Instead of feeling encouraged to explore our innermost thoughts and feelings, we are taught at a young age to shrink them, in order to keep others comfortable.

While that narrative is useful for surface level connections, to oneself and others, it establishes a core belief that we are too much. Too sensitive.  Too emotional. How can we understand our own depth if we are taught to suppress it? That question has kept me up many nights contemplating the answer. 

When I was a child, my Mother used to set the timer on the stove clock for 5 minutes and say “Katie, I need 5 minutes of quiet. No talking until the timer goes off”. I can remember staring at the timer, willing time to speed up until I could talk again. Not fully understanding the meaning. She wasn’t wrong for asking for that moment of peace. I was a ball of raw energy as a child. I had questions about everything. Not just simple questions, why questions. I would learn something new and immediately need to know why. Why do things happen the way they do? Why should I believe the sky is blue just because you say it is?

The message I received from the timer situation was that my questions were too much. And if I continued asking them, at the same rate, it would make my Mother withdraw from me.

That taught me something very specific about receiving love. It taught me that love could quiet itself when I was too much. And that if I wanted to keep it close, I needed to shrink. It created an early loop in my mind, be smaller and love stays.

And that tone has echoed throughout my adult life. I saw it show up in the mask I wore in order to receive love. 

The “Me” I showed to the outside world in order to feel accepted. But it never felt real. People would call me phony behind my back, and they were right. But the reasoning behind it was where the truth was hidden. I was hiding myself because if I showed my authentic self, they would abandon me because I wasn’t lovable at my core.

That was something I knew I needed to change. Feeling unloveable had created a web of circumstances that felt like a perfect storm. 

I reached for men who were emotionally unavailable. Looking for love from someone who was not capable of reciprocity kept me farther away from discovering my true self.  The friends that I attracted were people who would take advantage of my goodness and exploit my softness for their own gains. I accepted it, even though I saw through it, I allowed behavior that shouldn’t be tolerated.

It wasn’t until I finally stepped back and became still, that the patterns I was repeating started to become visible to me. 

I had been living in survival mode. Things had started to fade, lose their depth, as a cool numbness settled in. Days blurred together. I moved efficiently, convincingly, but without weight. Nothing pierced deeply enough to linger. Every time I denied my true feelings, depth started to fall away, replaced by an image I stopped recognizing.  I was distracting myself by trying to be who others needed, rather than who I truly was. 

That’s when I realized that nothing in my life was ever going to change unless I took the time to get to know who I was, at the most primal level. I started asking myself “Why?”. The very question that put into time out at age 5, turned out to be the single most important question I have ever asked of myself. 

For many years, I didn’t understand how deeply this pattern had shaped the way I chose connection. It wasn’t until I found myself drawn to two very different men, that I could see it clearly.

I noticed that the way my body and mind reacted to each connection was vastly different. Man A felt overwhelmingly familiar, like he was home. My body reacted intensely to him, my chest would tighten, making breathing take effort. Long silences made my mind spiral, filling in the gaps with my own narrative.  A longing almost desperate in nature. My day revolved around waiting for his texts and my mood was dependent on the outcome. If his mood shifted, my day tilted with it.

The connection with Man B showed me something very different. A type of quiet consistency that felt unsettling, at first. 

There was no spiraling with him. Being with him brought a sense of calm. I could physically feel my body relax around him. Open chest, clear thoughts without fog, steady breathing, warm feeling in my belly, shoulders dropped.

But what exactly did this contrast in my somatic system show me?

It showed me that my body was adept at translating the feelings of intensity, while struggling to understand the peace of calm. 

The feelings that came from B were foreign to me and I was very suspicious of trusting him. I kept asking myself, “What’s his angle?” 

I spoke chaos fluently and bathed in it’s shadow. Peace was still misunderstood in my mind.

The familiarity of the connection with A allowed me to trust it in spades. Not because it was healthy for me, but because I associated love with chaos and instability, not peace and calm. 

That realization caused a shift in the way that I saw things. 

It wasn’t that my nervous system was lying to me, I was misinterpreting it. 

The intensity causing my nervous system to spiral, didn’t mean my intuition was telling me that A was my destiny. It was telling me that this heightened sense, was meant to create an awareness that something was off. 

But at a young age, I was conditioned to recognize these signs as hallmarks of love. And my adult self continued to seek out connections where this idea was replicated.

Integrating calm into everyday life is intentional work. Knowing how to recognize the signs my nervous system is sending has made this easier.

When I am faced with a situation that clearly activates my nervous system, I have learned to pause. 

Sit with the feeling and look deeper inside myself for the root cause before reacting. 

Notice what my body is unconsciously telling me. Are my shoulders relaxed or tight? Is my breathing effortless or labored? Is there a sense of anxiety or calm? 

That pause creates a buffer, allowing me to respond from a place of peace, rather than urgency.

Choosing peace is a journey. It begins with one small choice at a time, a ripple, not a wave. Growth is messy. But choosing peace is how I clean it up. And little by little, I’m learning that calm isn’t the absence of love… It’s what love feels like when it’s safe.