That’s a different thing from being loved. Trust me I have never truly loved a gym membership, but alas there was a relationship there because my doctor gave ‘the look.’ But when it is a person, or people, and not a torture chamber, it can look identical to mutual love and friendship from the inside, right up until the moment you aren’t providing anymore.

For a few years, my house was where everybody came.

Wednesday nights I’d rush home from work and have the place clean by the time people started showing up. People would drift in and settle into the living room, and the noise would build, laughing over each other, telling the same stories again.

The kids ran feral in the best way. Mine were little then, two and seven, and they’d disappear into the backyard with everyone else’s kids or pile into the back bedroom and not come out until someone made them. You’d lose track of whose kid was whose. That was the whole point. That was the thing I thought I had.

Then my marriage started coming apart, and I told them I needed to step back for a while. Just for a bit. I’ve got a lot going on, I need some time to deal with my own stuff, I’ll be back. I feel like that was a completely normal thing to say. I’d been ‘working on myself’ you know, and that’s what all the gurus had told me to do. Just take a step back and make time for myself. Right in theory. But those gurus never seem to get to the messy part that inevitably showed up.

If you asked any of them, I’m sure they’d tell you sincerely that they cared about me and wished me well and were so sorry about everything I was going through. All the standard things you say while you’re slowly walking away.

Turns out when I wasn’t the put-together working wife and mom with the beautiful home and the open door, and I became the woman in the middle of losing everything, with nothing left over to give my value tanked.

And this reinforces so many of our biggest fears, right, which is why we all end up burnt out, tired, and emotional and can’t verbalize why. I was overburdened with hosting every week on top of work, kids, family, oh and did I mention my marriage that was caught in a fireball (that’s a different article entirely), so I put something down. And then I lost my community, which reinforces that it’s better to just not put anything down at all and keep it all kumbaya copacetic .

Way back in 1979 Clark and Mills put this feeling into one of those fancy standardized research studies. Apparently I was not the first person to come to this realization, shocking, I know. They split relationships into exchange and communal relationships. I’m letting you know I cut all the sciency geek out just for you. You’re welcome. So the final finding was that in a communal relationship you give because someone needs it; in an exchange relationship you give because you received something.

The thing is, I hadn’t lost my community. I was finding out I’d never exactly had one. What I’d had was an arrangement, an exchange relationship. A place in the circle that lasted precisely as long as I kept the circle fed. Belonging that ran on what I provided, and quietly switched off when I stopped providing it.

I hear this same story with different characters every day. It’s the friends who got quiet when they got sober, because drinking was the thing they did together and without it there wasn’t a together. It’s the ones who cooled off when they set the boundary, because the boundary interrupted the role they’d always played. It’s whoever drifted when they stopped being the reliable one who could always be counted on to hold it, and stopped saying yes before they finished asking.

I changed one thing about how much I gave, and found out that the giving had been the only thing holding it up.

While it was happening it felt as if the evidence was piling up against me. If they left when I changed, then changing must have been the problem, and the old me, the useful one, the one who kept the counters clear, must have been the acceptable one.

Wrong. Just wrong. And I will die on this hill. There are exchange relationships and communal relationships. Each has their place in the world. Exchange relationships aren’t inherently evil. But, it’s helpful when both people are able to acknowledge what it is. Like being work friends, but then one of you leaves. You may text a few more times, but eventually you just stop talking. You exchanged a need for friendship in the workplace.

The problem shows up when one person knows it’s an exchange relationship and the other is operating as if it’s a communal relationship. We all get busy and when we reflect on things we think it has to be this deep search into the inner lurkings of your soul, whatever that means. But, honestly, reflection can be as simple as taking a moment and thinking about who you interacted with that day. Are those exchange relationships or communal relationships? And most importantly, do you think that everyone in that relationship would agree?

Losing people is not the same as losing your people. When you have your people nobody knocks for the food. There is no food. They just want you.

There was a lot going on. Family dynamics had been loaded going into the day.

My body knew first. Before I knew. Tight stomach. Heart picking up its pace. The fast that says something is happening and we should already be doing something about it.

Years ago, I would have sat in that and said nothing. The old version of me knew exactly what to do with a body that was warning her: ignore it. Smile. Keep the peace. Be the one everyone could relax around. People-please my way through the entire afternoon and then collapse on the drive home, exhausted in a way I couldn’t have explained to anyone, including myself.

But I’m not that woman anymore. Ok, well, that’s the dishonest version of the sentence. The honest version is: I’m not only that woman anymore. She’s still in there. She still has access to the controls. But she’s not the only one driving anymore, and most days, she’s not even the one I’d hand the keys to first.

So I did the new thing. I named what was happening, out loud, to a family member.

I’m having some real physical symptoms of anxiety right now.

It was a small sentence. It cost me something to say. It was the truest sentence I had access to in that moment. But, the woman I used to be doesn’t say sentences like that.

This time, I said it plain.

What I was hoping for, even though I couldn’t have named it in the moment: any small acknowledgment. I hear you. That makes sense. Is there anything I can do. The body doesn’t need much. It just needs to know it has been heard. One sentence back would have been enough to land me.

What I got was four words.

Oh just stop it.

The move you probably expect next would be to villainize the speaker, turn her into the antagonist, build a whole essay about how some people will never get it and you don’t need that kind of negativity in your life. Then we’d bring it to an end by telling you to choose yourself.

That’s not what we do here.

Those four words came from a person who is doing her own work, or not doing it, or has never been told there’s any work to do — and that’s not the part that matters. I can’t (never could, but that took me longer to learn) control another person’s nervous system responses.

What does matter though? My Machine came shrieking back to life.

If you’ve been reading my work for a while, you know what I mean. The Machine is what my nervous system has been producing for decades — the automatic I’m fine, I’ve got this, I should be doing more, what’s wrong with me output that was built to keep me alive in a system that didn’t have room for the real version of me. The Machine is loud. The Machine is fast. The Machine speaks before I do.

I’ve spent years learning to catch the Machine. Years filing deposits into the Safety database — small, body-sized moves where I let someone see me actually being me and they didn’t punish me for it. Years building evidence that the world is bigger than the rules the Machine learned. Years.

And four words from someone at a horse race on Mother’s Day sent the whole thing right back to where it started.

The Machine wasn’t subtle. It started running its script before I could even register what had been said: You shouldn’t have said anything. You made it weird. You always make it weird. This is your fault. She would be fine if you hadn’t brought it up. You ruined the day. Everyone is going to feel it now. Fix it. Smooth it over. Apologize. Make her okay. Make everyone okay.

I knew, intellectually, that nothing the Machine was saying was true. I knew it the same way you know that the floor is solid even when you’re standing on a deck above the ocean and your eyes are telling you that you might fall through.

Knowing doesn’t stop the body from doing. Knowing didn’t stop the Machine. Knowing just gave me one thing the old version of me didn’t have: I knew what was happening.

I was sliding into the Ashes right there in the elevator at the horse races.

But like I say over and over and over again.

The work doesn’t make you bulletproof.

The work doesn’t make it so that someone can tell you to stop it and you stay regulated and serene because you’ve been doing your breathwork. You haven’t developed some kind of armor that other people’s dysregulation bounces off of. The work doesn’t mean you stop sliding into the Ashes when someone close to you dismisses what your body is doing.

The work means that when you slide, you can name where you are. The work means that the Machine can still scream, but you can still hear something underneath the screaming. The work means that the slide doesn’t last as long as it used to (this time it lasted about 3 races), and you have somewhere to go from the bottom of it.

So I sat there at the horse races with my whole nervous system screaming and I did the only thing I know how to do anymore.

I started looking for the Ember.

The Ember is the second of the four states I write about in my framework. The Ashes are conservation, numbness, the I am underneath everything state. The Ember is the first flicker — not action yet, not movement yet, just the smallest possible signal that something underneath the Ashes is still warm.

The Ember is findable even in the loudness. That’s actually one of the things that makes it the Ember. It doesn’t require quiet. It doesn’t require a meditation cushion or a podcast playing or a perfectly designed self-care moment. The Ember exists in places you wouldn’t think to look for it. It exists in crowds. It exists in family dynamics. It exists at the busy table at a Mother’s Day horse race after someone has just told you to stop it.

You just have to know how to look.

I looked. I just remembered I was in the Ashes and that meant the Ember was somewhere nearby. The Ember is always nearby. That’s the whole structural promise of the four states — they’re not stages of healing, they’re locations, and you can find your way between them once you know they exist.

It took me a minute. More than a minute. The horses ran another race. People around me cheered. I was inside my body but watching it from a small distance, the way you can sometimes when you know exactly what state you’re in and you’re waiting for it to shift.

The Ember came in small. A pull on my attention toward something specific — I don’t even remember what now. Maybe my daughter laughing at something. Maybe the way the sun was hitting the track. Maybe the recognition that I had said the true sentence even though it cost me. Maybe it was all three at once. The Ember doesn’t have to be dramatic to count. It just has to be evidence that something underneath the Ashes is still warm.

I let the Ember be small. I didn’t try to fan it. I didn’t try to use it to get back to my baseline or recover the day or any of the wellness-industry phrases for the move I was making. I just noticed it, and I let it be there, and I trusted that noticing it was the work.

By the next race, I could feel the Flame starting underneath the Ember. By the race after that, I could feel myself wanting to be present with my family again — not performing presence, not pretending the slide hadn’t happened, just actually wanting to be there. Because in the past I would have plastered on that smile while silently reeling inside in shame and anger and hopelessness. This time there was nothing fake about it.

I enjoyed the rest of the day.

What I want you to take from this, if you take anything.

Someone telling you to stop having the experience you’re having is not a moral verdict on you. It’s not a sign that you said the wrong thing or that you should have stayed quiet or that the work hasn’t been working.

The Machine wants you to make those four words mean something about you. The Machine is selfish. The Machine is wrong. The Machine is always wrong about that, actually — that’s part of how you know it’s the Machine talking and not your actual voice.

After sitting with this for two weeks now I’m able to accept that oh just stop it wasn’t aimed at me. It was aimed at her own discomfort with what was happening. My body was saying something out loud that her body probably also had an opinion about, and she didn’t have anywhere to put that opinion in the middle of a horse race on Mother’s Day. So she handed it back to me, broken.

She wasn’t trying to silence me. She was trying to silence her own discomfort with what was happening, and the easiest way to do that was to ask me to stop bringing it up. Same mechanism, different surface.

I can know exactly what she did and not need her to know that I know (although I’m pretty sure she reads my Substack, so… Hi). The work isn’t her business. The work is mine.

The Safety database got a deposit from this day, even though it might not look like one.

And even though it isn’t as clean or fun as other deposits, it’s actually one of the more useful kinds of deposits. It shows that the nervous system, the slide, and the recovery can coexist with the rest of the day. That you can be in the Ashes and at a horse race at the same time. That the people-pleasing pattern is no longer the only available move when someone you love hands you something broken.

I went home that night, and I didn’t think about the day. I didn’t journal it into the ground. I didn’t text anyone about what had happened. I just let my body file what it had filed.

Two weeks later, I’m writing this. Which is its own kind of evidence: that the moment was real enough to need this, and far enough away now to handle being looked at. Both things, again. Both things, always.

If you’ve been doing this work and you had a moment recently where you thought I shouldn’t have said anything, I want to say something to you plainly.

You should have said something. You said the true sentence. The response was about them, not about you. The slide was not a failure. The recovery was the work. And nothing about the moment they handed it back to you broken says anything about whether you should keep saying true sentences.

Keep saying them. Keep filing the deposits. Keep finding the Ember in places you wouldn’t think to look.

The Machine wants you quiet. Your Voice has been there the whole time.

It’s not about who hears you. It’s about whether you can hear yourself.

💜 Lauren

I look at this person I’d die for without hesitation, and I feel… nothing.

Not emptiness. Static. White noise. I know, intellectually, that I love her. But I can’t feel it. And that knowing without feeling is one of the loneliest experiences in the world.

Then she drops her pencil. It rolls across the floor. And something in my body detonates. My jaw clenches. My shoulders shoot up. I want to scream or run out of the house. Over a pencil. A fucking pencil.

Emotional numbness doesn’t come alone. It comes with hair-trigger reactivity that makes you feel insane. You can’t feel the love, but you can feel everything else at maximum volume. The guilt of that, the shame of being so disconnected while being so overwhelmed by their mere existence, is crushing.

You shame yourself for not feeling enough. You shame yourself for snapping over spilled water, replay it obsessively, promise you’ll do better, then do it again two hours later. You start building this story: I’m a bad mom. I’m damaging my kids.

Shame isn’t just a feeling. It’s physiologically activating. It floods your system with stress hormones. It puts you into a state of threat. So when you’re already running on a depleted nervous system, and you add layers of shame on top of it, you’re actually making yourself more reactive, more disconnected. The shame you’re using to try to punish yourself into being a better parent is the very thing making it harder to show up the way you want to.

Your emotional system has gone offline to protect you, not to punish you. You’ve been running on empty for so long, maybe from your own childhood stuff, maybe from the relentless demands of parenting itself, maybe from a relationship that never felt safe, that your nervous system just… shut down the feelings part. Because feelings take energy. And you need that energy just to survive the day.

But your threat detection system? That never shuts down.

Your nervous system has a limited budget. When you’re chronically overwhelmed and depleted, your body makes choices about where to allocate resources.

Connection, warmth, and presence are expensive. They require bandwidth you don’t have. So your system does the math. We’re shutting down emotional connections to conserve energy. It’s not conscious. It’s your body trying to keep you alive.

But threat detection? That’s non-negotiable. That stays on 24/7 because your survival depends on it. So you end up with this brutal combination.

Emotionally flatlined but hypervigilant to every potential threat.

And the noise. Oh my god, the noise. My kids are laughing, fighting, just existing at their normal kid volume, and it all feels like it’s scraping against my nervous system.

It’s bedtime, and my daughter wants one more story, one more hug, one more glass of water. She’s reaching for connection, and I know that. I know this is the moment I’m supposed to feel tender and present. But instead, I feel trapped. My body is screaming at me to get out of that room. So I go through the motions. I read the story, I give the hug, but I’m not really there. And she can feel it. I can see it in her eyes that she knows I’m not really with her.

These aren’t just annoyances. Our bodies are reading them as threats. Parenting is fundamentally unpredictable and relentless. The sensory input never stops: sudden noises, constant physical contact, interrupted thoughts. For a nervous system already in survival mode, every small interruption can register as a five-alarm fire, because a body that’s been on alert this long struggles to tell the difference between a spilled cup and a genuine crisis.

So what does “creating safety” actually look like? Spoiler: it’s not bubble baths or meditation apps. I mean the things that keep you from losing your mind over a pencil.

First, catch your body before it blows. What’s your tell? Jaw locked, heat crawling up your neck, hands turning into fists. Everyone’s got an early warning system. Find yours.

Just noticing you’re overloaded is the first move. The ashes you’re standing in? Name them. Sometimes all it takes is one thought: “my nervous system is fried,” or “I’m in survival mode.” That’s enough to wedge a little space into the spiral. Not to fix it. Just to interrupt it.

Sometimes that interruption works fast. Sometimes it takes an hour. Sometimes you need the whole day to crawl back to baseline. That’s not failure. That’s your nervous system doing its job. The goal isn’t to bounce back. It’s to stop the free fall.

Then use an actual exit strategy. “I need two minutes,” and you go sit in your car. Or say to your kid, “I love you, but my body needs a break,” and step away. Not as punishment. As information.

This time, maybe instead of going from zero to screaming in three seconds, you get a five-second window. Maybe you still feel numb during bedtime, but then your kid says something funny, and for just a flash, you feel it. That warmth. That “oh, there you are” feeling you thought was broken forever. An ember that there is more.

When you let your kids see this, you’re normalizing the process of identifying, naming, and managing your own spiral. You’re teaching them that bodies have limits. That recognizing those limits isn’t weakness. It’s wisdom. That sometimes the most loving thing you can do is step away before you become someone you don’t want to be. They’re learning that emotions are real, that regulation is a skill, and that asking for what you need is possible. That’s not damage. That’s modeling what it looks like to be human.

Understanding this doesn’t magically fix it. Your nervous system doesn’t just flip back online because you finally get what’s happening. But it changes everything anyway. When you stop seeing yourself as broken and start seeing your nervous system as something that’s been working overtime to protect you, the shame begins to lift. And shame is expensive. When that eases, even a little, you have more resources available.

Slowly. In small moments. You stop adding self-hatred on top of an already overwhelmed system. You recognize the signs earlier and intervene before you’re screaming about a pencil.

You can look at your kids and think, “I can’t feel it right now, but I know I love you,” without that thought destroying you.

If this numbness has been sticking around for weeks, or it started after a pregnancy or a big loss, please also bring it to a doctor or therapist. It’s common, it’s treatable, and you deserve more support than a newsletter.