Nobody Taught Us How to Come Back to Ourselves

I was eight years old the first time I remember my body completely betraying me.

I was sick, and my mom needed me to take medication, one of those large tablets that seemed impossibly big for a child's throat. I tried. I gulped water, tipped my head back, and tried again. Every time, the pill lodged somewhere between my throat and my courage, and I couldn't do it. I was already scared of being sick, and now I was scared of the pill too. With every failed attempt, my mom grew more desperate and more frustrated, until she was screaming at me, not out of cruelty, but out of her own fear, which had by then grown much louder than mine.

I remember the feeling of my whole body seizing up in pure panic, not just about the pill anymore, but about everything at once: that something terrible would happen if I failed, that I was failing my mom, that I needed to fix this right now. And eventually, I did. I forced it down and I got it done.

Nobody held me afterward. Nobody said that was scary, and you're okay now. My mom didn't know how to do that because her own nervous system was still flooded with fear. So I filed the experience somewhere wordless and moved on.

What I didn't know then is that I was absorbing a life curriculum. Get it done no matter what. Your fear is inconvenient. Suppress it and push through. I carried that program into adulthood so seamlessly that I didn't even know it was running. I became someone who functioned beautifully under pressure and had very little sense of what was actually happening inside her.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and every year the conversation circles the same familiar territory: eat well, move your body, sleep more, go to therapy if you can. All of it is valid, and none of it is wrong. But there is something that almost never makes the list, something so foundational that its absence explains much of what we're struggling with, which is that almost none of us were ever taught how to regulate our own nervous system. Not in school, not at home, and not anywhere in between. We are paying for that gap in ways we don't always recognize, because the symptoms look so ordinary that we've stopped questioning them.

Consider what we actually teach children. We teach performance, compliance, and output. We grade them on results and train them to override discomfort in service of getting things done. But the actual mechanics of the inner world, what it feels like when your body is moving into a stress response, how to recognize the early signs, and what to do when it's happening, are almost universally absent from how we raise children in this culture. Dr. Daniel Siegel, clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, writes about what he calls mindsight, which is the capacity to perceive and understand your own emotional and mental processes. He argues it is one of the most essential skills a human being can develop, and yet it appears nowhere in the curriculum.

So we carry that gap into adulthood, where the stakes are higher even though the tools are no better. Because regulation was never framed as a learnable skill, most of us don't even recognize what dysregulation looks like in ourselves. We assume we're just anxious, just sensitive, just people who don't handle stress well, when in reality we are simply undertrained.

Dysregulation has a very familiar face, and most of us walk past it every day without recognizing it for what it is. It looks like snapping at someone you love over something small and not quite understanding why your reaction was so big. It looks like standing in the kitchen unable to decide what to eat because your executive function has quietly gone offline. It looks like scrolling for an hour before bed, not because you actually want to, but because the stimulation is keeping you regulated in the only way your system currently knows how. And it also looks like being the person who always gets it done, who powers through, who doesn't let fear slow her down, who at eight years old forced a pill down her throat because falling apart simply wasn't an option.

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, whose research gave us The Body Keeps the Score, writes that the body's stress response, once activated and not properly completed, doesn't simply reset on its own. Instead, we carry incomplete stress cycles forward with us: fears we never metabolized, emotions we were taught to override, experiences we filed somewhere wordless and moved on from. Over time, these accumulate and shape our reactivity, our relationships, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we have to be in order to be okay.

Your autonomic nervous system is running beneath all of it, constantly scanning for cues of safety or danger in a process neuroscientist Dr. Stephen Porges calls neuroception. We don't consciously decide to shut down or push through in a hard moment. Our body decides, based on a lifetime of accumulated signals. And when the earliest signal we received was that our feelings were inconvenient and getting it done was what mattered, that became the program we run on efficiently, and at considerable cost to ourselves.

Know that you are not broken, none of us are; but we were simply never given the tools and we inevitably pass down the same conditioning.

The things we were handed, performance and productivity and the suppression of anything that slowed us down, were useful for a certain kind of survival but deeply inadequate for the full complexity of being a human being. The good news is that this is a curriculum gap, and curriculum gaps can be filled at any age with very little.

Breathing slowly and consciously, particularly when you extend the exhale longer than the inhale, activates the parasympathetic nervous system within minutes. Dr. Andrew Huberman at Stanford has described how a double inhale through the nose followed by a long exhale through the mouth is one of the fastest ways to bring the body out of a stress response in real time. It takes about thirty seconds and costs nothing, yet almost no one does it because almost no one was ever told it was available to them. Similarly, the simple practice of noticing, pausing to ask yourself where you feel something in your body, or what an emotion is actually asking of you, can begin to build a relationship with your inner life that most of us never had the chance to develop growing up. Even a few lines written in a notebook at the start or end of a day, not as a productivity exercise but as an act of genuine presence, can slowly teach your nervous system that someone is paying attention.

If any of this feels familiar, if you recognize yourself in the getting-it-done and the pushing-through and the disconnection from your own experience, I want you to know that there is another way to live. I know because I had to find it myself.

My own journey back to my body didn't start with a dramatic breakthrough. It started with small steps and the humility to notice the walls I kept running into, the moments where my reaction was bigger than the situation, where I felt nothing when I probably should have felt something, where I was so busy getting it done that I had no idea what I actually needed. Slowly, I began paying attention to my intuition, that quiet signal underneath all the noise, and I learned to treat it as information rather than inconvenience. It wasn't linear and it wasn't fast, but it was messy and necessary. And somewhere along the way, my mind and body started to find each other again in a way that eight-year-old me, alone with her fear and her pill and her silence, never got to experience.

If I can do it, so can you. The work I do is about helping you stop running the old program and start coming back to yourself: to the part of you that doesn't have to have all the answers, that is allowed to feel what it feels, and that is so much more than what it can produce. If you're ready for that, I'd love to be part of the journey.

Mimi