Rachel Abi runs a show called In the Nude: Naked Truth of Healing, and the title is accurate. She doesn’t do the gentle-voiced version of this conversation. She asks a question and then waits, which is a rarer skill than it sounds.
We spent most of it on identity — specifically, how a woman disappears into her roles without a single dramatic moment marking the disappearance. There’s no scene. Nobody hands you the costume. You become the perfect wife or the hypervigilant mother or the professional who never drops anything, and it works, and it keeps working, and then you’re forty and you can’t answer a question about your own preferences without checking who else is in the room.
The mechanism underneath it is simple and awful: if you learned early that your value was contingent on what you provided, then having a self starts to feel expensive. So you stop keeping one. Not consciously. You just quietly stop stocking it.
We also covered the part I think gets skipped most often, which is what it costs to climb out. Everybody wants to talk about the freedom on the other side. Fewer people want to name that when you stop performing, some of the people around you were attached to the performance, and they will not all follow you. That’s not a reason to keep the costume on. But you deserve to know the price before you’re standing there holding it.
And we got into nervous system literacy, which is the thing I actually care about. Fight, flight, freeze, fawn — not as a personality quiz, but as information. Your body has been running a strategy this whole time. You’re allowed to know what it is.
Fair warning: this one is more direct than the other episodes I’ve posted. If you’re in a stretch where you need soft, come back to it later. It’ll keep.