The body does not only obey food, sleep, minerals, blood sugar, hormones, toxins, sunlight, movement, fasting windows, lab markers, supplements, or whatever the biohackers are currently yelling about this week because they stumbled on another finding.
I used to think the same way, especially after the stroke I suffered in 2011. Before the stroke, I already counted every calorie that passed my lips with almost religious precision, but afterwards I took it to another level. I ate on a very strict schedule, did bloodwork every twelve weeks to make sure my blood sugar was exactly where I wanted it, and turned down outings because I needed a certain number of hours of sleep each night. In my mind, health meant doing everything related to the body perfectly, one hundred percent of the time.
And don’t get me wrong, the body DOES obey all those things - food, sleep, minerals, blood sugar, hormones, toxins, sunlight, fasting windows, lab markers, supplements, and exercise of course, because we are biological beings made of chemistry, rhythm, matter, electricity, tissue, nourishment, depletion, exposure, adaptation, and repair after all. But what I didn’t know back then and wish I did is that the body has always also obeyed something far less visible and, in many ways, far more important: emotional instructions. How could I have possibly known? No doctor ever asked me anything of emotional nature. And when I had an out of body experience at 19, I was put on anti-psychotic medications. Medicate the body. Silence the signal. That has always been one of the medical industry’s favorite solutions.
For many women, emotional instructions were installed early, long before we had language for trauma, nervous systems, emotional repression, boundaries, attachment, betrayal, or the damage done when a person learns to become acceptable instead of honest. Stay quiet. Do not need. Do not ask. Be useful. Be strong. Do not upset anyone. Do not trust softness. Prove your worth. Do not be too much. Do not tell the truth if the truth will cost you love. Do not show pain if no one is coming to hold it, witness it, or even listen to it. Do not collapse, because there is no one available to catch you. These are not just ideas floating through the mind. Repeated long enough, they become the emotional environment the body is forced to live inside.
This is the part that was never talked about in any health and healing spaces, because it’s always been much easier to talk about meds, magnesium, protein, cortisol, parasites, lymph, mitochondria, mold, binders, red light, glucose spikes, than it is to ask the more devastating question underneath all of it: what emotional instructions has my body been obeying for years? And what has that done to the nervous system? Because as we know now, the body keeps receipts, yes, from what we eat, how we sleep, what we absorb, what we breathe, what we are exposed to, and what we fail to repair. But it also keeps receipts from silence, pretending, swallowing grief, performing strength, and living as the version of ourselves other people could tolerate while the real self sat somewhere inside, exhausted, unseen, heartbroken from learning that truth was unsafe.
In my own life, those instructions did not arrive as one dramatic event one day with a clear beginning, a middle, and an end. They were always part of life and part of the ordinary fabric of existence. As most of us know, in many cultures, including mine, being beaten as a child was perfectly normal – never looked at as abuse. It was actually considered parenting. It was discipline. It was what parents did when children misbehaved, spoke back, cried too loudly, needed too much, disobeyed, embarrassed the family, or dared to have a nervous system instead of the expected military-grade compliance program. Nobody sat me down and said, “Your truth is dangerous now.” Nobody had to. The body understood. The body learned to read the room before speaking, and to learn the moods of those around me, to control my face, to control my tone, to shrink my need, to swallow my impulse, and to avoid provoking the people who had power so that I can avoid being beaten. It learned that safety depended on silence, that love is always conditional, that needing too much made me inconvenient, and that being and behaving acceptable always mattered more than being honest.
But children do not process all that like adults do. A child does not sit there thinking, “This is a family system shaped by culture, fear, inherited violence, and emotional immaturity.” A child’s body simply adapts. It makes meaning in the only way it can. If speaking brings danger, silence becomes intelligence. If needing brings rejection, self-sufficiency becomes protection. If softness is mocked, sensitivity becomes something to hide. If love is given when you are useful, pleasing, impressive, quiet, strong, or easy to manage, then performance becomes a survival strategy.
My body learned all of those,
And then one day, decades later, you wonder why you cannot relax without earning it, why asking for help feels humiliating, why being seen feels unsafe, why you over-explain, over-give, over-function, over-discipline, over-control, and then call yourself “high-achieving” as if the body is too stupid to know the difference between purpose and survival.
For most of my life, I had to put on a show. Not in one neat little area where I could point and say, “There, that was the performance. See it?”, but in all facets of my life. I had to be the version of myself that was expected, acceptable, impressive, useful, strong, composed, resilient, and never too much. I literally had to stay quiet to avoid being beaten. I had to suppress all my needs, not only physical needs like a hug, but emotional needs, feminine needs, relational needs, the need to be heard, the need to be chosen with honesty, the need to express pain without being made to feel dramatic, difficult, weak, or needy. I also had to make sure I don’t ask because asking risked rejection. I had to be useful to be accepted, wanted, and loved. I had to be strong because, frankly, what the fuck else was I going to do?
That is the part people romanticize when they call women resilient. I promise you, what looks like resilience is often just a woman who was never given permission to fall apart. What looks like independence can be an old adaptation to emotional unreliability. What looks like strength can be a body that learned very early that nobody was coming, so it had better figure out how to survive. And yes, of course there is power in that. I will not pretend I did not benefit from becoming strong, disciplined, capable, and hard to knock down. But there is also a cost, and in my case, that cost was nearly catastrophic. In other words, I almost paid for that adaptation with my life.
I learned early on to monitor the emotional temperature of the room, especially around my father. I learned that keeping the peace often meant keeping quiet. I learned to read people’s moods, anticipate reactions, and hide as needed. Sensitivity was treated as weakness. So I became strong, useful, composed, impressive, and careful. And like most women, I too tried to become the kind of woman who could earn love, honesty, effort, and emotional safety by being good enough, understanding enough, patient enough, reasonable enough, and not too much. But the body notices when love requires performance. It notices when truth has to be begged for. It notices when truth has to be negotiated. It notices when we keep shrinking ourselves to stay in relationships where our needs are treated like a problem.
This is how emotional instruction becomes biological. Not because the body is weak. Not because the body is dramatic. Not because every feeling instantly creates disease in some simplistic, sloppy way. That’s not what I am saying. What I’m saying is that the body adapts to the emotional environment it’s asked to survive inside. If the environment is safety, warmth, truth, repair, presence, respect, and love, the body receives one kind of instruction. If the environment is silence, betrayal, emotional abandonment, fear, performance, hypervigilance, and pretending everything is fine while the soul is screaming, the body receives another. And eventually, what remains unresolved doesn’t evaporate into thin air simply because we became very good at hiding it.
One of the most powerful emotional instructions my body ever obeyed was performance. You know, putting on a show. Keep functioning. Keep appearing fine. Keep the pain private. During betrayal, the instruction became especially loud. I learned to move through life with a level of composure and “I’m fine” that looked like strength from the outside, while internally I was carrying a mountain of emotional pain I had not yet learned how to process, express, or resolve. At the time, I didn’t understand that the body carried what the mouth refused to say. I did not understand that unresolved pain doesn’t become harmless just because we become skilled at containing it. I only knew how to keep going. And eventually, my body made sure I understood what all that was also costing me.
When I started looking deeper into the cause of the stroke, whether it was tied to my very rigid diet or the accumulated emotional pain from the constant betrayal by the person I loved so much, I learned that people live in one of two extremes. One extreme being the body - purely physical, as though health depends on the body - a machine that randomly malfunctions in isolation from the life being lived inside it. The other extreme is where everything is purely emotional or as though one feeling neatly explains an entire biological event. Honestly, both are too small for the complexity of a human being, especially a woman. The body is not a category. I’ve said it before - the body is a biography. Biology matters. History matters. Food matters. Sleep matters. Stress matters. Blood matters. But oh family systems matter too. And so does betrayal. And silence. And we now know that the nervous system matters. The soul matters. The emotional life being lived inside the body matters. A lot. The totality of a person and all the facets of the person’s life all matter so much. All at the same time.
What I believe now is that the stroke came because my body could no longer afford the identity I was performing. The silent one. The strong one. The useful one. The one who did not need too much. The one who swallowed pain and called it survival. The one who kept pretending the emotional injury was not costing her biology. And I wish I realized sooner that healing became much more confronting than merely adding a supplement, changing my diet, or running a faster mile. I had to stop obeying the instruction of silence and self-abandonment.
But I’m sure you understand just how complicated that is, because silence had protected me once. Let’s be honest - many of our most destructive instructions all began as survival strategies. Staying quiet may have protected the child. Not needing may have protected the girl. Being useful may have kept love close enough. Being strong may have been the only available option when collapsing was not an option. But what once protected us can later imprison us, and there always comes a time when the body begins asking for a new instruction. And it doesn’t always ask politely. The body is not always polite when it’s been ignored for too long. Sometimes it whispers, sometimes it aches, sometimes it tightens, sometimes it becomes tired in a way sleep cannot fix, and sometimes it sends an invoice so large that we pay with our greatest treasure – our life. Yes, it’s a large bill. So large that it can bankrupt us.
The bill comes due. That’s not punishment. That’s life accounting.
For many women, the emotional instructions are so familiar they don’t even sound like instructions anymore. They sound like identity. “I’m just independent.” “I’m just strong.” “I don’t like asking for help.” “I don’t want to be a burden.” “I’m too sensitive.” “I’m too much.” “I can handle it.” “I don’t need anyone.” “I’m fine.” But sometimes that’s not personality. Sometimes that’s adaptation. Sometimes “I’m fine” is not strength; it is the body’s oldest emergency script. Sometimes being the woman who can handle everything is not empowerment; it’s the aftermath of having to become emotionally self-sufficient too early.
This is why I become suspicious when healing is reduced to protocols of the body alone. Yes, that aspect of a protocol supports healing beautifully. Food supports healing. Minerals support healing. They are needed for the body to function. Movement, light, rest, detoxification, breath, prayer, therapy, truth, and beauty all support healing, and they are part of every protocol I ever developed. But at some point, we have to ask what emotional instruction the body is still obeying underneath all the good behavior. You can take all the magnesium in the world and still live under the instruction “do not speak.” You can eat clean and still live under the instruction “do not need.” You can fast every week and still live under the instruction “prove your worth.” You can regulate your nervous system and still keep returning to relationships that dysregulate you because some part of the body still believes love requires self-abandonment. You can do all the “right” things while the deepest instruction remains unchanged. And the body will 100% know.
This is not about blaming yourself for what happened to you, so let us not turn this into another wellness weapon. We have enough of those. This is not “you caused your illness with your emotions.” That is downright cruel. This is about becoming honest enough to ask what the body had to carry, what it had to adapt to, what it had to suppress, what it had to normalize, and what it may no longer be willing to hold. Blame says, “This is your fault” but responsibility says, “This is now asking for your attention.” There is a difference, and that difference matters.
So maybe the question is not only, “What should I take?” Maybe the question is, “What have I been swallowing?” What have I been pretending doesn’t hurt me? Where did I learn that my needs were too much? Where am I still performing strength while quietly collapsing? Where am I calling silence peace because truth would disrupt the arrangement? Where did I confuse being useful with being loved? Where am I still trying to prove that I deserve what should never have required a performance of me? And perhaps the most confronting question of all: what truth has my body been waiting for me to finally say out loud?
That was the instruction I had to change. My body had to learn that silence was no longer the price of survival. It had to learn that truth would not kill me; if anything, silence likely would. It had to learn that my emotions were not inconveniences. It had to learn that being a woman with needs, grief, rage, tenderness, softness, intuition, boundaries, longing, and standards did not make me weak, needy, selfish, or too much. It had to learn that unresolved emotional pain does not become holy or sacred just because we endure it quietly. It comes back. It comes back in the body, in the nervous system, in the relationships we keep repeating, in the patterns of life we call fate, and in the symptoms we try to manage without ever asking what our life is asking the body to obey.
The new instruction my body is learning now is simple, but it’s definitely not easy: do not EVER leave emotional truth unresolved. Do not swallow what needs to be spoken. Do not abandon yourself to keep the peace. Do not pretend the pain is not costing you – oh it is. Do not confuse silence with wisdom. Do not wait until the bill arrives to admit there was a large debt. Because there will come a time when the bill must be paid, and I would rather pay it in truth now than in illness later.
That is the part of healing many people do not want to talk about. You know why? Because it asks something real from us. It asks us to stop performing the self that survived and begin becoming the self the body can finally feel safe inside. It asks us to stop treating the body like a project while ignoring the emotional instructions it has been forced to live under. It asks us to understand that healing may not only require a cleaner diet, a better supplement, or a more disciplined morning routine. Sometimes healing requires a new command…a new instruction.
You are allowed to speak. You are allowed to need. You are allowed to ask. You are allowed to rest. You are allowed to soften. You are allowed to stop proving. You are allowed to be loved without performing usefulness. You are allowed to be honest before the pain becomes a symptom. You are allowed to stop calling survival your personality.
The body hears that too.
And if the body has been obeying emotional instructions for years, then perhaps part of healing is not only changing what we eat, what we take, what we track, or what we avoid. Perhaps part of healing is changing what we keep asking the body to live under.
Because the body keeps receipts. But it can also start healing when it receives new instructions.