult with a qualified healthcare provider before making any changes to your health practices.

Transcript

Introduction and Purpose of the Episode

0:01

All right. What's up? What's up? So this episode is not what I plan to make this week, but it is the one that I need to make. So I'm in the middle of something right now, something uncomfortable, raw, and really revealing, and instead of waiting until I figured it all out, I wanna bring it. I wanna bring you into it in real time. I want to be vulnerable. I want to share with you my experience, and this isn't gonna be prepackaged, this isn't going to be, thought out. I am going to just vulnerably share and put everything on the table here because of what I've been experiencing is deep and there's no physical outside trigger necessarily. This isn't like I'm going through a breakup. I'm going through, I got fired. This isn't anything like that. This is like I am actively choosing this life and I am choosing to do this deeper work, but my fucking God, can it be. Humbling at times. So if you'd like to hear the ins and outs of my healing process and learn a little bit about me and get a little intimate and deep with me, then come on down.'cause this episode is named When Healing Becomes Hiding. The body is a mirror. The self in dissent. So get ready because I'm about to blow your fucking mind. Welcome to Embody this, the NO BS Healing podcast for women who are done playing small. I'm Lauren Michelle Jewel, a single sober business owning badass who has been humbled as hell by healing. But I'm not just someone who's lived it. I've studied it, coached it, and helped women walk through it for over seven years in mind, body health, gut brain science, and nervous system healing. I've worked with women who have tried everything, therapy, diets, supplements, self-help work, but still feel disconnected from their bodies, their health, and their truth. Because here's the thing, healing isn't a trend. It's not aesthetic. It's not an identity. Healing is embodied, and let me be real with you, it's hard as fuck and it's also rewarding as fuck. I know because I've lived it. And along the way I realized something. Modern healing methods are failing us. Everything is compartmentalized. Go to therapy. They say, take the supplements, do the inner work, but no one teaches you how to actually integrate it. All this show is for you if you're ready to rethink healing. It's not about being perfect, being a wellness influencer or having a PhD in biohacking. It's about undoing, unlearning, and finally coming home to yourself. Quick disclaimer, this podcast is for educational purposes only. It's here to expand your mind, challenge old narratives, and empower you with knowledge. It's not a replacement for medical advice. Always consult a professional when making health decisions. If this episode hits home, follow the share, rate it, review it, share it with someone who needs to hear it, because you never know whose life you might change. Now let's fucking go. All righty guys. Let's talk about what I'm discovering and where I'm at. So I have been healing, quote unquote. Since, let's say like actively choosing it, right? Where I'm like in it, I am learning all the things. I have been wanting to heal. I am doing the breath work, I'm doing the journaling. The concept of like healing is in my vocabulary. I understand trauma, right? You know what I'm saying? Like I've been in it since 2019. The minute that I got sober was the minute that I was like, okay. Let's fucking go what do I need to do to not feel like shit and feel better? Because when I first got sober, I struggled with severe anxiety, like social anxiety. I didn't know how to be human at all. Social anxiety, constipation. F brain frog, like I literally was like, I needed double the caffeine for everything. Obviously I had did not have good eating habits, so I was like sugar addicted. This is like basically like the epitome of all. Recently sober people, by the way, you reach for sugar because it's a dopamine hit. You reach for caffeine because again, it's a dopamine hit. And like they always jokingly say, it's like the person walking in, they have an energy drink on, they got their key chains, they have some candy, maybe their vape or their six, whatever it is, right? Choose your poison. But I struggled with brain fog, constipation. I had insomnia and. I was recently just into a new relationship and I was like addicted to love and I didn't know it at the time. It's crazy how many loves of the lives, loves of your life. You will meet in the same town. So wild. And really you're just like. Attracting trauma responses, and they're all mirrors. And I plan to get deeper in this within the podcast too, because the relationship, topic is really important to me. And it's something that blew my mind and it's so correlated to our health, right? It's so correlated to our health, the physical imprints that we have from relationship, and how it affects our body is. A big key player when I work with my clients. But for me, right when I first got sober, I didn't like the way that I felt. I was shocked. I was like, okay, like I, I did it. I got sober. Like, why do I feel this? Why? And of course, what did I do? Well, I went to the doctor, right? Before I wouldn't go, but this was like, you know what, I need to step off my high horse and I need to go to the doctor and I need to ask for help. So I went to a, addiction specialist place and I spoke to them about my mental health and I spoke to them about my physical health. And what I found was that even though it was a place specifically geared towards addiction and what I was struggling with at the time, even though I was sober. I still just walked out of there with a bunch of labels and a handful of prescriptions, and there was no question ever asked what's actually going on underneath all of this? Why? What's the correlation here? Like they, they label me with a DHD and say, well, that was the reason for your addiction. I'm like, yeah, but it wasn't from a deficiency in Vyvanse. That's not. That's not it, right? Same thing with anxiety. Well, we're gonna put you on blood pressure medication to help you lower your b well, why am I getting so anxious? What's underneath that? Same with sleep. It's okay, well I'm not sleeping properly because I'm anxious and I have a DHD. Well, yeah, obviously it's a symptom of the medication, but also before that I wasn't sleeping properly. So what was going on? Underneath that, what is the root of this? It's not a deficiency in sleep medication. It's not a deficiency in a sleep aid, even if it's herbal, right? There's something deeper going on within the body. And so this experience for me really brought me to a point where I was like, okay, I need to take total like radical responsibility and I need to start learning more about this because I am not going to spend the rest of my life not knowing shit about my body. And my health. And so that cued the, I wanna learn, I wanna get to know my body, I wanna understand food, like I'm gonna have to eat every day, so let me learn about it. They don't teach us enough in school about it, but let me learn about it. There's the internet here, there's books, there's all these things, right? Then I was like, I wanna learn more about the mind and learning about self-development. And the minute that I learned about self-development, like obviously I was indoctrinated into it through like AA and NA and all of those things, but. It wasn't until I like really got into self-development and started to learn from different teachers that I was able to finally understand and grasp the possibility that we have, right? Like we have. So much opportunity to shift and change the way that we think and the way that we treat ourselves and the way that we speak to ourselves and other people and going even deeper, understanding the subconscious mind and understanding how our behaviors play out and why we say we want something and we don't do it right. And this was what was really fascinating to me. So I went back to school, I finally was like, you know what? I'm going back to school. I'm gonna find people that I have interest learning from. And that's what I did because I just was like, yeah, the four year college thing, like I always had beliefs about education in that sense. And I was scared at the time, so I was like, let me start smaller and let me find some mentors that I can learn from. And so I went back to school for nutrition. The biology of trauma, learning about like the gut brain, learning about digestive health and how trauma affects the body, and how our mindset and our behaviors and all of those things affect the body. And then I worked under my mentor Tracy Lit for about four years. So it was self-study at first, like I wanted to just work underneath her and learn from her and embody my own healing. And then she provided the opportunity to work underneath her and get certified underneath her. And I was like, hell fucking yeah, let's go. Because that the neuro identity evolution methodology is just life changing when you start to understand the identity aspect of it and it teaches you how to basically embody the identity of who you are becoming rather than. Continuously trying to transform from a place of being unhealed and from a place of the habits and the thought processes and all that, you start to construct the identity of who you are becoming, and you start to live as that person. And you learn the processes of how to do that rather than just trying to affirmation your way to transformation, affirmation your way to whatever it is that you desire. And so learning that process and working underneath her and co-regulating with her was a game changer, and it allowed me to start to see the world through a different lens. I started to realize that I had so much more. Agency and ability, and that my mind wasn't always telling the truth. And a lot of the things that I was experiencing were from childhood. And they were stories and they were things that my parents told me, but they were not fucking truth. And then I started to see how my physical symptoms and experiences were all correlated to the repression of emotion. So for years I always prided myself on being like the cool girl, like the super laid back, like my nickname was lj. I was like, they used to say I was like one of the boys. And really as cool as I was just massively repressed, right? Like I was just putting on this mask. Even though I had such strong emotion, I always felt everything so deep and deep down inside. I really wanted somebody to meet me in that depth, but no one ever really did. And I kept wondering why, and it was because I was masking myself. I wasn't allowing that full part of me to really come through. And this started really far back from, honestly, like elementary. I remember like I started to mask myself and act a certain way to be palatable for other people to be accepted as a child. And when we learn this and we start to realize that we have been judging ourselves for not being accepted yet, it's not even us, it's pretty fucking eyeopening.'cause you realize you're upset. That something isn't going your way, but you were never actually really you to begin with. You were adapting to fit in, to receive love, to be accepted.'cause that's what it really all comes down to is when we are infants we have a choice to either survive and attach or to be authentically expressed. And many of us. Don't ever have the opportunity to learn what it means to be authentically expressed and to be ourselves. We choose to survive and attach, and this shows up everywhere in our life. So I really dove into healing. Because I found it so fascinating and there were so many things about myself, and I was so willing to go there, and there were so many cool things like breath work and journaling and feeling my feelings and I, I could see it all. It was this big pattern. I was just like, holy shit. Obviously I was this repressed little girl who didn't know how to feel her feeling she was modeled, her mother drank, her father worked, her brother was mean to her when she was a child, sibling, tough love type shit. And obviously she wanted to fit in, so obviously she started to party because it made her feel better because she was holding everything in. And obviously this happened because of this, and I have everything figured out right. That's where my thought process was. And so I was diving so deep into this work and I started to see the vision of oh my God, this is all connected. Our physical health, our mental health, our emotional health. This is in ancient scripture. It is old as hell. It is just not the western medicine topic. But I started to really see it through lived experience, like my health started to finally transform. When I started to feel my feelings, allow that expression to come through fully, to really get honest with myself, start making decisions differently from the place of my, her, the identity of who I am becoming when I had that clear vision of where I was going. But there's a paradox here. Because what I have realized, the revelation I needed to give you a little backstory there of what I am currently discovering about myself is the paradox of healing became my escape. Now, my coach, who I'm currently working with. I'm so fucking grateful for, but this shit's raw. Like I still, we are literally just touching on this. I'm just sharing this with you so that you can experience this with me because this is part of my life's work is to go through these death and rebirth cycles and to share in my vulnerable. Spaces to share my magic'cause this is where my magic comes through. Yeah. I can curate it, I can make it look really pretty. I can make it sound really nice, but really it's in the raw. Honest spoken truth, right? So my coach and my mentor and my guide, she calls it the idea of the crystallized healer. So I've built an identity around perpetual growth and it's actually fucking limiting me right now. So I've built my entire identity since getting sober around healing. And only recently did I realize that healing. Healing became my protection. I was so good at it, but it became how I hid from my actual pain because there are some things that I experienced in my childhood that, I'm tearing up sharing about it that nobody should ever have to experience. And it happened really young, and because of that compounding effect, when we have things happen to us really young, they continuously start happening to us because we never learned how to process through that, and we never learned that it wasn't okay. And so we adapt because we are intelligent beings and we create these facades and we create these masks and we become the good child and we become the quiet one, and we become enmeshed with our family. And we never learn how to actually process things. And we never learn how to actually emotionally express, and we never learn how to really feel our feelings. Because feeling our feelings feels dangerous because we were never modeled how, and so it feels really scary, but really we're just overthinking things and then we're perpetuating that process. But there's a part of me, and there's parts of me that have been repressed for so long. When I came into this work, like I said, I was like, when I first met my mentor, I remember being like. I know that you're really smart, but you're not gonna be able to mess with me because I am repressed. I don't feel feelings. And she read me like a book, like immediately, right? Like I was like, oh, okay. I'm gonna give you all my money because I've never had somebody read me that. Well. And like I said, once I started realizing the science of it all and understanding all that stuff, that's when I was like, oh shit. So you're saying the reason why I can know all these things and nothing's happening in my life is because I'm actually not embodying it and feeling it. Oh fuck. But what I did was that I built on top of those old identities and those adaptations. There are parts of me that are so deeply buried that I didn't even know about them until recently. I didn't even realize it. I have been so keen on deepening my work and doing all of these things, but there's is really intelligent protective mechanisms that apply here. And I need to be so clear with you. No one's going to I'm not going to be hurt in this process. I will feel the grief. I will feel the sadness, whatever it is, whatever part of it is that is so deeply, scared and protected. I don't have memory of what it's from. And this is what our brain will do to protect us. So if you're someone who does not remember your childhood, it is not because you didn't have one. It's because your body and your nervous system said, cool, cool. She cannot handle this. We will hide this away. And I say that with so much love because we know deep down that there's something there. Because we'll see it reflected in our life. And one of the ways that I've protected myself since getting sober is, like I said, I have become a. Using healing as avoidance to actually feel my pain. And what I mean by this is that like instead of actually feeling the pain, I'll become highly aware of what's going on and I will intellectually it so I can explain it so fucking well. This is what makes me such a good teacher. Such a good teacher, right? I can explain it. I will find a motherfucking science of it. I will go deep into the psychology of it, the neuroscience, the somatics, right? I can't explain it. That is a gift, but it's also an adaptation. But I don't ever actually feel it. It may sound like I'm feeling it. It may sound like it'cause I know it so well. How does she know that? What does she feel that in her body, that's how fucking intelligent this protector part is of mine. And my body will mirror this, i'll know when I'm stressed because I'll have the tension in my jaw. I'll know when I'm stressed because I'll just feel really just me, right? Like when I'm avoiding something, eventually it has to come. And you wanna think of it as think of a frog, right? If you put it in boiling hot water immediately, it's gonna jump out. But if you put it in simmering hot water, lukewarm water, and then you slowly start to heat it up, eventually you'll boil that fa frog. And so we, as human beings, when we have these adaptations, they are not. Necessarily bad, especially when we're children. We must use this to survive until someone comes along and teaches us until we come along and we repair ourselves. It's when we get older and those adaptations are no longer serving us. And we'll notice this through patterns, but it takes, again, courage and compassion to start to break these cycles because a lot of times they may not be ours. We pick up things from our family, we pick up things from our coworkers, we pick up things from society, right? And we will know when it's not working for us because we won't be able to experience what we truly desire. And I personally have been, I. Working so hard on things, right? Like I have made it my fucking mission to heal and to break these patterns and to invest so much money into myself and do all of these things, but I wasn't seeing the result that I wanted. I was. Reaching these points in times where I was like, what am I doing all this for? Why is nothing I'm doing landing? And it was frustrating for me and it's been frustrating for me. And there's been times recently where I felt incredibly alone. Because you get to a point where you've healed and you're healing and you can witness all these things in everybody else, but you feel like no one can really tune into you. Like I was holding so much space for everybody else, but who holds me? You know who holds me? And these past month. Was really that breaking point for me where I was like, who do I reach out to? What do I do? What's going to change? Like, when is this ever gonna stop? I, and working with my coach, that's when she helped me identify. She was like, you are still protecting a part of you. Which we're working on Now. Again, I'm not all the way through this. That's why it's very raw. There's parts of me that have been fragmented. This is what happens when we experience trauma and it will show up through symptoms, tension, disconnection, intuitive blocks, right? Since our subconscious is our body, your body is your subconscious. Our unprocessed emotions will live in the body. They will create protective identities to create an that create energetic patterns. And this is also how disease and discomfort can be really a messenger, not a malfunction. And let me be so clear with you. Everyone has trauma. I like to call it emotional imprints because it's just what happens. It's part of the human condition, right? We all have stuff that we never fully metabolized, and what I mean is that we were never taught how to properly. Process it and integrate it and embody it and let it go and let it move through us. Many of us were modeled a life of suppression, of repression. We remodeled how to push through it and how to just keep doing more and more. And then we wonder why we are in a place in our life where we maybe are receiving all the things that we've always desired, but we can't let it in. And that's really where I was. Recently I was finding myself, I've done so many amazing things, but I could not let it in. And it was like my nervous system. It knows pain. This is what I wanna be so clear. It is a aware of pain. It knows pain, it knows suffering, it knows the struggle, but ease, joy, pleasure, all of these things. It doesn't know how to receive that. It doesn't know how to actually experience that. And if it does, maybe for a short period of time, but it can't hold it. And when I say hold it, like I can't metabolize it properly. It can allow that in without a, feeling conditional without the shoe dropping. So what I wanna do in this section of it is I wanna explain to you really how energy becomes the body. How these childhood moments, which I call the descent of consciousness, how these energetic blocks, these moments in our childhood, the things that we have pushed away and maybe built on top of will lead to disease. They will lead to our symptoms, they will lead to our experiences in our life. So let's break this down. So you've probably heard phrases like your body keeps the score, or your issues are in your tissues. But let's get specific about what that actually means. So at the root of all your suffering, your anxiety, your burnout, your digestive issues, autoimmune flares is not just poor diet or bad luck. It's a descent. It's a chain reaction and one that begins in your consciousness and it ends in your cells. So you've heard me say your body is your subconscious mind, but what does that really mean? How does something as invisible as a belief become a physical symptom? How does energy become matter? Like I said, this is what I call the descent of consciousness and is the journey of pure awareness into thought, emotion, nervous system, patterning, and ultimately into the cells of your body. So we'll talk, we'll start at the top. At Pure Consciousness. So this is your spiritual body, right? This is the energetic origin of everything. This is your true self, your essence before identity, before trauma, before programming. This layer is subtle, infinite, and often ignored in modern science because it can't be explained from this still expansive awareness. Energy begins to take shape and as it descends, it begins to form structure, and that first structure begins with your thoughts and your belief. This is known as your mental body. This is the layer where thought is born, but it's not just passing ideas. I. It's meaning. So this is where your childhood experiences start to hardwire beliefs like, I'm not enough. It's not safe to be me. Love is earned through performance. And these beliefs are not truths, right? They're survival strategies and they shape the filter through what you interpret your life. But thought isn't neutral. It holds frequency, and that frequency moves down. So we move into energy and motion, which is your emotional body. This is the realm of emotion, and it's your body's way of responding to the meaning that you've assigned. So if you believe that you're not safe, your body will create an emotional charge, like anxiety, fear, or tension. And those emotions are energy in motion. But if we repress them. If we don't feel safe to express grief or anger or sorrow, that energy stagnates and stagnant emotion is dense. It gets stored in the tissues. It becomes a toxin just like the chemical pollutant. I. This is where trauma starts to embed itself. So this is where I was experiencing things, right? So my conscious awareness was getting really large, right? My mental body and my conscious awareness and my spiritual body was just growing. But then I still had issues with. My past self, right? The self that I had repressed back when my childhood, I hadn't gone back there to really excavate those things. I hadn't allowed certain parts of myself, my identity of then that I repressed to fully process through. So even though in the current life. In my current situation, I was processing emotion and I was expressing there was still a deeper layer where the trauma had embedded itself, and I hadn't gone there. So the next layer, we move to the survival interface, which is your nervous system. So the nervous system kicks in to interpret these emotional charges as signals of threat or safety. And if your body feels stuck in unresolved emotion, it will default to your fight, flight, freeze, or fa. And it reroutes like your blood flow, alters your breath, tightens your muscles shut down, digestion, and floods your bloodstream with stress hormone. Chronic nervous system dysregulation is probably one of the most overlooked root causes of modern disease because it's literally tied to everything, which is why I tie it to everything because it's literally tied to everything. The science is unbelievable. And no mindset, affirmation in the world will regulate, and the system that doesn't feel safe, I can promise you that. You can know all the fucking things, but if you have not gotten into your body and allowed yourself to express those emotions, nothing's going to get past your brainstem. It's just gonna sit there and you are going to loop, and you are going to be in your mind and not in your body, and you are going to feel like you are spinning. And I say this from experience, then we move into the final layer, which is the physical body. So this is where energy becomes matter. This is the realm of form, right? Your cells don't just respond to food or supplements. They respond to beliefs, to fear, to your inner dialogue, right? Chronic shame. It burns out your adrenals grief. It constricts your lungs powerlessness. It suppresses digestion, emotional suppression. It builds inflammation and energetic toxicity. This is why your symptoms are sacred. They're not random. They are signals from your body asking you to look deeper. Every single emotion you have creates a biochemical reaction within your body, and it moves through all of these different layers. So it's not like your physical symptoms are separate from your emotional life. They are all connected. They're all connected from your level of consciousness. So your energy of how you're approaching things, this is where the nuances come in.'cause you may be doing all the right things, but if the energy. Is stagnated, right? If you wanna imagine your body like a drainage pathway of a city, if there is any energetic blockage, and there's blockages and there's buildup of think of it like a stress bucket, like all these things coming in. It could be stress from your life, it could be from pollutants, it could be from the foods that you're eating, but nonetheless. The reason why we do eat the way we do, it comes back to our consciousness level. It comes back to our behavior. It comes back to our mental state, right? And so all of these things add on top of it. So when it gets to the physical body, when we have a symptom, it means that it's been there for quite some time. If it's muscular, that means it's more recent. And then if it's within the organ and in the within the body like that, then that means that it's most likely from childhood. In addition to your current lifestyle situations and it's all playing together. And it builds into physical form. So the physical body is not the first place that you wanna look. It is actually the last place. But what I do with my clients and what I do with myself is you have to reverse engineer it. Because if the physical body is experiencing a symptom or it's experiencing disease, then it's pretty taxed at this time. It's pretty taxed. And so we wanna be able to support it not only with the nervous system, but we wanna be able to support it with the nutrients the rest, the regulation, and all of these things. So it's a full body journey, right? From pure consciousness to physical imbalances. Why healing has to be holistic. It's why band-aid prescriptions and surface level advice never gets to the root, and that's why we loop. So I say all this to say. Because it's so important for you to understand that at the most fundamental level, your consciousness is the source of everything you experience, your thoughts, your emotions, your physical symptoms. It's not separate from your mind, right? Your body is your subconscious mind. So when our consciousness creates thoughts. Right when these are filtered through your subconscious programming, which is largely shaped in childhood, your brain in trying to keep you safe, generates thoughts based on the environment in which you were raised. If love was conditional, if safety was scarce, your thoughts reflect that. Then your brain assigns meaning to those thoughts using past trauma, nervous system patterns and cultural conditioning. And here's the key meaning is not objective. It's based on how safe or unsafe your nervous system feels. So a child who is constantly criticized they don't just make a mistake, they feel like they are a mistake. Then meaning creates emotion, so that internalized meaning triggers an emotional response. The limbic system reacts sending signals that influence your hormones, your neurotransmitters in your automatic nervous system. And then the body doesn't differentiate between a real or perceived threat. It just responds. And if that emotional stress becomes chronic, it triggers inflammation, hormonal imbalances, digestive shutdown, fatigue, symptoms, illness, and what began as an invisible belief becomes physical matter over time. This is how the mind and body connection works in action. It's understanding, it is key to reversing chronic dysregulation because a story you're living out today in your body likely started out as a belief you formed decades ago when you didn't feel safe, seen or supported. You might be walking around thinking that you just have anxiety or maybe you're dealing with fatigue, insomnia. Digestive issues that seem to come and go with no rhyme or reason. But what if I told you that those symptoms are just your body's wave of speaking, the language of your subconscious? So these patterns, the ones that make you overthink, overwork shut down, or people please. It did not start last week. They were built a long time ago, likely before you even had words for them. And the wildest part is, is that they're not just mental, they're woven into your nervous system, your hormones, your tissues, and that's why it can feel so hard to shift them. So let's say you grow up in a house where being emotional wasn't really welcomed. Maybe your parents were super stressed or overwhelmed and without even meaning to, they made you feel like your big feelings were a burden. I. What does a kid do in that situation? Well, they internalize it. They think there must be something wrong with me. Fast forward to adulthood. Now you find yourself constantly apologizing, second guessing everything, feeling like you need to shrink to be accepted. Your posture literally collapses. Your shoulders round, belly tense, breath shallow. You might even hate your body, not because it's broken, because it carries the burden, belief that you're not lovable as you are. And that shame, it's not just emotional, it's physiological. It lives in your fascia, your gut, and your energy, or maybe your belief sounds more like I'm not safe. Now, this one usually comes from unpredictable environments where love felt conditional or chaos was the norm. As a kid, you probably learned that you needed to be hyper aware to scan the room, to always be a step ahead, just to feel, okay, so now you can't sleep, you're always in your head. You need to be in control of everything to feel okay. Planning gives you a false sense of safety, but underneath your gut is in knots. Your jaw's tight. Your breath is stuck high in your chest and you're wired, but tired, burning out, but still going. And usually people call you strong or driven, but really you're just surviving in a body that doesn't know how to relax. And what about I'm not enough. This one runs deep. For so many of us, including myself, it usually gets planted when your caregivers weren't emotionally present. Maybe they were there physically, but they weren't there emotionally, right? So I had emotionally unavailable parents. My father always was working, and he didn't know how to emotionally hold me. And then my mother was a drinker, so she just wasn't really there. I didn't trust her because she was always drinking. Or it could be that they were critical or just really emotionally immature, right? So you decided it must be me, and now you hustle for your worth. You can't rest without guilt, and you don't feel proud of yourself unless you're achieving something. I. You say yes when you mean no. You overdeliver, you overthink, you overextend, and your body, it's exhausted. Your adrenals are screaming and you might feel wired in the morning and then crash out at 2:00 PM and then lie awake all night with your brain on fire. And the hardest part, well, even when you do all the right things, the green smoothie, the supplements, the workouts, you don't still feel well because the root isn't physical, it's emotional and it's energetic. Then there's the belief, I don't belong and hear me out. This one can be really sneaky. Because maybe you were the sensitive one in your family, or you didn't fit the mold because of your identity, your emotions, your needs. So you learned to hide, to edit, to become whoever people needed you to be, just to avoid rejection. And now you feel lonely. Even when you're in a room full of people, you get a lump in your throat before speaking your truth. Your heart physically aches when you feel misunderstood and you smile and say you're fine, but inside you're aching to be seen. And here's the thing, this isn't about self-help. Affirmations. You can't positive think your way outta these patterns. Why? Well, because they're just not in your mind. They're in your nervous system. They're in your breath, your hormones, your tissues, your default settings. These beliefs become the blueprint for your biology. So when people ask, why can't I just stop people pleasing? Why do I keep burning out? Why can't I rest? It's not because you're broken. It's because your body is still trying to protect the child you once were. This is why the work that I'm doing with my coach right now, this is why I have a coach. Because even though I am aware of all of these things, we need a mirror. We need someone to reflect back to us. The nuances that we are experiencing, this is why it's called shadow work or inner child healing, because shadow work and inner child healing, it's all based around the ego, right? Our ego is made to protect us and we create these adaptative, behaviors to protect us. But if you think of the shadow, you can't see your shadow, but people can, other people can, and with the right. Person, they can reflect back to you what you are not seeing. And that's why deep healing means going deeper than just behavior. It means working with the subconscious, the emotional body, and the nervous system, and that's why and how you begin to feel safe enough to change. So this is where I currently am right now. Which isn't a bad thing, right? I am just going deeper. And the deeper that I go, the more complex and nuanced the adaptive behaviors become. And I'm willing to do this because I want to embody this work because the deeper that I go. The deeper and the higher I'm able to take my clients, right? The more in depth, the more versed I become. So if you're still here, if you're still listening, I want you to know that again, I am sharing this. Because I know that there are people out here that are experiencing this. I know people that feel like maybe they're not really healing anymore. Maybe they're performing healing. Maybe they feel like, are they using their awareness and knowledge to explain pain, not feel it if you're experiencing jaw tension, disconnection, physical signs of buried truth, if you can explain everything you've been through. But it feels like you are not really in it. Just know I understand. Just know that your nervous system is so fucking brilliant and it's trying to protect you. Right now, there's somatic storage of trauma within you. Yeah, but safety is required before full healing can happen, and whether or not you are versed or not, it is so important to have a guide, to have a mirror, to have somebody who has. The ability to see this. And I'm so grateful for my coach and my mentor the woman who's guiding me through this right now, because she's able to see it and she's able to hold me through it, and she's able to allow me to put down my coaching mask, right? My, my coach, the coach within me, and become. The vulnerable client to receive the help because that's something that I do, I coach myself and it's super adaptive. Super great, but not when we're really trying to open up space for all these beautiful things and all parts of me, every single part of me. We're not putting away the ones that we don't like. We are opening up to every single fucking aspect of me. Not the super wise one, not the super fucking profound one, but the actual, like every fucking layer. Maybe the one who's a little shitty, sometimes, maybe the one who wants to be a little fucking baby sometimes. Maybe the one who has a little fucking, slick tongue on her. Every single part of me. We are opening up and we are uns shaming and we are welcoming in, and sometimes it feels like I'm fucking dying. I'm not gonna lie, but that's the truth. And I know that it's not fucking the end of the world. I'm just opening myself up to receive more. And the more that I do this, the easier it's going to get. To start to feel that ease, to open myself up to all the beautiful, wildly successful things that I will experience. But the more and more that I try to block certain things. The more and more I'll block those great things. So again, I'm not on the other side of this. I'm literally in it right now. That's why I'm recording this right now, because I want you to experience and see me in the middle. And I want you to realize like integration is messy. It's non-linear, and it's fucking honest. It's not profound and wise. It's messy. It's can feel like everything you've ever known is falling away from you, but it can also feel so expansive, right? Like the highs are high, the lows can be low. Right now, what I'm learning to do is be in the middle, be safe in the middle, and to love every fucking part of myself, and hopefully in doing so, you can be mirrored and shown that it's true for you too. If you've ever found yourself healing so hard, you forgot to feel, if you've ever been strong one, they'll wear one. The wise one. I see you. You're not broken. You do not need to fix yourself to be loved. Your body already knows your truth, already lives in you, and I hope you give yourself permission to feel it fully. I think that's it for today. So I love you and hopefully you enjoy this. I'd love to hear how you feel about these more vulnerable, authentic shares compared to when I'm, teaching more. But let me know how you like it, until next time. Thanks for joining me for another episode of Embody This Know BS Healing podcast. If you want to connect with me, check out the show notes for any of my socials. But I would love to hear from you. So if you're here on Spotify, leave a comment, reach out to me, DM me, let me know what you think. And as always, this journey isn't linear and don't forget to have some fun. It's summertime here in the United States and starting to get pretty nice out. So have a beautiful week and I love y'all.