You’ve been safe for years. Nobody told your nervous system.
I was fifty-five and crying in the car on the way home from the markets.
New Farm, on a Saturday. My dog in the back, unbothered, the way dogs are. A boot full of vegetables I’d chosen carefully because I like choosing them. And me at the wheel with tears coming down, running the same inventory I have run in cars for twenty years — the business, the money, whether it holds, whether I’m enough for it, what happens if it doesn’t.
Sit with the arithmetic of that for a second, because I nearly didn’t write about it on the grounds that it made me look ungrateful.
By then I had it. The books were written. The keynotes were booked. I’d built a company from nothing and raised my daughter through years I wasn’t sure either of us would come out of.
And I was still crying in a car about whether I was going to be okay.
The thing I understood at the lights
I had an audiobook on. Somewhere in the middle of it, without deciding to, I put my hand flat on my chest and started tapping. And I said it out loud, to nobody:
I am safe.
I felt ridiculous. A fifty-five-year-old woman in traffic, patting her own sternum like she’s winding a baby, saying something to herself she can’t prove.
I said it again anyway.
And my shoulders came down.
I hadn’t known they were up. That’s the thing about a stance you’ve held for twenty years — it stops registering as a stance and starts registering as your shape. And then I could breathe. Properly, all the way down, for what felt like the first time in years. I hadn’t known I couldn’t. I’d thought that was just what breathing was.
Here’s what landed, and it has changed how I work with every woman I’ve sat with since.
I had been safe for years.
Not a little safe. Structurally, boringly safe. The rent was covered. The doors were locked. By every measure you could check, the emergency had been over for a very long time.
Nobody had told my body.
It was still running the shift. Still scanning. Still waking me at 3am to review the variables, still bracing on a Saturday morning at a farmers’ market — because the last time it stood down, I lost everything.
That gap has a name, and it isn’t anxiety
We put this in the wrong category. We say a woman is anxious, as though it were a temperament. Something she is, like being tall.
She isn’t. She’s a person whose threat system was correct for years and never got the memo that the years had ended.
And it won’t work that out on its own, because that isn’t what it does. Your brain’s job is survival, not freedom. It treats every survived day as proof that the current settings are working. Your body keeps the record. Put those together, and you get the thing nobody says plainly:
Your system doesn’t update when the danger passes. It updates when you show it something different, repeatedly, in a language it understands.
And it doesn’t understand English. That’s the whole problem.
Which is why insight hasn’t fixed you
You’re well-informed about your own patterns by now. You could give a short lecture on your conditioning. You’ve read the books, done the work, named the people-pleasing and the over-functioning and the load — and you still wake at 3am with your jaw set.
That isn’t failure. It’s the correct result.
Understanding lives in one part of you and bracing lives in another, and they are not on speaking terms. You cannot think a nervous system out of a stance it took twenty years ago. You’ve been trying to argue with a smoke alarm.
What actually reaches it is smaller and stupider than insight. Breath. Rhythm. Touch. Saying the thing out loud in a voice your own ears can hear. Doing it again tomorrow when nothing has visibly changed.
I’m not going to dress that up in science I can’t stand behind. Here’s what I know: a woman tapped her own chest in a car, and her body came down off a ledge it had been standing on for two decades. It worked. I’ve done it many times since. It keeps working. That’s the honest version, and I’m not going to inflate it.
The part that matters for anyone chasing something
You cannot run a filter for possibility while you’re running one for threat.
Your brain takes in roughly eleven million bits of information a second and lets around fifty reach you. Fifty. And which fifty depends entirely on what your system has decided is important right now.
A woman scanning for danger is not filtering for opportunity. She physically cannot. Every bit of that bandwidth is already spoken for.
Which means every clear-eyed thing you want — the role, the person, the life — is being wanted by a body that’s busy checking exits. That’s why wanting feels like effort. That’s why the open door looks closed.
Safety isn’t the reward at the end. It’s the precondition. You don’t get the life and then feel safe. You settle the system, and then — slowly, and mostly without noticing — you start seeing what was already there.
I had the life. I was still crying in the car. The life was never going to do it.
One caution, and then the ask
There’s a version of this I refuse to write: the one where I hand you a technique and imply that a woman who’s still frightened simply hasn’t tapped hard enough.
This is not a fix. Some of what your body carries needs a professional, and if that’s you, go. Some of it needs time; you can’t shortcut. And some days you’ll do the whole thing and feel exactly nothing.
Do it anyway. Not because it works every time — because the alternative is waiting for your body to be convinced by an argument, and it never has been.
So tell her.
Out loud, in the car, where nobody can see you. Hand flat on your chest so she can feel that somebody is home. Say it even though you can’t prove it — especially because you can’t prove it. You’ve taken far shakier things on faith for people who deserved it less.
I am safe.
She’s been on shift for twenty years. Nobody has relieved her. Nobody has come down and said: it’s finished, you can stand down, I’ve got it from here.
You’re the only one who can.
Go and tell her.
Sonia x
This is adapted from a chapter of my forthcoming book, Strong For Too Long — for the woman who holds everything together while nobody holds her.
Ready to Go Deeper?
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