The Truth Your Body is Telling You - Part 2

Self-Trust, Grief, and Coming Back to Life

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Guest Author: Kate Petersen is a member of The Broken & Beautiful Collective and supports women at the intersection of neuroscience, abuse recovery, and story. Her work explores what it means to tend to the body with curiosity rather than contempt. Meet Kate here.

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Your body has been telling you the truth all along. The work is learning to believe it.

Reader Note: Be gentle with yourself as you read. Details of pregnancy loss are discussed in this post.

When The Body Finally Speaks

It took a pregnancy loss to shake me back to life. 

Because I carried four babies to term without complications, I knew and trusted this was something my body could do well. But then, when I started to bleed at 12 weeks into my pregnancy, that trust evaporated. I was terrified and grieving, but left alone with my four small children to make an emergency midwife appointment and manage all our normal activities. All while knowing I was losing my baby. When the miscarriage completed days later, I called someone so I wouldn’t be alone, and was given “help” based on what they needed and wanted and not what was essential for my care. I was not physically alone in the moment, and yet, everything in my body was screaming that I had been abandoned in this experience.

This is what I mean when I say your body tells you the truth. It wasn't the miscarriage itself that woke me up, even though the loss was real and the grief was heavy. It was the clarity that followed. My body had been trying to tell me something for years, and I had been too afraid, too conditioned, too busy surviving to hear it. The miscarriage was the moment I could no longer ignore what my body had been saying all along: This is not safe. This is not love. This is not sustainable.

The Confusion of Being Alone While Surrounded by People

Here is something I need you to understand about isolation: it is not always physical absence. Sometimes isolation is being surrounded by people who do not see you. People who show up, but only on their terms. People whose care comes with conditions, commentary, or the unspoken requirement that you’re too much even when you’re not needing anything.

I thought I knew what love was. I had spent decades in relationships learning a definition of love that meant adjusting, performing, staying small, and making it easy for others to be near me. What I called love was actually a very sophisticated system of abandonment. I was never alone in a room, but I was alone in every way that truly mattered.

And my body knew this long before my mind could even begin to comprehend.

The autoimmune symptoms had been creeping in for years. The anxiety moved through me like weather I couldn't predict. The overwhelm at the slightest frustration. Sobbing for no apparent reason every day for years. The exhaustion that sleep couldn't touch. Skin disorders that would never heal. The way my system would lock up in the presence of the very people I was supposed to feel safest with. None of it was random. It was all communication.

And then the miscarriage. The loss of a pregnancy my body had carried so easily before: this was the loudest message yet. Its loss mirrored the abandonment my body had been experiencing for years. 

Questions That Changed Everything

And that is where the splintering questions entered my mind and started to shift my perspective: 

What if this isn't confusing? What if it means something?

What if your body isn't broken, or failing, or betraying you but responding to everything it has experienced and everything it is currently experiencing? What if the symptom you can't explain is not a malfunction but a message? What if the anxiety that arrives without a reason is your nervous system identifying a threat your conscious mind hasn't caught up to yet? What if the shutdown, the depletion, the emotional numbness is not you falling apart but your system trying desperately to protect you from more than it can currently hold?

I started asking questions like this  every time my body spoke up. And then, most importantly, I started listening. I didn’t understand it yet, but I was finally willing to trust it meant something. 

How to Begin Listening

You don't need to understand your body's language perfectly to begin hearing it. You just need to stop dismissing it as confusion and noise. When you experience pain, exhaustion, a flare-up, or an intense feeling you can't name, stop, notice, and then ask yourself:

What if this is true? What if my body is responding to something real?

And I want to offer you something to try today. Think of it as a step toward building trust with yourself. When you experience pain, exhaustion, a flare-up, or an intense feeling you can’t name…

…without fixing or explaining the sensation, simply stop and notice. Can you trust what your body is saying?

Now ask yourself

• What if this is true? 

• What if my body is responding to something real? 

  
  

You're not looking for a diagnosis. You're not trying to solve it in this moment. But you're giving yourself permission to trust that your body might be telling you something worth hearing.

Maybe you’re responding to a relationship that looks fine on paper but feels suffocating to your nervous system. Maybe you’re responding to a pace of life that your mind says is normal but your body knows is unsustainable. Maybe you’re responding to years of unprocessed grief, or stress, or harm that you survived but never had space to recover from.

You don't have to know which one it is yet. You just have to be willing to consider that maybe your body isn't wrong. Learning to listen is learning to recognize that state your nervous system is in: is it activating, shutting down, or in a state of flow and ease.  You don’t recognize these states in order to judge yourself, but so you can start to ask: What is my body responding to right now? And what would help me find my way back to capacity?

Capacity isn't the absence of hard things. It's having room inside yourself to meet them.

What Does it Feel Like to Live with Capacity?

Capacity is not the absence of hard things. It's not a life without stress or grief or challenge. Capacity is the ability to be with what's happening without your system going into overdrive or shutting down. It's the difference between feeling grief and being consumed by it. Between noticing anxiety and becoming it. Between encountering stress and losing yourself entirely inside it.

When I started to build capacity, I first noticed it in small, easy moments. I could sit with my own feelings without needing to fix them immediately. I could recognize when someone was asking me to manage their emotions and choose not to. I could feel the tightness in my chest when I was around certain people and this began to feel like self-trust, not a body malfunction.

Capacity feels like having room inside yourself. Like being able to take a full breath. Like trusting that you can handle what comes without needing to brace against all of it, all the time.

It doesn't happen all at once. And it can’t be developed alone.

The Interconnected Design of Humans

Here's a core truth about nervous systems: they regulate within relationships.

When I was in the worst of it - my body breaking down, life unraveling, everything I thought I knew about myself and my relationships falling apart - I could not think my way out or white-knuckle my way into healing. This was not a project I could accomplish on my own. 

I needed people who could hold the confusion with me. A coach who didn't try to fix me but helped me learn my own body's language. Friends who could sit with me in the mess without needing me to clean it up or make sense of it for them. People whose nervous systems were regulated enough to help mine remember what safety felt like.

This is not a metaphor. This is physiology.

Your nervous system learns regulation by being in the presence of other regulated nervous systems through the brilliance of mirror neurons in both. Your system learns safety by experiencing safety with another person. It learns to trust by being trustworthy and being trusted.

If you have been trying to do this work alone, I need you to hear this: it is not weakness to need help. It is biology.

You were never meant to do this by yourself.

What Comes Next

If you're reading this and something in your body is saying: yes, this is me, I recognize this,  then you're already listening. That recognition is the beginning.

The work from here is learning to trust what you feel. To stop going to war with your body and start working with it. To build capacity instead of just managing symptoms. To find the people and the spaces where your nervous system can remember what it feels like to be safe, seen, and held.

This is the work The Broken & Beautiful Collective does with individuals: in one-on-one sessions, and with groups where we can slow down, listen deeply, and do the work of becoming sovereign in our own bodies and lives.

If you're ready to stop managing and start listening, we're here with you.

Your body has been telling you the truth all along. It's time to believe it.

Read part 1 of "The Truth Your Body Is Telling You" here.