Your Body Has Been Speaking
Recurring headaches, digestive disruption, chest tightness, and exhaustion deserve appropriate medical care, and they may also carry information about what the body has been holding. This essay considers the relationship between emotional overwhelm, somatic symptoms, and the compassionate curiosity that can begin when the body is treated as a source of information rather than a problem to override.
The tension headache arrives every Sunday evening around six o’clock. You’ve tracked it, in the incurious way of someone who has simply noted that this is how Sundays end. It’s behind your left eye, usually, and it lasts through dinner and dissolves sometime around ten. You’ve tried magnesium. You’ve tried cutting wine. You’ve tried going to bed earlier and drinking more water and adjusting your screen settings. You’ve been to a neurologist who found nothing, and this has been treated as good news.
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Or maybe for you it’s not the headache. Maybe it’s the stomach. The particular digestive fragility that your gastroenterologist has been calling IBS for three years, the one that noticeably improves when you’re on vacation and returns within forty-eight hours of getting home. Or the chest tightness that arrives predictably at 4 PM, which you’ve attributed to the afternoon slump, to the cumulative weight of the day, to everything except what it might actually be.
Or maybe it’s something harder to name. A chronic tension in the shoulders and jaw that you’ve been calling posture, or stress, or just how things are for someone who does the kind of work you do. A tiredness that sleep doesn’t fix. A skin that breaks out under pressure in a way that has followed you since your twenties and that creams and diets and elimination protocols have never fully addressed.
It isn’t bad luck. It isn’t aging. It isn’t evidence that something is wrong with your body in the way your doctors keep looking for something wrong with your body. It isn’t random and it isn’t coincidental and it isn’t simply stress, though stress is part of it.
Your body has been speaking. In the only language available to it, through the only channels left open, it has been saying something specific. And the conversation we keep not having, between what the body knows and what the rest of you has been able to hear, is one of the most important ones we can begin.
“your body is a museum of natural disasterscan you grasp how stunning that is”
Kaur, Rupi. (n.d.). Milk and Honey. Andrews McMeel Publishing.
The proverbial house of the life we’ve built, the career, the relationships, the extraordinary daily performance of a woman who holds a lot together, is built on a foundation poured in the specific conditions of our earliest years. And one of the things that foundation determines is what we learned to do with the body’s signals: whether the feelings were received and named, or whether they were managed, set aside, presented in acceptable quantities or not at all. For many of us who grew up in households where the emotional climate didn’t have room for the full range of what we felt, the solution was elegant and devastating in equal measure: we learned to not feel it in the body. We got very good at the override. We became what our doctors keep describing as remarkably high-functioning.
The body did not stop generating the signals. It kept sending them. And when the signals couldn’t be received through the normal channels, they found other ones. The headache. The gut. The chest. The skin. The body, doing the only thing a body can do when its primary means of communication has been repeatedly blocked: escalating.
When Symptoms Become a Language
She’d brought a list.
(Names and all identifying details have been changed for confidentiality.)
This wasn’t unusual, many of the women I work with bring lists, but hers was unusual in its specificity. Twelve items, each with a date of onset, each with the current status, two of them cross-referenced to previous specialists. She was forty-two, a management consultant in San Francisco who had, by the time we first met, seen a neurologist, two gastroenterologists, a rheumatologist, an allergist, and a dermatologist. All had found nothing that fully explained her symptom picture. Several had used the word psychosomatic, which she’d found simultaneously insulting and familiar, because she knew on some level they weren’t entirely wrong and she had no idea what to do with that knowing.
Her childhood had been, she said, fine. Her parents were both professionals, both present, both loving in the ways they knew how to be loving. What they hadn’t known how to do, what their own childhoods had not equipped them for, was receive the full amplitude of a child’s emotional experience. Her mother had cried twice in Daniela’s memory and had seemed frightened both times, as if the crying had been something she’d lost control of. Her father’s response to distress was practical and rapid: identify the problem, address the problem, move on. Daniela had learned, by approximately age seven, that she was most lovable when she was manageable. She had been very lovable for thirty-five years.
“I know the list is…” She looked at it and then at me. “I know it looks like a lot. But it’s just, these are real things. They’re not in my head.” She paused. “Or. I mean. I know they might be in my head. But they’re also real. That’s what’s confusing.”
I didn’t say anything right away.
Her voice had a very particular quality in that moment, the quality of someone who has been making this case, repeatedly and to unreceptive audiences, for long enough that she’d started to hear herself the way she imagined her doctors heard her: as a woman who couldn’t quite accept that nothing was wrong. She wasn’t wrong. Something was very wrong. It was just located somewhere the tests weren’t looking.
right when I wanted to tell you a good thing,
a stone to hold and rub in the pocket like skin,
right then, the sickness comes again.
I want to write of the body as desirous, reedy,
fine on the tongue on the thigh,
but my blood’s got the spins again, twice, Limón, Ada. (n.d.). “From the Ash Inside the Bone.” The Carrying.
The Body’s Reports
There’s a framework I kept returning to when I was trying to understand why a woman with Daniela’s intelligence and clinical literacy couldn’t simply think her way out of the symptom picture. I found the clearest articulation in Hillary McBride’s work on embodiment, in a passage where she describes what had been sent to her clinic: a gastroenterologist sending patients with IBS, a cardiologist sending patients with chronic anxiety, a gynecologist sending patients whose sexual trauma resurfaced during exams, a chiropractor sending patients with debilitating back pain and clean MRIs. McBride writes that in each narrative, it was impossible to ignore the connection, that the body tells the stories we’ve avoided or forgotten how to hear, and that when we can’t feel our feelings, the body has to scream to get some attention.
Bessel van der Kolk’s work contains a passage I’ve shared with more clients than I can count: that somatic symptoms for which no clear physical basis can be found are ubiquitous in traumatized adults, and can include chronic back and neck pain, fibromyalgia, migraines, digestive problems, IBS, chronic fatigue, and some forms of asthma. He then names the mechanism: if the signals keep getting pushed down, the emotional brain keeps working, the stress hormones keep sending signals to the muscles to tense for action or immobilize in collapse, and the physical effects on the organs go on unabated until they demand notice by expressing as illness. The body isn’t malfunctioning. It’s filing repeated, escalating reports that no one at the receiving end has been trained to read.
Physical symptoms that are real and may be influenced by the nervous system, stress physiology, or experiences the body has been carrying, alongside any medical factors that need evaluation.
In plain terms: A headache, gut symptom, or tight chest can be real information from the body, not evidence that the experience is imagined.
I also found something in Livia Shapiro’s somatic therapy work, the observation that the body stores information not as narrative but as felt sense, as chronic patterns in tissues and systems that need support and expression. The places in the body that consistently hold fear or grief in specific ways. Daniela’s twelve symptoms weren’t twelve separate problems. They were a body’s attempt, across twelve years, to complete the same message through twelve different channels.
There is a pain, so utter,
It swallows substance up,
Then covers the Abyss with Trance,
So memory can step
Around, across, upon it,
As one within a Swoon,
Goes safely, where an open eye,
Would drop Him, Bone by Bone, Dickinson, Emily. (1862). “There is a pain, so utter, .” Quoted in: The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy. W.W. Norton & Company. Chapter 6.
Listening Differently
Here’s the structural layer we need to name.
The word hysterical descends from the Greek word for uterus. For centuries, women’s physical complaints that couldn’t be explained by the medicine of the moment were attributed not to real pathology but to the distinctive fragility of the female body, its particular susceptibility to the emotions, to the nerves, to the imagination. This legacy has not been fully retired. It lives in the pause before a specialist writes psychosomatic. It lives in the suggestion that anxiety might explain the symptom. It lives in the pattern, documented in research, that women’s pain is more frequently minimized, undertreated, and attributed to emotional causes than men’s comparable pain.
A learned habit of setting aside or minimizing internal feelings and bodily signals in order to function, manage a relationship, or meet demands.
In plain terms: It can help someone get through a hard day while leaving the body to carry the message that has not been given another place to go.
What this means is that a woman who grew up learning not to make her feelings into problems for other people, who learned the override, the management, the acceptable quantities, and who then brings her body’s accumulated reports to a medical system that has historically not known what to do with them, receives the same message twice: from the original household and from the institution. Your body’s signals are not quite trustworthy. Your response to them is probably a little excessive. We’ve looked at what you’ve given us and we don’t see the problem.
I’m not saying the doctors were malicious. I’m not saying the symptoms are untreatable. I’m not saying you should stop going to the specialists. I’m not saying the body’s language is your fault. I’m not saying this is simply a mental health problem that medicine has been right to redirect.
What I am saying: the body has been speaking for years, in the only language available to it, and the conversation has been consistently redirected to channels that don’t receive what it’s actually saying. AND, the symptoms are real, and they have an origin, and the origin is not in the body itself but in what the body has been asked to hold. AND, the body is not broken. The body is the most honest thing about you. It has been saying the same thing in twelve different ways, and it will keep saying it, with considerable patience, until it is finally heard.
What becomes possible, when we begin to listen: the Sunday headache arrives and instead of the familiar management, the magnesium, the earlier bedtime, there’s a different question: what has today asked me to hold that I haven’t set down yet? The IBS improves not because the gut is fixed but because the gut was never broken. The chest tightness at 4 PM gets curious attention rather than cortisol management. The body becomes, slowly, a source of information rather than a source of problems. Daniela’s list gets shorter. Not because the symptoms vanish. Because they’re no longer the only way the conversation can happen.
I do not come like a secret warrior
with an unsheathed sword in my mouth
hidden behind my tongue
slicing my throat to ribbons of service
with a smile
while the blood runs down and out, Lorde, Audre. (n.d.). “A Woman Speaks.” The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. not provided. p. 234.
The next time the Sunday headache arrives, before the magnesium, before the neurological attribution, try this:
Place one hand on your sternum. Just there, behind the left eye, below the chest. Take one slow breath and ask, not analytically, just with genuine curiosity: what has this week asked of me that I haven’t had language for?
You don’t have to answer it tonight. You don’t have to solve it. You just have to let the body know that the door is open. That there’s someone on this side willing to listen. The symptoms were never the problem. They were the knock. And you’re allowed to finally answer.
Q: Are unexplained physical symptoms real?
A: Yes. The essay emphasizes that symptoms are real and that medical evaluation remains important, while also making room for the body’s stress and emotional history.
Q: What are somatic symptoms?
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A: They are real physical symptoms that can be shaped by nervous-system and stress processes as well as other medical factors.
Q: Does this mean I should stop seeing doctors?
A: No. The essay explicitly says not to stop going to specialists; curiosity about emotional and bodily patterns belongs alongside appropriate medical care.
Q: Why might symptoms get louder over time?
A: The essay describes a body that continues sending signals through different channels when its earlier signals have been repeatedly overridden or not received.
Q: What can I ask when a symptom appears?
A: Try a gentle question about what you may have been asked to hold without language, without requiring yourself to solve or explain it immediately.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
“Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.”
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist with 15,000+ clinical hours since 2013 and an EMDRIA Certified Therapist. She’s the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she successfully exited. She’s currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). Her expert commentary has appeared in Psychology Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is an EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, and she's been in practice since 2013. Trained in EMDR, psychodynamic, and somatic modalities, she is licensed in 14 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida (California, Colorado (telehealth only), Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington). Annie works with driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds, and everything she writes about is field-tested across thousands of clinical sessions. She is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited, and is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
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