Ep 51 with Ailey Jolie

Ailey Jolie: 0:00

Welcome to In This Body, a podcast where we dive deep into the potent power of embodiment. I'm your host, Ailey Jalee, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life fully from the wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a love letter to embodiment, a podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment alter the course of our shared world? Join me for more consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body. This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the Podcast with me, A. Lee Jolie. Welcome back to How to Be in This Body. Or if this is your first time here, welcome. It's an absolute honor that you've decided to dedicate your energy and attention to spending time with me, but also spending time deepening the relationship with your very own body. So in today's solo episode, I want to follow up on something I shared about right at the end of 2025. Some of you may have read a piece I wrote about a surgery that I had. And this isn't the jaw surgery I mentioned in the New Year's episode or surgery that relates to any of the other surgeries I've had over the past two or three years. This is something else entirely. It was a surgery to remove something I carried in my body for 15 years. At the end of 2025, a sequence of very serendipitous events aligned for me to be able to have my breast implants removed. And I wrote about this at the time I actually scheduled a piece to be released to you all. I was on the table being operated on for reasons that felt really important to me that I'll get into later. But now that I've had time to process the surgery a little bit more to feel into my body, I want to talk about the experience with the depth it deserves. Because I don't think I've ever really told the whole story out loud. And because I think the story might matter to some of you in ways that go beyond my particular experience. And I have this feeling that the story might matter to some of you in ways that go far beyond my individual experience. When I recorded the New Year's episode, I was still really in a process of making sense of what had happened. And now that I've had some time running the embody course and enjoying the community that's there and deep in my writing and feeling really supported by the people around me. And because I've stepped back, even further back from client work and really dedicated my time to more supervision. I've had time to really sit with what the surgery meant, not just physically, but what it completed and what it finally allowed my body to say. So for today's episode, I'm going to tell you what happened, not just the surgery, but what led to it, because the accumulation is the point. And I want to tell it was something I didn't have back then language, clinical language. Back then, I didn't have a framework for understanding what was happening in my nervous system or my body. And I didn't have supportive people around me, like my own therapist or analyst, for me to make sense of the experience either. Today I'm going to tell you the story of a much younger me, but I'm going to tell a story with the wisdom I have now. As a somatic psychologist who spent years studying trauma embodiment and what happens to women's bodies in a world that was never designed for us to live in them. The tools my younger self needed didn't exist, not really, or not at least for what happened to me. And that's not a personal failing on any one trauma theorist or psychology in general. It's just naming a gap in psychological theory or how we understand trauma. It's a gap that I spent my career trying to understand and ideally hoping to fill it in a little bit. For you to understand the gap that my younger self and maybe you have fallen into this void that psychology and trauma theory has a hard time coloring in. I need to take you somewhere that might feel abstract at first. But please stay with me because this context matters. It's the reason why I didn't have language for what's happening in my body. It's the reason so many women still don't. The truth of the matter is that trauma research was built on male bodies. Vanderkock began his career studying combat veterans returning from Vietnam. Levine developed somatic experiencing by watching animals escape predators. He was inspired by a female client. Cordis built polyvagal theory from a million biology. All of these men's work is brilliant and it's truly changed the field. I teach from it, I use it clinically. There's nothing you could say to take away from the brilliance of what they put forward. And the foundational frameworks, the metaphors, the assumptions. They emerge from bodies in acute crisis, men at war, animals fleeing predators, mammals under threat, discrete event trauma, a clear before and after something happened, the nervous system responded, and now we need to help it complete what got interrupted. But here's what I've come to understand through my own life and through sitting with hundreds of women in my practice. Women's disembodiment often has no origin story, no single event, no trigger, no combat zone, no clear before. And me saying this isn't saying that women's experience is somehow unique and only women can experience disembodiment with no origin story. That's not true, of course. But there is a cultural phenomenon that is placed on female bodies that creates a sense of disembodiment. And this is the slow accumulation of learning that your body belonged to others before it belonged to you. And it's worse than just a gap in the research. Psychology has a history of actively silencing that what women's bodies know and have lived. In 1896, Sigmund Freud presented his seduction theory. He had listened to his female patients describe childhood sexual abuse. He believed them. He published his findings. The medical establishment was horrified. Not by the abuse, but by the accusations. Within a year, Freud recounted, he decided his patients had fantasized their abuse. He called it the Oedipus complex. The foundation of psychoanalysis was built on the decision to stop believing women. In the early 1900s, women who couldn't speak, couldn't walk, couldn't stop shaking were diagnosed with hysteria. The cure was institutionalization or forced marriage or surgery on their reproductive organs. What we now recognize as a trauma response is the body telling the truth, medicine once called madness. Fast forward into the 1990s, adult survivors began recovering memories of childhood abuse in therapy. The backlash was almost immediate. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation was created largely by parents who had been accused of abusing their children. False memory syndrome was never a real diagnosis in the DSM. It was a legal and public relations strategy, and it worked. Therapists lost their license, survivors were silenced. The message was clear. Your body's memory cannot be trusted. Someone I speak about a lot, but often is missed out when we talk about trauma theorists that have shaped the field is Judith Herman. Judith Herman wrote about all this. She called it the central dialect of psychological trauma. The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them out loud. The powerful have every interest in denial. The powerless have every interest in truth. And the study of trauma has been held hostage to this conflict for over a century. This is the context you were born into. This is the context I was born into. This is why there were no tools for what was happening to me. Not because the research focused only on men. That's a part of it. Because when women's bodies tried to speak, they were systematically disbelieved. So now let me bring this back to the personal. Let me tell you about what my body knew long before I had words for it. I was five years old when I made a secret Christmas wish. This is one of my foundational childhood memories. And I remember wishing not for toys, not for trips. I wished to wake up in a woman's body. I wish for hips and for breasts and for longer legs. I believed with the logic of a child being sexually abused that if I could just grow up fast enough, the men would stop, the abuse would stop, and I would be safe. I believed my body's smallness was the problem that becoming a woman would mean becoming safe. Now with the language I have, I can name what was happening. My nervous system was trying to solve an unsolvable problem. I was a child. I couldn't fight, I was too small, I couldn't flee. Where would I go? I couldn't even freeze in a way that would protect me because the abuse kept happening. So my body and my nervous system did something else and started to plan, to strategize, to fantasize. To believe that if I could just change my body, I would change my circumstances. This is what the research missed. They met fight, flight, freeze by watching animals. Buffon, the please response, the appease response, the disappearance accommodation response. That came from watching women, from watching girls. Girls who fight back get labeled difficult, girls who flee get called dramatic. So the nervous system learns a different way. Comply, perform, make yourself into whatever keeps you safe. Clarissa Pinkle, the wonderfully talented Clarissa writes in The Women Who Run with the Wolves. In the book The Women Who Runs with the Wolves by Clarissa, she describes the wild instinctual self, the one who knows what she knows, who can smell danger, who can trust her own body. And she traces how that wildness gets trained out of us, domesticated. How girls learn to override their instincts because their instincts are inconvenient, because their no is too loud, because their knowing threatens someone. By the time I was five, I had already learned what Clarissa describes. I had learned to override. The instinctual self who might have fought, who might have fled, who might have told someone she was already going underground. And in her place, the good girl, the pleasing girl, the one who makes herself easy girl arrived. But here's where it gets a bit contradictory. And I imagine in your own experience of trauma, if you have one, that you also have moments of contradiction where the theory that maybe you've come to understand doesn't necessarily map perfectly onto your own experiences, behaviors, or choices or beliefs. This is one of the places where theory doesn't map so well onto my experience of trauma. Because even as I wish to grow, to become a woman, to finally be safe, the abuse had made me so disgusted with my own body, made me so full of self-hatred that I couldn't bring myself to feed my body. I didn't feel I deserved to eat. I wanted to become a woman and I wanted to disappear both at once. Janina Fisher writes about structural disassociation. How when we can't integrate what's happening to us, we split. Parts of us carry different survival strategies. One part reaches toward life, another part tries to make us smaller, invisible, gone. They're not in conflict because one is right and one is wrong. They're both trying to keep you alive. They just have different ideas about how. Sometimes starving is the only form of control available when your body has never belonged to you. And this gets missed so often, even though, and I acknowledge there might be something in the collective ether that brought these clients to my practice. But this is what I really noticed often, not always, in the clients that I supported when I worked with eating disorders and disordered eating. It's not everyone's experience, of course, but it is one that gets missed often through my time supporting those clients, but more importantly, in just my own time and my own therapy and analysis and training, I've come to understand clinically that you can't discharge or release this kind of trauma. The somatic tools assume a charge that built up in the body and needed and needs to release a tiger you couldn't escape, an accident you couldn't process, shake it off, tremor it out, complete the interrupted survival response. I mean, I've been in all those trainings and a lot of it is really good stuff, and some of it just doesn't work. A lot of it is really good stuff. And I think it's really important to acknowledge that something can be a really incredible tool, and to acknowledge that one tool isn't meant to be used everywhere and isn't gonna work for everything. So the question I always sat with when I was in those trainings, like a question that started in those trainings that I still sit with is how do you shake off 20 years of trying to disappear? How do you tremor out a lifetime of making yourself smaller or quieter, easier to be around? What I eventually kind of found in sitting with that question for long enough and bringing it to lots of somatic sessions, is that I couldn't. And maybe you can't. I don't know, maybe you can. But for me, I couldn't because it wasn't a single incident. My story of trauma, like so many other people's stories of trauma, is such a complicated web of factors and layers and intergenerational reasons for why the abuse got missed, or I was left with people who did harm me, or why no one noticed an eating disorder. I mean, there's such a web, and there is for so many people. And sometimes that single incident processing can be amazing and so helpful while we're kind of untangling this web. It can be such a great tool, but nonetheless, it doesn't really address the web. It can address some of the clumpy bits and clumpy bits in the web and and undo a few knots, but it won't it won't untangle the whole wall. And that's I guess what I'm really trying to invite you to think about today. So as I grew up and the accumulation continued, and the accumulation of violence and violation continued, we know that those who are predisposed to childhood sexual abuse or experience childhood trauma or have greater vulnerability to experience, such as an adolescence and adult. And that was my experience. Because violence in childhood does something to the nervous system's pattern recognition. It calibrates you to danger almost as normal. This doesn't mean it's your fault. It just means your baseline shifts. What should feel alarming starts to feel familiar. So you don't leave, you don't run, you find yourself in situations that match what you already know. This is why violence in childhood makes you so vulnerable to violence in adolescence. Not because you're broken or you deserve it or you did something wrong, but because your system learned that this is just how it is. This is what love looks like, this is what relationships look like. This is what you deserve. At least that was my experience. So as I grew up, there were abusive relationships, sexual assaults, female betrayals, a boyfriend who justified cheating on me with my best friend by saying he just wanted to, just wanted to have sex with someone who had some tits. Those are not the words he used. Each one of these experiences landed on my nervous system that already been primed to believe that my body existed for others, each one confirming what I'd learned before I had words. Your body is not yours, your body doesn't have worth, your knowing doesn't matter, what happens to you is your fault. By the time I made the choice to get breast implants as a very young person, and freshly new adult, as a very young person, my body had been a site of so much violence that I couldn't find a way to live in it anymore. And I know through the privilege of being a therapist that this is not a rare story, that this is what happens to girls. The research shows that women experience more cumulative trauma, more relational trauma, more chronic trauma than men. And the frameworks were built on discrete events, single incidents, combat, accidents. But what about the girl who was never in combat, but whose body was a war zone, anyways? To give you even more context, right around the time I was making this decision, I was so desperate to escape my body. And staying in my skin felt so impossible. And that's when the industries found me. And I think there's many different ways that this happens today. I don't think you have to enter the modeling world or the pageant world or the dance world like I did for there to be industries profiting off of this disembodiment. I think anytime we go on social media now and we give our attention to that algorithm that is feeding our insecurities and therefore driving more of our attention to stay there. This is another form of the industries finding us. I mentioned my experience in these industries because I had really made evaluation and measurement and correction of the body quite normal in the ways I imagine social media does to younger people today. These industries made the external gaze feel familiar. I never really developed my own gaze. I looked at my body the way everyone else did as something to assess and something to fix. This is something the research has only recently begun to understand and look at, mostly because of the rise of social media, but the research has started to look at self-objectification. And this is the habit of monitoring yourself from the outside. It actually impairs your interception, your ability to sense your own body from the inside. Studies show that women who are primed to think about how they look become less accurate at detecting their own heartbeat, their own hunger, their own fatigue. Think about what that means for a moment. The more you watch yourself from the outside, the less you can feel yourself from the inside. And how all of those are constantly are constantly pulling ourselves out of our bodies and really and pushing a lens of self objectification on us. For me, when I was younger, I'd been watching myself from the outside most of my life, first through the eyes of the men who abused me, and then through the eyes of dance teachers and modeling agents and pageant judges. And I didn't know what it felt like to be in my body. I only knew what my body looked like to others. So this is why when I was just a child and the agents told me that having impressed augmentation would better my career and all of the things. I I listened because I didn't know how to listen to anything else. And I didn't have capacity at that time to say no or even think that I could say no to someone's suggestion of what I did with my one and only body. I want to zoom out to be really clear about what was happening in my nervous system. I was in a functional freeze, which doesn't mean I was unconscious or checked out. The knowing was there. There is a voice inside me saying, Don't do this. I remember that voice. But I couldn't act on it. That's what functional freeze actually looks like. You're awake, you're functioning, you might even look fine from the outside. But the part of you that knows what you want, what you need, what's true, you can't reach it. The pathway between knowing and acting is blocked. My system had learned through years of abuse, assault, and violation that my knowing didn't matter, that compliance was survival, that my body existed for others before it existed for me. Every experience in my life up to this point had confirmed this. So when someone with authority pointed at a body I didn't have and told me how to buy it, I said yes. At this time, I was deep in an eating disorder. I was very suicidal and so lost. I just experienced a sexual assault. I left a relationship with domestic violence, which required me to leave university. It's safe to say that I was not okay, and no one asked if I was okay either. The surgeon who performed the breast augmentation didn't screen for my mental health. He didn't understand why a visibly underweight teenager with dark circles under her eyes or scars from self-harming wanted breast implants. I think he just saw a customer or a procedure to bill, or maybe he did see something but and decided it wasn't his to support or be a part of. I don't know what was going through his mind, and I never will. What I do know is that the night before the surgery I awoke with my heart pounding. My body was trying to speak. It'd been trying to speak for years, through the starving, through the staying with violent men, through the disassociation. And I remember laying in bed, waking up in the middle of the night, and just had this voice that said, Do you hate your body this much? And I remember that there was a voice that jumped in so quickly that answered, Yes, I do. And that yes contained everything. The five-year-old's wish, the violence I'd witnessed, the violence done to me, the years of trying to starve myself into something else, the abusive relationships, the assaults, the rape, the comparisons, and the desperate belief that being in another body would stop it all. I really want to honor the girl who said yes, my younger self, because I don't see her as weak, I don't see her as stupid, I don't see any woman who makes a similar choice as weak or stupid, or have any judgment in any way. When I look back at my younger self, I can see that I was surviving with the only strategies I knew. And I can see I genuinely believe that the surgery would be liberating. I thought that if I could just get the body right, maybe I could find a reason to stay alive in it. The hope my younger self had was real. Her desire to survive was real. She just didn't know yet that you couldn't cut your way home. What happened next confirmed everything my nervous system in my younger self already believed about her body. I had chosen a specific size, I'd been clear about what I wanted. And when I woke up from surgery, I had this feeling. When I woke up from surgery and started to heal, I had this deep sinking fear that something had gone wrong. And I've carried that feeling for years. And when I got my implants removed, what I found out was that feeling was really valid. With only the wisdom of hindsight and information of hindsight, I can say now that the surgeon that day decided while I was unconscious on his table that he knew better than I did about what my body should look like. Weeks after being raped by a friend, and then make choices about my unconscious body again. Pattern doesn't break just because you pay for it. Shortly after that surgery, one of the nurses broke my confidentiality and told her daughter I'd been there. By the time I healed and returned to my life and was trying to make sense of my chest that seemed larger than I wanted it. I had been branded in my local community as the slut and the attention seeker. And people I had known for decades wouldn't have anything to do with me. And this is how women are punished for their survival strategies. When we try to escape, when we do desperate things to keep living, we're shamed for it. The world doesn't want to know what we're running from, just wants to judge how we ran. And here's what the nervous system learns from that. You're right not to trust anyone, and you are right to believe your body is the problem. And you were right that your knowing doesn't matter. As I tried to settle into my body and what it looked like, I struggled for a really long time to accept the size of the implant, not knowing what I know now, that it genuinely was not a size I agreed on. And I took steps and participated very naively in procedures that other doctors told me would correct the size or change the size of my implants. Now I can see that that was just all my naivety and desperation to try and deny something that had been done to my body. But also a real deep avoidance and fear of confronting having my implants removed head-on by participating in pseudo-medical things is the best way I'll describe it. But this is what trauma really does. It makes you complicit sometimes in your own forgetting. It makes you reach for any story that hurts less than the truth. I don't wish that the hope that led me to have the implants, the breast implants had manifested or shown up, that having implants allowed me to feel more alive in my body or any of those things that I consciously and unconsciously hoped for when I was in such a dark, suicidal place when I made the choice. But the implants did bring more of what I was trying to escape. They brought more objectification, more sexualized violence. My body became even more the male gaze intensified. Everything I'd been trying to get away from only got louder. And it drove me deeper into the eating disorder, deeper into dissociation, deeper into the belief that my body was my source of my suffering. And if I could just change it enough, control it enough, make it different enough, I would finally be safe. And I think, obviously, I don't know, but I do think one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about embodiment and the work that I do today is because of this experience and really feeling the legacy of having my body taken from me in so many different ways or through so many different avenues and somehow reconnecting to my body and finding it again and feeling it again. And breast implants is definitely for me a a really painful part of my history, but I think it's also a part of my potency today and my understanding of being in my body in a way that I'm still making sense of since I'm only on week five of having my implants removed. For 15 years, the reality is that I carried something in my chest that I didn't choose, that was bigger than I wanted, that I said yes to because I couldn't access my no. And for years within those 15, I told myself about corrective procedures that let me avoid the weight of what had actually happened. Years later, when I became a therapist, I learned the frameworks, I did my own therapy, spent a lot of time in treatment centers, outpatient, inpatient, trauma, eating disorders, all of it helped. EMDR, somatic experiencing part works. I did the right work and it helped with some things. The discrete events had somewhere to go. I could process a specific memory, discharge a specific activation. But for me, there was always something underneath that the tools couldn't quite reach. A kind of disembodiment that wasn't about a single event, chronic sense that my body wasn't mind, a lifetime of having been shaped by forces that started before I had memory. And as a therapist, I started to notice that my personal experience wasn't that unique. I had lots of female clients who were doing everything right. All the trauma practices, all the somatic practices, all the nervous system regulation, and still feeling disconnected from their bodies, still unable to trust their own knowing, still waiting for someone else to tell them they were okay. And that's when I started to understand you can't heal a story with tools that were designed for an event. The body keeps the score, implies a tally, points in a board, discrete events being counted. But women's bodies and other bodies, of course, as well, don't keep a score. They keep the story. The story of being shaped from the beginning, of learning to hold a form that prioritized everyone else's comfort, of abandoning yourself so slowly that you didn't notice it happening. Score asks, what broke you? Story asks, what were you shaped to hold? Score treats symptoms as malfunction. Story treats symptoms as testimony. The industry that soulmate implants as a very young adult is the same system selling Botox to women in their 30s, fillers at 40, fake slips at 50. Each step is framed as self-care, each escalation framed as empowerment. The system that creates the wound sells the fix, and when the fix creates new wounds, it sells the fix for that too. I want to be clear as we start to draw the link between beauty culture, wellness culture, and cosmetic surgery. This is not about shame. The women caught in this, as we all are, are responding rationally to irrational demands. They're aging in a culture that punishes aging. They're making calculations women have always made. What will keep me visible? What will keep me safe? What will allow me to stay in the room? Kathy Davis studied women who choose cosmetic surgery. What she found was that these weren't women obsessed with beauty. They were women in pain, trying to feel at home in their bodies, trying to close the gap between how they felt inside and how the world saw them. The tragedy isn't the choice. It's a world where that gap feels like something only surgery can fix. I was newly 18. I was in pain. I was trying to close a gap that felt unbridgeable. And when the industry was right there, waiting, ready to sell me a solution. And when that solution created new problems, more industries were ready, ready to sell me the fix. Who profits from the war we wage on our own reflections? And what would it cost to stop fighting? I'll bring this back now to me and the surgery I had five weeks ago to the X-Plant. I didn't do this because I finally healed in some complete way. I don't think healing works like that. It's not a destination. It's not a before and an after. I didn't do this because I had some big plan. I found out about eight days or nine days before my scheduled surgery date that I would be doing it. Again, it was just a happenstance of events. I had a small feeling inside that it was really important that I wrote my book without my implants in, and I don't know why yet. I have some ideas as to why that's so important, and I think that will continue to unfold. But I chose to have my explant because after years of this work and myself with clients and research and writing, my nervous system had finally developed enough capacity that I could hear the voice that was there all along. The one that that said no at 18, the one I couldn't reach, the one I couldn't support, and this time I could act on it. This is what capacity actually looks like: not the absence of fear, not perfect regulation, not perfect support or circumstances or any of those things. The ability to feel everything, the grief, the terror, the hope, and still move towards what's true. This time around, I chose a female surgeon. I went through many consultations with many surgeons, and I can definitely look back and see that I was probably being tested by the universe with some of the comments from some of the men I met, one of them telling me I was going to have an aesthetic downgrade, another asking if my partner approved of me having the surgery. I mean, I was really tested to keep going and to listen to that inner voice and to not fall into what I fell into when I was younger, the pressure and beliefs coming from someone very indoctrined in capitalistic beauty standards. And so I had a female surgeon, and I, for me, I really needed a woman to undo what men had done to my body. And I gave her authority to make decisions about my body while I was unconscious. And when I met her, she was the first surgeon that I felt like I could be myself with and be honest with. So I had the surgery going in. I didn't I didn't know and she didn't know what we were gonna find. Another twist in this is that I haven't been able to get access to my medical record from my original surgery, which is a whole other cluster of stuff. And because of that, she didn't know. I didn't know exactly what was gonna be found. And so she gave me her, you know, best plan of action around what we were gonna do and if she was gonna be able to do unblock, meaning removing all the breast tissue around the implant or just removing the implant. But again, it would depend on what she found, which was also deeply healing to go in and and really surrender choice in this way and to trust so deeply. Because there's a difference. This time I was giving authority, not having it taken. And there's a world of difference between someone making choices about your body without your consent and choosing to trust someone with that power. The first is violation, the second is repair. My nervous system needed to learn that I could give someone access to my body and be held and not harmed, that I could be unconscious and wake up safe, that I could be unconscious and still be cared for, that I could trust my knowing and have it honored. The first surgeon took authority I never gave. The man who abused me took authority I never gave. And this time I chose. I chose who got to touch me, I chose who got to decide, and I chose trust. And I also chose to tell my own story. Published that piece while I was still on the table because I was done letting anyone else decide when my story got told. A nurse took it from me when I was just a young adult, and for 15 years I let Shame decide who knew. So for me, the surgery wasn't completing a survival response. It wasn't shaking off trauma. For me, it was rewriting the story. I went back to one of the earliest sites of not trusting my knowing, and I chose differently this time. I let my body have the no it couldn't have. And that's what reclamation actually looks like. Not erasing what happened, not going back to some before there was no before for me. Just choosing in the present moment from a more resourced nervous system, what couldn't be chosen back then. So now here I am on the other side, week five in my healing, and for the first time in 15 years, I can actually breathe and feel my own ribs expand. I haven't been able to hug anyone yet and feel their chest against my heart, but I'm really looking forward to that. There's also this deep sense of interception coming back online. I want you to know that the implants were never the problem. The problem was the belief that I needed them, the belief that my body as it was was why men hurt me, that transformation of my body would finally make me safe or okay or worthy of being respected. I carried that belief in small ways and in big ways in my chest for 15 years. And now it's gone. What remains is just me, the body that survived everything, the body I'm finally learning to live in instead of the body that survived everything. To close this episode today, I want to talk to you now more directly. Whoever is listening to this and feeling something maybe tighten in your chest or a story swirling in your mind. Maybe you're thinking about your own yeses, your own surgeries or starvations or silences or ways you've altered your body, your own ways of trying to escape a body that maybe I felt unbearable to live in. You don't have to experience trauma to feel like our body is a place that we can't inhabit. So, regardless of what your story of leaving the body is or was, I want you to know that you were never the problem. Whatever was done to you, whatever you did to survive it, whatever choices you made from Freeze, from Vaughn, from the absence of any other option, you were never the problem. The body you're in right now, the one that carried you through it all, it's not your enemy. It's your wisdom. It's kept the story when you couldn't tell it, it held what you couldn't hold. It's archived every yes that should have been a no, not as evidence against you, but as testimony, as proof of what you've survived. And you can come home to it at any point. The door doesn't close. Coming home doesn't mean undoing what was done. There's often no place to go back to. There's just now. There's just you and this body learning to stay. And the truth is, a woman who finally hears her body becomes dangerous, dangerous to every system that tried to silence her, dangerous to industries that profit from her disconnection, dangerous to anyone who needs her to stay outside herself. You're allowed to be dangerous, and you're allowed to come home. If you have the time, please rate and review the podcast so that this podcast reaches a larger audience and can inspire more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and nurturing the relationship you have with your very own body.