Why You Keep Abandoning Yourself (It's Not Your Mindset)

I used to wake up at 2am running the same mental loop,

Thinking about conversations I had,

Replaying them,

Dissecting them,

Asking myself what could I have said differently so that they would finally understand,

So that they would finally be okay with me having a need.

I would lie there in the dark,

Exhausted,

And quietly building a case for myself,

Like I was on trial,

Like I needed a lawyer-level argument prepared just in case anyone questioned why I made a decision to protect myself.

And here's the thing no one asked.

That is the mark of a woman who has not yet developed what I think of as the three essential capacities of inner strength.

And today I'm going to name all three,

Tell you exactly what happens in your body when you try to claim them,

And give you a somatic practice for each one of those.

Because the reason most women can't hold these isn't about mindset,

It's about your nervous system.

And those are two completely different problems and two completely different solutions.

Hi,

I'm Dr.

Kelly Kessler,

A doctor of physical therapy,

Transformation coach,

And the host of the podcast,

Rewiring Health.

I've spent years working with women seeing the same pattern.

They're intelligent,

They're capable,

Deeply self-aware,

And yet they override themselves in so many situations.

And that's what I specialize in,

The gap between knowing and being able to actually live in it.

So let's get into it.

Carl Jung spent decades studying what he called the individuation process,

The journey of becoming a fully realized version of yourself.

Not the performed version,

Not the palatable version,

But the real one.

He also observed that women in particular face a unique set of obstacles due to social conditioning.

And this often operates at the level of the body,

Where it shapes how a woman breathes,

How she holds herself in the room,

Whether she can feel her own hunger physically or emotionally,

Without translating it into something that might be an inconvenience for someone else.

I'm not a Jungian analyst.

What I bring is in the body side of this.

The somatic practice his framework doesn't address.

What I've come to see both in my own life and in working with hundreds of women are three core capacities that emerge as a woman comes back into her own inner authority.

I want to name each one,

Show you what it looks like when it's been conditioned out of you and show you what reclaiming it actually requires.

Because here's what I know.

You cannot think your way into sovereignty.

You have to inhabit it and inhabiting it starts with the body.

The first capacity is what I like to call containment.

The capacity to hold yourself,

To not collapse under pressure,

To not need the other person's emotional state to regulate yours.

For years,

I had no idea I wasn't doing this.

I thought I was calm,

But what I was actually doing was monitoring.

I was constantly reading the room,

Scanning for tension,

Adapting myself in real time to manage what I felt other people needed from me.

And when there was tension in the room,

In any room,

A meeting,

Dinner,

Parking lot even,

My body immediately sent a signal,

You are in trouble,

Fix this.

And within seconds,

I would soften my tone.

I would position myself in a way that I felt was adaptable.

I would adapt myself to the conversation,

Change my facial expressions,

Just to try to smooth everything over.

And then I would spend the next three days recovering from that interaction,

Exhausted,

Replaying it and asking myself,

Why did I do that again?

I was silencing myself in the moment,

Not speaking my mind and just becoming what I felt like the room needed.

And that is not calm.

That is a dysregulated nervous system working overtime.

The body pattern associated with the lost containment is predictable.

It's chronically tight upper chest,

Collapsed anterior shoulders,

Shallow breathing that never drops below the collarbone.

The body is holding itself.

And this isn't as strength,

This is as defense,

Because it doesn't feel safe in that moment.

And no amount of telling yourself to hold your ground,

That it's okay,

Is going to change that,

Because the signal is subcortical.

It's happening below your level of conscious decision making.

And that's why the body has to be the entry point.

And here's what most personal development content skips entirely.

The part of your brain generating that threat signal,

The part that tells you you need to shrink,

Soften and fix,

Is the subcortical brain.

The amygdala,

The brainstem,

The structures that process danger before a single conscious thought is formed.

Your prefrontal cortex,

The part doing all the journaling and affirmation work,

Doesn't have a fast enough or direct enough connection to override it in the moment.

The signal travels faster than your thinking brain can even respond.

Muscle activity,

Proprioceptive input and breathing patterns.

These all feed directly into your neural circuits that regulate your threat response.

This is why a physical intervention works when a cognitive one doesn't.

You're entering a system through a door that cannot open.

And that's why I'm going to show you the somatic practice for chest opening.

It's a pandiculation.

And a pandiculation is not a stretch.

It's actually a voluntary contraption followed by a slow intentional release.

And it sends a reset signal through the nervous system.

You can think about a cat waking up from a nap,

That full body arch and the yawn.

That's pandiculation.

So here's what I want you to do.

You're going to sit or stand,

Bring your arms behind your back,

Interlace your fingers and gently draw your shoulders back and down.

You're contracting in this motion and holding it.

So this is not just a passive stretch that you're going into.

You're actually going to contract the muscles to put yourself into that position.

So holding them back and down.

And as you do that,

You're going to inhale through your nose.

And as you release your breath slowly,

You're going to slowly release the contraction of the muscles.

And go as slowly as possible.

Do that again.

So again,

Back and down with the shoulders,

Opening up the chest,

Contracting,

Pushing down with your hands,

Breathing in through your nose,

And then slowly exhaling as you slowly release the contraction.

This is not about posture.

This is about your nervous system learning through direct input.

That it's allowed to take up space.

That opening up is not danger.

And that is where containment begins.

The second capacity is discernment.

The capacity to feel the difference between your emotion and someone else's emotions.

To know what is yours to carry and what isn't.

I spent most of my life saying,

I feel bad as a complete sentence.

Not I feel sad,

Not I feel hurt.

I feel bad.

This ambient,

Nonspecific guilt that sat on top of every situation that didn't resolve perfectly.

As if the imperfect outcome was mine to hold.

As if someone else's discomfort was evidence of my failure.

I felt responsible for how other people felt.

I felt the pressure to explain every single decision,

Even the ones that weren't being questioned.

Because somewhere in my body,

I believed that if someone was unhappy,

It must have something to do with me.

And this is what happens when discernment is conditioned out of a woman.

She loses the ability to trust her own inner signal.

Because it's been overridden so many times in favor of some external one.

She becomes a very sophisticated reader of other people's emotional states and a very poor reader of her own.

And here's the body pattern that comes along with this.

A tight diaphragm,

Gut level confusion,

The inability to feel a clear yes or a clear no in the body,

Chronic back tension.

And that's what I carried for most of my 20s and 30s.

And they often show up as these patterns.

The body stays subtly braced,

Constantly orienting itself to others' needs.

And again,

This is why the body is the entry point.

Discernment is not a thinking problem.

It's an interoception problem.

And interoception is your body's capacity to sense its own internal state,

To register what is actually happening inside you,

Rather than what's happening in the room around you.

And research shows that chronic stress and chronic people pleasing actually degrade interoception accuracy over time.

You become less able to read your own inner state because the nervous system has consistently prioritized external signals.

You cannot reclaim discernment by thinking harder.

You reclaim it by restoring the body's ability to feel itself.

That means down-regulating the stress response first,

Because a body in sympathetic activation is a body scanning for outward threat,

Not inward truth.

And the practice I'm going to show you is an exhale-based practice,

And it directly stimulates the vagus nerve,

Which is your 10th cranial nerve and the longest nerve in your body.

It's also the primary driver of the parasympathetic shift.

So when you extend your exhale,

You are physiologically signaling safety to your nervous system.

And in that window of safety,

Your own interior signal has a chance to become audible again.

For this one,

You're going to sit comfortably,

Raise your one arm up,

And allow your other just to hang on the side.

You're going to reach actively up to the sky so that you're not just up here,

You're actively reaching,

And slightly laterally extend over to the side.

So again,

You should feel an activation of muscles with this.

As you do it,

You're going to inhale through your nose,

And feel the air into your belly.

So it's not chest breathing,

It's trying to bring the air lower.

So again,

Actively reaching,

Breathing into your nose,

Hold it for a second or two,

And then as you slowly lower the arm,

You're going to slowly exhale,

Allowing the arm to come down to the side as you exhale.

Going up to the other side.

So again,

Reaching up with your other arm,

Actively reaching overhead,

Inhaling through your nose,

And as you exhale,

You're going to slowly lower the arm out to the side.

And again,

This is going as slowly as you can,

There is no rushing here.

The slower you go,

The more opportunity your body has to adjust to that and recognize the signals from your body.

The extended exhale helps shift the nervous system out of a stress response and into a more regulated state.

And the lateral release begins to loosen areas that tend to hold protective tension.

You cannot trust your own knowing when your body is constantly adapting to someone else.

And this is the beginning of coming back to yourself.

The third capacity is one Jung pointed to most clearly in his work,

The development of inner authority,

The capacity to act from your own knowing,

Even under social pressure.

Even when someone disagrees,

This is sovereignty.

And this is the capacity that is most deeply conditioned out of women,

Because it directly challenges the patterns that keep women accommodating and self-abandoning.

I want to tell you what sovereignty did not feel like for me in the beginning.

It did not feel like confidence.

It felt like danger.

Every time I made a clear decision,

Held a position,

Let someone feel disappointed and stopped explaining myself,

My body responded as if I had done something wrong.

The guilt was immediate and felt so heavy every single time.

The urge to fix it,

To soften,

To go back and explain just one more time felt so immediate and so pressured at this time as well.

I would set something in place and then spend hours composing the apology in my head.

And it's not because I did something wrong.

It's just that I felt like I wasn't allowed to protect myself in this moment.

I felt like someone knew better than me.

I felt like their needs trumped mine.

And this is because my nervous system had been trained for decades to interpret self-assertion as a threat to belonging.

And belonging at the nervous system level is survival.

This is why you can't simply decide to be sovereign.

The decision lives in the thinking brain,

But the reaction happens deeper and faster.

And here's the body pattern that goes along with this.

There's a freeze after self-assertion,

Immediate guilt,

Second guessing,

And the urge to repair.

And underneath it,

A spine that has spent years slightly curving inward,

A postural position that says,

I will make myself smaller so no one is threatened by my presence.

When your nervous system has been conditioned to treat self-assertion as social danger,

Every act of sovereignty triggers a threat response.

The body floods with cortisol,

The gut tightens,

The impulse to explain and apologize and retract become stronger and more deeply wired.

Social rejection from mammals at a time was actually viewed as a death sentence.

And this is why your nervous system doesn't distinguish between emotional disapproval and physical threat.

It all feels like legitimate threat.

This means that no amount of deciding to be more confident will hold.

If your body continues to register self-assertion as dangerous,

You will make the decision and then you feel the pull to undo it every single time because your nervous system is wired to keep you safe.

And it senses that this new act,

This new way of being is not safe for you because it's not predictable.

There's no sense of certainty in what could happen now that you've chosen yourself over someone else.

And that's why the body holds so much power,

Specifically through proprioceptive input that teaches the system what it actually feels like to be upright,

Grounded and unretracted.

You are pairing a physical experience of taking up space with the moments you are choosing yourself.

Over time,

That pairing wires the association.

Self-assertion stops feeling like danger and it actually starts feeling like home.

And that's why this is such a powerful practice to integrate into your day.

So for this one,

You can stand up and what you're going to do,

You can put your hands on your hips or across your chest,

Whatever feels good for you.

You're going to extend your back and feel the muscles of your spine contracting.

As you feel those contractions,

You're going to inhale through your nose.

And as you slowly exhale,

You're going to slowly release the contraction of your muscles.

And bring your spine back into a neutral position.

Again,

Coming from the side,

Extending your back until you feel the contraction of those muscles.

Inhale through your nose,

Hold for a moment.

And then slowly release the extension of your back into a neutral position as you slowly exhale.

When you do this,

You also want to feel the ground.

Notice your feet on the ground and really allow yourself to anchor into that space.

All these practices should be slow and controlled.

There is nothing that needs to be rushed in this.

This is a moment to slow everything down,

Allow your system to integrate it and adjust to this new way of moving.

When you pair this motion with times that you choose yourself,

You begin to teach your nervous system that self-assertion is not danger.

That is how sovereignty becomes something you can hold and something that feels real and something that becomes integrated in your system,

Not just a concept that you learn about.

So the three concepts we covered today are containment,

Discernment and sovereignty.

There are three capabilities that emerge as you come into alignment with yourself.

These are three capabilities that many women have spent their lives being trained away from due to adaptation and the sense of safety and belonging.

But the thing is,

It was belonging to someone else,

Not to themselves.

Work of reclaiming them is not intellectual.

You already know enough.

The work is in your body and it starts with something as simple as pandegylation,

Your nervous system's way of resetting.

Thank you so much for being here,

For joining me and for taking this time for yourself to choose something differently.

I'll see you in the next one.