Learning to Live Inside Ourselves Again
Many women move through life appearing highly functional while internally living in states of exhaustion, anxiety, tension, or emotional disconnection. Over time, these patterns can begin to feel less like temporary stress responses and more like internal habitats we learn to survive within.
We are working, caregiving, managing relationships, carrying responsibilities, and continuing to push forward even when we feel overwhelmed. From the outside, we often appear capable and composed. Internally, however, we may feel disconnected from ourselves in ways that are difficult to explain.
In my work, I often hold space for women who have become highly skilled at functioning while feeling increasingly disconnected from themselves emotionally and physically.
This disconnect rarely happens all at once.
More often, it unfolds gradually through chronic stress, caregiving, difficult relationships, trauma, pressure to perform, or years of prioritizing everyone else’s needs before their own. Over time, many women learn to stay productive, emotionally contained, and outwardly “fine,” even when their internal world feels strained or exhausted.
Eventually, this way of functioning may begin to feel normal.
Many women become disconnected from basic internal signals: hunger, exhaustion, tension, emotion, rest, desire, and even joy. They may know how to manage schedules, support others, and meet expectations, but struggle to answer simple self-questions like:
“What do I need?” “What am I feeling?” “What would actually feel restorative right now?”
Mental health is experienced beyond the mind and is often felt in the body.
Anxiety, for example, is not simply worrying thoughts. It may also look like muscle tension, shallow breathing, jaw clenching, digestive discomfort, irritability, fatigue, difficulty relaxing, or constantly feeling “on edge.” Often, the body recognizes overwhelm before the mind fully names it. The body frequently holds, and carries, what the mind has learned to push past.
Part of this disconnect can be understood through what psychologists Fredrickson and Roberts (1997) described as objectification theory. In simple terms, many women learn to experience themselves from the outside in. Rather than remaining connected to internal experience, women are often socialized to monitor appearance, behavior, productivity, emotional impact, and the comfort of others. Over time, this chronic self-monitoring can create anxiety, shame, disconnection, and emotional exhaustion.
Women are frequently taught, both directly and indirectly, that being accommodating, attractive, emotionally manageable, or endlessly capable is tied to worth and belonging. Some women become so practiced at managing life externally that they lose connection to their own internal experience altogether.
This is one reason that more counselors are beginning to pay more attention to embodiment in mental health work.
Embodiment refers to developing a more connected relationship with one’s internal experience: emotions, physical sensations, stress responses, needs, boundaries, and sense of presence. Embodiment is not about perfection or wellness trends. It is about learning to inhabit yourself more fully.
Psychotherapist Nick Totton (2018) describes emotional and relational experience as something that is lived through the body, not simply thought about cognitively. From this perspective, stress, anxiety, relationships, and emotional wounds are more than mental experiences. They are also physiological and relational experiences.
Modern culture frequently reinforces disconnection from the body, particularly for women. Many women become highly practiced at productivity and self-monitoring while losing touch with rest, intuition, emotion, pleasure, or internal awareness. In this sense, healing is not about becoming someone new. Often, it involves reconnecting with parts of the self that have been muted, overridden, or ignored for survival (Clarke, 2024).
Healing most often begins with small moments of awareness.
Noticing tension. Recognizing exhaustion. Paying attention to breathing. Allowing emotion instead of immediately overriding it. Resting without guilt. Learning to ask, “What am I experiencing right now?”
These moments may seem small, but they can become important shifts toward reconnecting with the self.
Therapy can support this process by helping women better understand the relationship between stress, emotions, relationships, the nervous system, and the body. It can also create space to reconnect with parts of themselves that may have been ignored while surviving, performing, or caring for everyone else.
Many women have learned how to function well while disconnected from themselves.
Healing is not a static outcome. It is an ongoing process that often includes learning how to fully inhabit your own body, and life, again.
References
Clarke, A. R. (2024). Returning home to our bodies: Reimagining the relationship between our bodies and the world: Practices for connecting somatics, nature, and social change. North Atlantic Books.
Fredrickson, B. L., & Roberts, T. A. (1997). Objectification theory: Toward understanding women’s lived experiences and mental health risks. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21(2), 173–206. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1997.tb00108.x
Totton, N. (2018). Embodied relating: The ground of psychotherapy. Routledge.
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