I Spent Years Trying to Stay Steady

Relearning the truth about emotions, safety, and how our bodies actually work

I spent years believing that steadiness meant holding myself together. I learned to keep my emotions small, orderly, and private. I learned to maintain composure even when something inside me was trembling. I learned to keep the room steady, even if it meant fading out of my own experience.

Like many of us, I didn’t receive an invitation to feel. I received instructions on how to hide.

For a long time, I assumed that was simply what adulthood required: stay contained, stay capable, stay unflappable. And as I moved deeper into academia and training, I carried those lessons with me. I learned how to sound knowledgeable, how to use the language that proved I belonged, how to keep my internal world neatly tucked behind my professional one.

So when I first encountered somatic language—words like regulated and dysregulated—I didn’t immediately recoil. I’m an academic. My instinct is to reach for clinical language when I want to be taken seriously. That’s part of my own archetype pattern: if I speak precisely enough, maybe people will see that I deserve to be here.

The bracing came later.

When I began writing with these words and speaking them aloud in my teaching, something in me tightened. The language didn’t feel honest in my own body. It didn’t match the lived experience I was trying to describe. And when I watched my students and clients hear those same words, I saw a familiar flicker—the subtle tightening of someone who suddenly feels evaluated.

We can tell ourselves to listen without judgment, but somatic spaces don’t stay safe through intention alone. Safety is relational. It requires everyone in the room to participate in how the words land, how the power moves, how the message is held. Without that shared awareness, even well-meaning language can slip into hierarchy or quiet shame, and the body feels it long before the mind catches up.

It took me a long time to understand that regulation has never been about emotional neatness or composure. It has always been about relationship. It has always been about movement, truth, and range.

Once I let myself feel that, the whole idea of “steadiness” changed.

What We Really Mean When We Talk About Regulation

Many of us grew up with the idea that the “right” version of us was the one who stayed calm, focused, and in control. But regulation isn’t control. And it isn’t stillness.

A regulated system is one that can move without losing itself.

Our breath rises when something matters and settles as things soften. Our emotions swell and ease. Our attention shifts to meet the moment.
Our body expands and contracts in its own rhythm.

Regulation isn’t about staying the same.
It’s about staying connected as things change.

And when we talk about being “dysregulated,” we’re not describing a failure or a flaw.
We’re simply naming the moment when the system gets pushed past what it can hold.

A memory hits harder than expected.
A room suddenly feels unsafe.
A demand exceeds our capacity.
Even joy can overwhelm a system that learned to stay small.

There’s nothing wrong with us when this happens.
Our body is telling the truth.
Our job is to listen, not judge.

How We Lose Our Range

Most patterns don’t appear all at once. They take shape quietly, shaped by the rooms we grew up in, the roles we learned to fill, and the expectations we carried forward.

Some of us learned to be the strong ones, keeping everything together long after we’d run out of room inside ourselves.
Some of us learned to care for everyone else first, organizing our lives around other people’s needs without noticing how much of our own we’d set aside. Some of us learned to shine only in safe portions, never enough to risk exposure. Some of us learned to stay in our heads because our emotions didn’t feel welcome. Some of us learned to chase improvement, believing our worth depended on constant refinement. Some of us learned to function flawlessly while feeling quietly lost.

These aren’t deficiencies. They’re adaptations, brilliant strategies that helped us stay connected or protected when we needed it most.

But each one asks our body to narrow itself in some way.
Each one trims down our range a little more.

So when we reach the edge of what we learned to handle, our system reacts.
Not because we’re broken.
Because we’re honest.

If you’re curious how these themes play out in your own life, the Somatic Archetypes Quiz can offer a quiet place to begin.

What Regulation Actually Looks Like

When our system has room to move, subtle things begin to shift.

Our breath adapts instead of shutting down.
It rises in moments of excitement and settles when the body senses ease. Sometimes it pauses just long enough for something inside us to catch up and then finds its way back without being forced.

Emotions begin to take up their rightful space.
Sadness can move through without pulling us under.
Anger can sharpen clarity instead of turning inward.
Joy can expand without feeling like too much.
Fear can speak without becoming a verdict.

Our attention becomes more honest.
It narrows when something needs our full presence.
It widens when the body feels spacious.
It softens when we’ve reached our limit.

The body starts to speak with more truth.
We feel ourselves lean toward what aligns.
We sense the pullback when something feels off.
We recognize when we need time, breath, or a boundary.

And under all of this is a quiet awareness that we have choices—small ones, but real.
Not perfect control, not endless capacity, just enough internal room to respond instead of react.

Regulation isn’t a destination.
It’s how we move while staying connected to ourselves.

How We Relearn This in Community

We didn’t learn these patterns in isolation.
We learned them in families, studios, ensembles, classrooms, and institutions.

So we rarely unlearn them alone.

We relearn in community—in the presence of people who meet us without tightening or fixing. We borrow steadiness from one another. We breathe differently when someone sits beside us without rushing our process. We rediscover emotions as communication instead of danger.

Shared spaces become mirrors.
We recognize our own tenderness in another person’s story.
We feel our range widen because someone stayed with us long enough for our system to soften.

This is why embodiment, creativity, and community can’t be separated.
Belonging is a somatic experience. Change is relational.
We widen our range together.

A Closing, From Me

If something in this reflection echoes your own story, know that I wrote it from inside mine. I spent years trying to stay steady in ways that required me to stay small.

The mBODYed Journey emerged from the moment I realized steadiness was never something I had to hold. It was something I could relate to.

It was movement. It was honesty. It was belonging to myself, to others, to the full range of being human.

This is the heart of mBODYed spaces. Not fixing. Not perfecting.
But remembering our range with care, curiosity, and community.

If you’ve been moving through impostor feelings alone, this January’s small cohort might be a place to explore that experience with others who understand the terrain.

Wherever you step in, through a course, a pathway, coaching, or simply being here, there’s room for you.

Exactly as you are. And in all the movement that makes you human.