EP 73 When Closeness Feels Like Danger

Your partner reaches for you, and before a single thought forms, your breath catches and your stomach clenches. You want closeness, and your body treats it like a threat. Then come the stories: I'm sabotaging myself, I'm too much, something must be wrong with me. In this episode, somatic trauma therapist Barbara Collier joins us to give that bracing a different name. An adaptive response. Your nervous system learned long ago that closeness could come with a cost, and it keeps protecting you from the there and then while you're trying to live in the here and now. We explore why arousal can feel more like alarm than pleasure when "anxiety and excitement literally have the same juice," why calling it a pattern keeps you stuck in shame, what years of living with one foot on the gas and one on the brake do to your health, why wounds from before you had words rarely shift through talking alone, and the surprisingly small first step back toward pleasure when you feel numb, tense, or in pain. You can't shame your way out of something your body is doing to keep you safe. You can get curious, and that's where everything starts to move.