I want to tell you about something that happened when I was 26, that I’m only now—at 43—really understanding. And then I want to tell you about what happened recently that made me realize: some things change profoundly, and some things still shake in our bones.
Summary
At 26, Annie was living at Esalen in the early stages of her relational trauma unraveling—and she still couldn’t speak up for herself when it mattered. Now at 43, a small act of speaking up in a fitness class revealed something profound: the foundation has genuinely changed, even if the fear still visits. This essay is about what it actually looks like when relational trauma heals—not the absence of fear, but a new relationship with it.
Relational Trauma
Relational trauma is the psychological injury that results from repeated experiences of feeling unsafe, unseen, or unvalued in significant relationships — particularly early ones. It doesn’t require a single catastrophic event; it accumulates through patterns of emotional neglect, inconsistency, or control in the relationships that were supposed to teach you what love looks like.
Table of Contents
The Yurt at Esalen
I was living and working at Esalen Institute on the Big Sur coast. If you haven’t been there, it’s 27 acres of healing land perched between the mountains and the Pacific, where people have been coming since the 1960s to do deep transformative work. I’d arrived there in what I now understand was early decompensation—when all the strategies that kept my childhood relational trauma manageable were starting to fail. My Peace Corps service in Uzbekistan had initiated this unraveling, and I’d come to Esalen hoping to put myself back together.
In one of our regular community meetings in a yurt, I spoke up against one of the senior leaders. They were making a decision I thought was wrong for our community, and I said so.
I remember absolutely shaking. Feeling completely and utterly terrified. And yet I still did it. Looking back, I’m actually not sure how I did it, but I did it.
Then the senior leader—in front of everyone—shamed me for what I said. Not disagreed with me. Shamed me.
That particular kind of public shaming has a specific quality to it. The heat in your face, the ringing in your ears, the sense of being very far away from your own body while also acutely present. It’s a physiological response that’s hard to describe if you haven’t experienced it.
That experience impacted me a lot, and not positively.
I left the yurt and went straight to the rock wall outside the Esalen Lodge. I cried. I let my body shake and metabolize what had just happened while the Pacific crashed against the cliffs below. A fellow staff member about my age came and sat down next to me. He’d witnessed the whole exchange and came to check on me.
I remember what he said: “I don’t really understand why this is rattling you so much.”
He didn’t say it to be malicious—I want to be really clear about that. He was checking on me, making sure I was okay. He was well-meaning. But for him, he genuinely couldn’t understand why I was so negatively impacted.
When Trauma History Meets Economic Reality
What I can see now but couldn’t articulate then were the multiple variables at play, and how they compounded each other in a very specific way.
First, I was still at the very early stages of my relational trauma recovery. My nervous system had learned early that challenging authority was dangerous. In my family of origin, speaking up against power meant real consequences—withdrawal of love, emotional abandonment, being seen as the problem. So when I spoke up in that meeting, every alarm bell my childhood had installed was going off.
Nervous System Dysregulation
Your nervous system is the body’s threat-detection apparatus. When it’s been shaped by relational trauma, it can get stuck in patterns of hypervigilance (always scanning for danger) or hypoarousal (shutting down to cope). Nervous system dysregulation means your body’s alarm system fires too easily, too often, or not at all — regardless of what your conscious mind knows to be true.
But here’s the crucial part: those alarm bells weren’t wrong.
When you’re economically vulnerable, every professional interaction carries different weight. I was living and working at Esalen. My employment, my housing, my meals—my survival—was tied to staying in good standing with leadership. I had no financial safety net. No family to go home to. No job prospects at that time. The administration literally had control over whether I had a roof over my head and food to eat.
So when I risked the displeasure of leadership to stand up for what I thought was right, and then received that shaming response, I wasn’t just having a trauma response. I was having a trauma response that was also an accurate assessment of real vulnerability.
My catastrophic thought was that I’d compromised my employment, maybe even lost it. That wasn’t actually true—but it wasn’t irrational either. It was my nervous system doing the math: relational trauma history (speaking up = danger) + current economic precarity (job loss = homelessness) = extreme activation.
Here’s what’s important to say: even if I had been further along in my relational trauma recovery, the fact that I didn’t have finances to lean back on—should the worst-case scenario happen and they fired me—that anxiety still would have been intense. The material vulnerability was real.
My well-meaning colleague? He had a loving family who would welcome him home if he got fired. He had some savings. He had other umbrellas to shelter under where I did not. He wasn’t as attached to preserving his employment because he had actual safety nets.
For him, professional disagreement was just disagreement. For me, it was potentially catastrophic.
That literal shaking, that terror—it had both structural and personal roots.
Continue Your Healing as a Driven Woman
You’re reading part of a larger body of work now housed inside Strong and Stable—a space for ambitious women who wake up at 3 AM with racing hearts, who can handle everyone else’s crises but don’t know who to call when you’re falling apart, who’ve built impressive lives that somehow feel exhausting to live inside.
All new writing—essays that name what’s been invisible, workbooks that actually shift what feels stuck, and honest letters about the real work beneath the work, and Q&As where you can ask your burning questions (anonymously, always)—lives there now, within a curated curriculum designed to move you from insight to action.
If you’re tired of holding it all up alone, you’re invited to step into a space where your nervous system can finally start to settle, surrounded by women doing this foundation work alongside you.
Step Inside
If you’re ready to go deeper, I work one-on-one with driven, ambitious women through relational trauma recovery therapy and trauma-informed executive coaching. And if this essay resonated, there’s more where it came from — my Substack newsletter goes deeper every week on relational trauma, nervous system healing, and the inner lives of ambitious women. Subscribe for free — I can’t wait to be of support to you.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does it look like when relational trauma actually heals?
Healing rarely looks like the complete absence of fear or reactivity. More often, it looks like a different relationship with the fear—noticing it rather than being consumed by it, having more space between the trigger and the response, being able to choose rather than simply react. It also looks like being able to speak up in a fitness class when you couldn’t at 26, and actually registering that as progress.
What is Esalen Institute and why is it relevant to trauma healing?
Esalen is a residential educational center on the Big Sur coast in California, founded in the 1960s as the home of the Human Potential Movement. It has hosted significant figures in psychology, philosophy, and spirituality, and has been a site for deep personal growth work for decades. For many people, immersive environments like Esalen can accelerate the surfacing of psychological material that everyday life keeps managed.
Why did my coping strategies start failing even though I was doing fine?
Coping strategies—especially those developed in childhood—work until they don’t. Often they begin to fail at moments of transition, success, or reduced external pressure, because those are the moments when the nervous system no longer has to spend all its resources on survival and can finally start processing what it’s been holding. This is what early decompensation looks like: not falling apart, but thawing.
Why is speaking up so hard even when I know intellectually it’s safe?
Because knowing something is safe and your nervous system believing it’s safe are two completely different things. For women whose early relational environments taught them that speaking up had costs—relational tension, emotional withdrawal, conflict—the body treats self-expression as a risk even when the current situation is objectively low-stakes. The body carries the historical evidence, not the current reality.
What does it mean to have a nervous system ‘wired’ by childhood relational trauma?
The nervous system learns from repeated experience, especially in the formative years of childhood attachment. When caregiving was inconsistent, emotionally unavailable, or punishing of self-expression, the nervous system wired itself to manage those threats: stay quiet, stay small, stay useful, stay hypervigilant. This wiring doesn’t disappear when childhood ends. Understanding how early relational trauma damages the foundation helps explain why changing these patterns requires more than willpower.
Attachment Style
Your attachment style is the relational blueprint your nervous system built in childhood based on how your caregivers responded to your needs. It shapes how you pursue closeness, handle conflict, and tolerate vulnerability in adult relationships — often without your conscious awareness.
DISCLAIMER: The content of this post is for psychoeducational and informational purposes only and does not constitute therapy, clinical advice, or a therapist-client relationship. For full details, please read our Medical Disclaimer. If you are in crisis, please call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or text HOME to 741741 (Crisis Text Line).
You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.
