The realisation that every person you pass on the street has a life as complex as yours. That the person cutting you off in traffic is rushing to the hospital. That the barista who got your order wrong just lost their mom. Long story short:

You’re not the main character - you’re just one of billions of people living full, complex lives alongside your full, complex life.

Humbling, I know.

But nowadays it seems that everywhere you look, hyper-individualism is the trend to aspire to. No, they don't call it that. They package it nicely as self-care, boundary-setting, “protecting your energy”. Things that aren't inherently bad - until they're sold to us as healing at the expense of connection.

When we’re told that healing means doing it alone, we’re also told that holding space for someone else’s needs is too much to ask of ourselves - because if we do it alone, they should too. Right?

So we lose the reciprocity of care. We lose the ability to hold each other.

Because we’re so busy focusing on our own energy, our own peace, our own capacity, that we forget: other people are drowning too. And sometimes, holding each other is the only way to stay afloat.

Let me be clear: I’m not against self-development. I’m not against tending to your own nervous system, tending to your needs, learning to enforce boundaries. Caring for yourself so you can pour from a non empty cup. That’s important. That’s self preservation. That’s what I do for a living - support people in holding themselves.

What I’m saying is that when the narrative becomes so focused on the self that the collective is not part of the conversation, we need to lock in. Because if doing the work means becoming so self-obsessed with our own lives, our own experiences, our own healing journeys that we forget other people exist. That their pain is just as real. Their needs just as valid. That they’re as deserving of care and attention and bandwidth. We forget each other, and are forgotten in return.

Because if everyone is the main character, then there’s no supporting roles.

And as cool as it has become to need nobody. I will die on the hill of - we need each other.

You need someone to hold you when grief knocks on the door. You need someone to remind you you’re not alone in your experiences. You need someone to sit with you in the hard stuff, and the joyful stuff, and the mundane in-betweens of being human.

And they need that from you too.

This is the radical act of remembering that you are not the center of the universe.

Not as a way to lessen the importance of your experience (because you’re really damn important), but as a realisation that holding space for someone else’s complexity doesn’t diminish your own. That showing up for other people’s lives doesn’t mean abandoning your own.

And most importantly, opening space for the healing that happens in the messy, uncomfortable practice of being human together. And holding each other in it.

I hope you found yourself somewhere in these words.

With love

Jo

And so I went after the thing that felt closest to it - touch.

Most of us, at one point in our lives, bought into the idea that connection equals physical intimacy. And that intimacy is only possible if a part of your body is touching a part of my body.

Now combine that with a culture where a hug feels loaded. Where platonic touch has meaning. And you guessed it - we become touch-starved, and as a result, connection-starved. But what if that’s not the whole story?

What if we’re not just under-touched, but we’re under-held?

What I’ve noticed - in myself, in my clients, in the people brave enough to have these conversations with me - is that the craving isn’t just for touch. It’s for being held. And being held is not just about literal holding.

To be held is to be met where you are, how you are, in your experience, in what you’re going through.

It’s being able to fall apart and not have someone immediately try to fix you or soothe you or make it okay, unless you want them to.

It’s being witnessed in your joy, your laughter, your grief, your anger, your mess, and not being asked to clean it up first.

Being held can be physical, yes. Sometimes it’s arms around you. A hand on your back. Someone sitting close enough that you can feel their warmth.

But it’s not always that. And sometimes it’s not even intimate in the way we’ve been taught to think of intimacy.

Being held can be energetic. Emotional. Mental even. It can be someone sitting across from you and just... staying. Not looking away. Not changing the subject. Not needing you to be different than how you are in that moment. Just existing - with you.

It’s someone saying “I’m here” and actually meaning it. Not as a performance. But as a commitment to not abandon you in your experience.

Being held is someone reminding you that you’re not alone - and then actually showing you.

And yet most of us have learned that in order to be held in these ways, we have to offer something in return. So we look at touch as the currency of holding.

But you can be touched and not held. You can have physical intimacy and still feel completely alone. And you can be held without being touched at all.

So next time that you, like me, are craving intimacy. Connection. Someone to see you. Someone to hold you - I invite you to get curious about what you’re actually asking for.

Is it touch? Maybe. And if it is, go for it.

But if what you’re craving is to be held beyond the literal meaning of the word - get creative. Expand your understanding of what that can look like. Because being held doesn’t always require skin. Sometimes it just requires the presence of someone willing to stay.

I hope you found yourself somewhere in these words.

With love

Jo

Like some kind of zen non-human who floats through life unbothered. Like nothing gets to you. Like when you see footage of children being bombed, you should just... breathe through it and find your center.

I say fuck that.

Getting angry at the state of the world? Regulated. Freaking out when you loose your job? Regulated. Crying after a breakup? Also regulated.

Being regulated doesn’t mean being chill at all times. It means your emotions match the reality of the situation. That’s it.

You’re not failing at emotional regulation because you can’t watch a genocide without your body screaming at the injustice. That visceral reaction? Healthy. But in this “regulation as calm” obsessed world, we completely lost the plot on that truth.

You go on social media and see all the tools to calm your nervous system, ground yourself, regulate downwards. More calm. More ease. Less discomfort. Less tears. Less anger. Less humanity. I guess according to social media, being regulated = don’t let things get to you. Ever. And if you do, you better quickly breathe it out until you’re calm again. It’s giving “please calm down, you’re overreacting”.

And I’m over here like... why are we trying so hard not to be affected by things that should absolutely affect us??? I say this (in a much gentler version) to clients every. single. day. And now I’m saying it to you.

If your goal is to be calm and unaffected - that’ll be a 24/7 job. And you still won’t get it. Because life isn’t designed for you to stay calm. Life is designed to move you. To shake you. To piss you off sometimes. And a nervous system that responds to that? That’s not dysregulation. That’s being alive.

We’ve confused regulation with emotional flatness. We’ve confused “staying regulated” with numbing ourselves out of feeling. With bypassing our valid responses, because:

Nobody taught us how to feel the difficult things and come back to baseline.

And although that’s a whole journey on it’s own. I think if we slow down the narrative about nervous system regulation as constant bliss, we can create space for the narrative that tells us: I can feel the thing that matches what’s happening. And when it passes, my system can shift too.

So next time you cry at the news, get angry at injustice, and fear for the world (or other also very valid things from day to day life like getting pissed off that that guy ghosted you again), and then hug your cat and feel some ease in your chest, or laugh about the silly joke your friend just did, or be in awe at the colours of the sunset - you’re not failing at regulation. You’re just... being human.

And our body is doing what bodies are supposed to do: responding honestly to what’s in front of you.

I hope you found yourself somewhere in these words.

With love

Jo

It’s their way of helping me track my ovulation by marking when I might be in a high libido phase. But let’s be real. What are they actually asking here? Are they asking if I feel aroused? Or are they asking if I want to have sex with someone?

Because those aren’t the same thing. And the fact that we treat them like they are? That’s a problem.

When we’re surrounded by messages like this, here’s what we internalise: feeling turned = you want sex. Arousal is a signal.

But what if it’s not? What if feeling aroused is just... feeling aroused?

What if it’s your body being turned on in itself, for itself, without it needing to mean anything beyond that?

Think about it. How often do we talk about arousal as something that’s just… there? Not as foreplay. Not as a prelude to something else. Not as a signal to a partner. Just as a state of being in our own bodies.

I’m gonna take a wild guess and say - not often.

And the cherry on top of the rotten cake is that, when a period tracker asks “are you craving sex?” most people won’t ask “what form of sexual expression in all it’s endless shapes and forms am I craving today?” They’ll likely ask “do I want to hook up with someone today?” And likely default to the most culturally reinforced equation: high libido = I want sex…with someone.

Now, I know we can all agree that sex doesn’t have to mean partnered sex. It can be solo. It can be about pleasure for yourself. It can be so many things.

And yet, getting real about the definition of sex is a whole essay on it’s own. But if there’s one thing that’s clear in my work with clients, is that shifting the meaning of what we think about when we hear the word ‘sex‘, from our conditioning to our own complex and ever evolving definition, is harder than it sounds.

We’ve spent so long centering sexuality around someone else that we’ve forgotten it can exist independently.

We’ve been taught that our sexuality is relational by default.

That it’s meant to be shared, offered, given. That if we feel desire, it must be desire for something or someone.

And look, I’m not saying relational sexuality isn’t amazing. It absolutely is. But when it’s the only framework we have to be with our turn on? That’s a problem.

Why? Because they’re different things. And merging them as one keeps us from understanding our own bodies, our desire, our sexuality.

So what does it look like to decenter others from our sexuality?

It starts with recognising that arousal is information. It’s your body telling you something - maybe that you feel safe, maybe that you feel alive, maybe that you’re in a certain phase of your cycle. It doesn’t have to be a call to action. And it certainly doesn’t have to be a call to action with someone.

It can be. But the key is - it doesn’t have to.

And whether or not it is - that’s your choice.

I hope you found yourself somewhere in these words.

With love

Jo

Look, I get the appeal. Maybe you felt lighter, like a heavy blanket was moved from your chest. It felt great in the moment. The “release”. That cathartic high.

But then a few days later, the same stuff came back. The patterns. The tightness in your chest. The reactions you swore you moved past. Maybe you got triggered, and reacted the same as before. And so you think you failed. You think you did it wrong.

Here’s what the people selling you their “5 daily practices to release stored trauma” are not telling you:

They’re selling you capitalism disguised as healing.

You’re being sold quick fixes, the fast track for healing. That if you do this somatic exercise, have 6 “emotion release” sessions, join the 3 week “somatic release” program, attend the workshop, the retreat, follow the protocol - you’ll finally be healed, be whole, be okay. And the things woven into your nervous system over years, the things your body learned as protective mechanisms, because at some point they kept you safe, the experiences ingrained deep enough that your mind kept away from memory - all gone, puff! As if trauma is something you can sweat out at the gym.

It’s like they took “the body keeps the score” and sold you the promise to erase your score completely. Tempting. I know.

But let me get sciency for a bit (please skip if it’s not your jam):

When you push (emphasis on push) yourself into an intense emotional release, you're activating your sympathetic nervous system. Your body floods with cortisol and adrenaline. It feels powerful, euphoric. But your nervous system can't tell the difference between that and experiencing a new stressor. So what you're actually doing is creating another stress response on top of the original one. And after that high wears off - after the cortisol spike crashes - you're left more depleted than before. Your system has to recover from the intensity you just put it through. And that's not integration - that's exhaustion.

Because if your body could just release trauma like that, don’t you think it would have done it already the last time you had a big dance or lifted weights?

I’m gonna hold my own hand when I say this: I fell for this too. As a practitioner. As a client. Before I trained in Somatic Experiencing, my first somatic training was in somatic trauma release work (whatever that means). It was a week of full catharsis that made me feel like I had found the cure-all, fix-all switch. I left that training feeling like I had the cure for trauma. An ego trip, that’s what it was.

Because after lending my nervous system to practices during the training, I left actually depleted to my core. The teacher said I just needed to “integrate.” In reality, my system needed to recover from the high level of stress it was put under to force something out of me.

And here’s what I wish someone reminded me of:

You can’t heal trauma with more unsafety.

And that’s exactly what these cathartic practices give you: more nervous system unsafety disguised as pleasurable momentary releases.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against screaming into a pillow, shaking, dancing. I love doing those things as a way to move my body, to move out tension from being stuck in front of a screen for five hours, or from tensing my whole body during a difficult conversation. But I don’t use it to release trauma. I use it to relieve stress. And we need to talk about that distinction more often.

The truth is, reorganising trauma often looks very boring. It often doesn’t look like a breakthrough moment of overwhelming emotion. It looks like:

A new sensation showing up after freeze. Speaking more easily about a subject without it overwhelming you the way it used to. Being able to notice how your body responds to something without instantly needing to find a justification or fix it.

Somatic trauma work is more about learning to trust your body than guiding it to a certain response.

It isn’t linear. It’s not a one-size-fits-all. It’s not a checklist. And it’s definitely not something you can hack or optimise your way through, no matter how many courses promise you that you can.

So next time you can’t “release your trauma”, remember: your body isn’t broken. But the system selling you “healing” is.

I hope you found yourself somewhere in these words.

With love

Jo

Which made me question (as I question most things)… is that what we really want? Or is this yet another want that we think is ours, but it’s actually imposed on us so early we can’t tell the difference?

The truth is, we live in a world that teaches women to perform and mask as a way to find belonging. That teaches us early on that validation is what we should strive for. That we should make ourselves digestible and palatable.

And so we learn to meet the desire of the eyes that see us - to be pretty enough, smart enough, successful enough, but never too much of anything.

Never so much that we become uncomfortable to witness.

And so we sand down our edges, perform our relatability, curate our complexity into something that fits neatly into a first impression of “the girl next door”. And get spoon fed that image like our life depends on it.

Because you see… society likes it’s women seen, but not known.

This is the fallacy of the “girl next door” - the ideal woman, approachable, non-threatening, familiar. Visible enough to be admired but contained enough to never be challenging. She doesn’t ask for too much. She doesn’t take up too much space. She doesn’t speak too loudly about what she actually needs or wants or knows.

She’s the perfect package: seen, but never truly known. Because a woman who is only seen can be managed. But a woman who is known? A woman who insists on allowing her full depth to be witnessed - her anger, her intelligence, her needs, her complexity, her refusal to shrink? She disrupts the status quo. She’s too hard to manage. Too hard to control.

Being seen keeps us performing. It keeps us asking: “Am I likeable? Am I too much? Did I say the right thing?” It keeps us second-guessing our own knowing, smoothing ourselves down, making ourselves smaller so we fit into the frame of what’s acceptable. Keeps us in the perceived safety of performance.

But here’s the thing about that illusion of safety: it’s not actually keeping us safe. It’s keeping us compliant. It’s keeping us from the very truth, connection and belonging we’re actually craving, and the kind that we actually need.

To deconstruct that illusion, is to dare to be known.

To dare to disturb the status quo that benefits from keeping us quiet, contained, and performing.

I'm still learning this. Still catching myself mid-performance. Still feeling the fear of being too much, of asking for too much, of showing too much.

But I'm learning that the alternative - staying small to stay safe - isn't safety at all. It's just a quieter kind of disappearing.

I hope you found yourself somewhere in these words.

With love

Jo