Esalen at 26, Jumping Jacks at 43: A Story About Speaking Up.

A psychoeducational essay on esalen at 26, jumping jacks at 43: a story about speaking up, drawn from more than a decade of practice with driven women in relational-trauma recovery.

One weekday morning, in a fitness class in a strip-mall studio with the garage door rolled up to the parking lot, the instructor called for another round of jumping jacks and my left knee sent up a warning. I’m 43. I heard myself say, out loud, to a room of twenty strangers and a woman with a headset mic, ‘I’m going to modify this one.’ Nobody looked up. She nodded and moved on. And I stood there stepping side to side, heart pounding far harder than the exercise warranted, because something in my body knew exactly how much that one sentence had cost me.

In my practice, I’ve noticed that the women who come to me rarely struggle to perform. They struggle to say the true thing in the moment that requires it: to the boss, to the mother on the phone, to the instructor with the mic. What I’ve come to think of as the frozen throat isn’t a character flaw or a confidence problem. It’s what happens when a nervous system learned, early and repeatedly, that speaking up in front of someone with more power ended in humiliation. The body files that away. And then it treats every room with a hierarchy in it as the room where it learned the lesson.

Here’s what I want to offer you, and I offer it as someone who’s still living it: healing relational trauma doesn’t mean the fear of speaking up goes away. It means the fear no longer gets the final vote. At 43, my hands still shake when I use my voice. What’s different is the floor under me, and I can tell you exactly when that floor was missing, because seventeen years ago I was living in a yurt on a cliff above the Pacific, coming apart in ways I didn’t yet have words for, and a man at the front of a room taught me what silence was for.

This article is educational and developmental in nature. It isn’t a substitute for individualized care from a licensed clinician, and reading it doesn’t establish a therapist-client relationship. If you’re in crisis or having thoughts of suicide, in the United States call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Outside the US, visit findahelpline.com for local crisis resources.

The yurt at Esalen: the sentence I couldn’t finish at 26.

I was 26 and living at Esalen, which sounds romantic when I say it out loud and mostly wasn’t. I’d landed there the way a lot of people land in places like that, not because I was seeking enlightenment but because the life I’d built in my early twenties had stopped holding. I was sleeping badly, crying in the shower, losing track of days. I was doing work-study shifts in the kitchen and the garden in exchange for a bed and a chance to sit in circles with people who talked about feelings in complete sentences, which wasn’t a language I’d grown up speaking.

The clinical word for where I was is decompensation. Clinically, it means that the coping strategies you’ve relied on to manage stress and old injury have stopped working, and your functioning starts to come apart at the seams. A closer analogy is the dashboard of a car when three warning lights come on at once: the engine isn’t gone, but the systems that were quietly compensating for a problem have hit their limit. On a Tuesday afternoon it feels like being unable to answer a simple text, or crying because the dining hall ran out of the bread you wanted, and knowing the bread isn’t the point.

One evening there was a community meeting in a yurt. Maybe forty of us on cushions, a kerosene heater ticking, the Pacific loud enough through the canvas that you had to lean in to hear. A decision had been made about the work-study program that affected the people at the bottom of the ladder, which included me, and I had a thought that felt important and reasonable. My heart was hitting my sternum so hard I could see my shirt move. I raised my hand anyway. I got about a sentence and a half in.

A senior leader cut me off. Not cruelly, by his own lights. He said something to the effect that people who’d been there six weeks didn’t yet understand how the place worked, and that it would be good for me to listen more than I spoke. A few people laughed, the soft kind of laugh that lets a room move on. I said, “Okay, sure,” and I looked at the floor, and I didn’t speak in that yurt again for the rest of the time I lived there.

Here’s what I didn’t understand at 26 and understand now: I didn’t stop talking because he was right. I stopped because his sentence landed in a groove that was already carved. The heat in my face, the instant certainty that I’d been foolish to open my mouth, the way my throat closed like a fist, none of that was new. It was old. It was so old I didn’t recognize it as a reaction at all; I thought it was just what I was like.

I want to hold that yurt up next to something that happened this past spring in a fitness studio with terrible lighting, because the distance between the two is the whole story.

Your nervous system learned that speaking is dangerous, not just that he was.

When people describe the moment they couldn’t speak up, they almost always describe it as a failure of nerve. I didn’t have the courage. I froze. I should’ve said something. The language is moral. But what’s happening in that moment isn’t a character flaw. It’s a nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do, very fast, below the level where you get a vote.

Stephen Porges, PhD, laid out the polyvagal perspective in a 2007 paper, and the piece of his work I find most useful here is the idea that the body is constantly scanning the environment for safety or threat, that this scanning happens before conscious thought, and that it shapes what your body can do next. Clinically, this is a description of how the autonomic nervous system shifts states: toward engagement when you feel safe, toward fight or flight when you feel threatened, toward shutdown when neither fighting nor fleeing seems possible. A good analogy is the smoke detector in your kitchen. It doesn’t know the difference between a house fire and burnt toast; it only knows smoke, and it goes off before you’ve had a chance to look around. On a Tuesday afternoon it’s the meeting where your boss asks if anyone has concerns, you have one, and your hands go cold and your voice thins to nothing before you’ve decided whether to raise it.

“The autonomic nervous system responds to the challenges of daily life by telling us not what we are or who we are but how we are.”

Source: Deb Dana, LCSW, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation (2018)

Here’s the part that matters for speaking up specifically. If, over years, the act of voicing your truth was followed by contempt, punishment, ridicule, or someone’s face going hard, your system doesn’t file that under “that particular person was dangerous.” It files it under “speaking is dangerous.” The cue becomes the act itself. So when I raised my hand in the yurt, my body wasn’t waiting to see what the leader would do. It was already halfway to shutdown before he opened his mouth, because the raising of the hand was the smoke.

What shutdown feels like from the inside is worth naming, because so many of the women I work with think they’re just being agreeable. Your throat tightens. Your voice comes out higher and softer than you meant. You start a sentence and hear yourself hedging: “this might be a dumb thought, but.” You lose the thread. Then, and this is the cruelest piece, a wash of shame arrives that feels like proof you never should’ve tried. That shame isn’t information about your idea. It’s the body’s way of making sure you don’t do the dangerous thing again.

None of this means you’re stuck. Nervous systems that learned one thing can learn another, though not through willpower and not on the timeline you’d choose. It happens through repetition in conditions of enough safety, which is a slow and unglamorous thing. But you can’t repair a pattern you’re still calling a personality trait. So before we get to what changed for me, I want to go back further than Esalen, to where the groove was cut in the first place.

The house where truth was handled briefly.

I talk about the proverbial House of Life™ a lot in my work, and the short version is this: your adult life is a house, and the foundation it’s resting on was poured by your family of origin before you had any say in the matter. You can put up beautiful walls. You can hang art. But if the foundation was poured crooked, every room above it leans, and you’ll spend enormous energy propping up doors that won’t close and wondering why the effort never seems to end.

For a lot of women who can’t speak up in the moments that count, the foundation was poured in a home where truth was handled briefly. I don’t mean a home with screaming, though sometimes it was. I mean a home where a child’s honest statement, “that hurt,” “I don’t want to,” “that’s not what happened,” was met with a swift correction. A sigh. A “don’t be dramatic.” A sudden chill from a parent who’d been warm ten seconds before. Or, in the more overt homes, a hand, a slammed door, a punishment that taught you in one afternoon what took other kids years to learn.

Clinically, what develops here is a kind of relational conditioning, where the child learns to predict the caregiver’s reaction and edit herself ahead of it. The analogy I use is a thermostat that was set by someone else’s comfort. You learn to keep the room at the temperature your parent could tolerate, and you get very good at it, and by adulthood you don’t experience it as adjusting anything. You experience it as being easygoing. On a Tuesday afternoon it looks like your mother calling, saying something that lands wrong, and hearing yourself laugh it off before you’ve even registered the sting.

What I’ve noticed over fifteen thousand hours of this work is that women who grew up this way often become excellent at two very specific skills. The first is reading a room before they enter it. The second is saying the small, palatable version of a thing rather than the true version. They mention it at the door. They say “no worries” when there are worries. They preface every real opinion with an apology. It isn’t dishonesty. It’s a survival adaptation that once kept a small person safe in a house where full sentences were expensive.

My own foundation had that crack in it. I grew up in a home where the adults’ moods were the weather and my job was to forecast, and where saying the true thing out loud tended to make the weather worse. So by the time a senior leader in a yurt told me to listen more than I spoke, he wasn’t teaching me anything. He was confirming a lesson I’d learned before I could read. That’s why it took a sentence and a half. That’s why I said “okay, sure.”

I’m telling you this not so you’ll feel sorry for that 26-year-old, though I do. I’m telling you because the fastest way to stop hating yourself for going quiet is to understand exactly where the quiet came from. And I want to show you what this pattern looks like in someone who knows, professionally, precisely how it works, and still can’t get around it.

When the information never gets into the room.

Lori is a composite drawn from readers who’ve written to me about this pattern. She isn’t a client; her name and identifying details have been changed.

Her email arrived at seven in the morning, and she said in the first line that she’d just come off three night shifts and would probably regret the hour but not the sending. She’s 55, an ICU nurse, married thirty-one years, two grown kids. She’d read something I’d written about the body and wanted to tell me about her left ear.

“I spent eleven years telling three separate doctors that something was wrong with my hearing on one side,” she wrote. “And it was always a small thing at the end of an appointment. By the way, my left ear. And every single one of them said something reasonable and none of them asked how long or from what. And I never volunteered it. That’s fair, I never said. And I am a nurse and I know exactly how a history gets taken and I still did not say it, for eleven years, to three doctors.” She was thirty-nine before anyone connected the hearing loss to what had happened when she was fourteen, in her father’s house, with his hand.

My chest went tight at “I know exactly how a history gets taken and I still did not say it.” Because that’s the whole pattern in one line. I write often about the unbelieved body, which clinically describes what happens when a person’s physical symptoms are dismissed, minimized, or explained away by the people who should be listening. The analogy is a witness who’s been ruled out of order so many times she stops approaching the stand. On a Tuesday afternoon it’s the woman who says “I’m fine, it’s nothing” to her own doctor while her body is very clearly saying something. But Lori’s story shows me the version of this I think is most common and least talked about. She wasn’t doubted. The information never got into the room. She offered a fragment eleven times, at the door, in the exact format that guarantees it’ll be handled briefly, and she’s the first to say she never volunteered the rest.

That isn’t a failure of knowledge. Lori knows more about taking a history than most of the physicians she saw. Knowing the mechanism gives you no access to it whatsoever when the history being taken is your own, because the part of you that decides what’s safe to say isn’t the part that went to nursing school. It’s the fourteen-year-old who learned that a full sentence about what happened in that house was the most dangerous thing she could produce.

What shifted for Lori, she told me, wasn’t that she suddenly started speaking in full sentences to doctors. She still can’t, sixteen years after the connection was finally made. What shifted is that she stopped calling it cowardice. She wrote the sentence down, the full one, the one about her father and her ear, and she put it on an index card in her wallet. She hasn’t handed it to anyone yet. But it’s in the room now, in a way it wasn’t before, and she knows exactly where it is.

The Systemic Lens: The workplace was built to hear women briefly.

I’d be doing you a disservice if I let this stay entirely inside your nervous system and your childhood, because a third thing is true at the same time: the rooms you’re trying to speak up in are often built to hear you briefly.

Judith Herman, MD, in her 1992 paper on complex PTSD, described how prolonged, repeated trauma tends to happen in conditions of captivity and unequal power, and how those conditions shape the survivor long after she’s out. I think about that framing every time a woman tells me she froze in a meeting with her department chair, or went silent when a managing partner interrupted her, or couldn’t correct a surgeon who’d gotten the dosage wrong. Clinically, we’d say the hierarchical setting is a trauma cue, an environmental reminder that puts the old pattern back online. The analogy is walking into a house that has the same floor plan as the one you grew up in; you know exactly where the door is, and your body knows exactly where the yelling came from. On a Tuesday afternoon it’s a Zoom call where the senior person’s face fills the screen and your carefully prepared point evaporates.

But the hierarchy isn’t only a cue. It’s also a real structure with real consequences, and I want to be honest about that. At Esalen, I wasn’t only afraid because of my history. I was afraid because I had a bed and food in exchange for compliance, no savings, and nowhere to go if the place decided I was more trouble than I was worth. That leader held actual power over whether I stayed. The women I work with in medicine, law, finance, and tech are often in exactly this position with much higher stakes: a mortgage, children, a visa, a licensure board. When speaking up carries the risk of being labeled difficult, not a team player, not a culture fit, the body’s fear isn’t irrational. It’s reading the room correctly.

What’s more, workplaces reward the door-mention. They call it being collaborative. Performance reviews praise women for being easy to work with, and the woman who states her concern plainly at the start of the meeting gets a note about tone. So the very adaptation your family of origin installed, the palatable fragment, the “just a small thought,” is the one the institution reinforces with promotions and quiet approval. You’re not imagining that it works. It does work, right up to the moment it costs you your health, your integrity, or the truth about your own body.

I say this because I’ve watched too many women blame themselves for a silence the system was counting on. Your nervous system, your childhood, and your paycheck are all in that room with you when you open your mouth. You don’t get to fix the third one by working harder on the first two. But you can stop treating your own fear as evidence of weakness, when a good part of it is evidence of accurate perception.

Which brings me to the thing I most want you to hear, and it’s the hardest part to hold.

Both/and: the fear still comes, and the ground beneath it is different.

There’s a fantasy of healing that I held for most of my twenties and thirties, and that most of the women I work with hold when they arrive: that one day you’ll walk into the meeting and simply not be afraid. That the heat won’t rise in your face, your heart won’t hit your sternum, your voice won’t thin. That healed means calm.

I don’t believe that anymore, and I don’t think it’s what the clinical work actually supports. What I’ve come to understand is that healing relational trauma is a both/and, not an either/or. The fear still visits. And the foundation it lands on isn’t the same foundation.

The clinical language for this is something like increased capacity, or a widened window of tolerance. What it means in the technical sense is that your nervous system can hold more activation before it tips into fight, flight, or shutdown, and that when it does tip, it comes back faster. The analogy I like is a bigger boat on the same water. The waves aren’t smaller. You’re just not capsizing. On a Tuesday afternoon it feels like your heart pounding while you say the true thing anyway, and then noticing, an hour later, that you’re eating lunch and not replaying it two hundred times.

Both things are true for me, right now, at 43. When I disagree with someone who has authority over me, my body still does what it did in the yurt. The heat still rises. My throat still tightens. I still hear the little girl and the twenty-six-year-old whispering that I’m about to be laughed at and moved past. And, at the very same time, something under all of that has thickened. I know the fear is old. I know it isn’t information about the present moment. I can feel it and let it be there and still let the sentence come out of my mouth, and afterward I don’t spend a week in the shame that used to follow.

I need you to resist the pull to collapse this into one side. If you land on “the fear still comes, so I haven’t healed,” you’ll dismiss every small act of courage you’ve managed, and there’ve been more than you think. If you land on “I’ve done the work, so I shouldn’t be afraid,” you’ll turn the fear itself into a new source of shame, and you’ll be right back at the door mentioning things briefly. Neither side is true alone. The fear is real. The change is real. They live in the same body, and that body is yours.

Lori knows this. She can name the exact mechanism and still can’t get the sentence out at the start of the appointment, and that isn’t a contradiction. It’s what the middle of healing actually looks like. The index card in the wallet is a both/and. So, it turns out, are jumping jacks.

Jumping jacks at 43: what speaking up actually looked like.

This past spring I signed up for a small group fitness class at a studio a few blocks from my house. Bad lighting, good instructor, eight of us on a rubber floor at 6:15 in the morning. About twenty minutes in she called for a set of jumping jacks, and everyone around me started bouncing.

My body can’t do jumping jacks right now. I won’t go into the details, but between two pregnancies and a back that keeps its own counsel, high-impact jumping is something I’ve had to give up for the time being. Historically, what I’d have done is jump anyway. I’d have done all forty, badly, hurt for two days, and told no one, because the alternative was to be the woman in the class who needed something different, and the little girl in me knew exactly how that went.

Instead, with my heart hitting my sternum exactly the way it had in the yurt, I said, out loud, to the whole room: “I’m going to do step-outs instead. My body can’t jump today.” The instructor said, “Great, do what works,” without breaking rhythm. The woman next to me, who had to be in her sixties, said, “Oh thank God,” and switched to step-outs too. And that was it. That was the whole event.

I drove home and noticed something in the car. I wasn’t replaying it. I wasn’t scanning the room in my memory for who’d looked at me. I was thinking about coffee. Clinically, I’d call what happened a corrective experience: a moment where the body does the old dangerous thing, speaks, and receives a different response than it was braced for, which gets logged alongside the old data. The analogy is one good entry in a ledger that’s been running red for decades. It doesn’t balance the books. It changes the trend. On a Tuesday afternoon, or a Wednesday at 6:15, it looks like a sentence about jumping jacks and a drive home thinking about coffee.

I want to be careful not to make this bigger than it was. It was a fitness class. Nobody’s job was on the line. But the size of the stage isn’t what matters. What matters is that the exact same nervous system response showed up, the heat, the pounding, the old voice, and this time it didn’t win. It didn’t win because I’d spent seventeen years in my own therapy, in EMDR, in somatic work, in relationships where full sentences were met with curiosity instead of a hard face. The foundation got repoured one small load at a time, and the day it showed itself was a Wednesday with terrible lighting.

So if you’re waiting for the big moment, the boardroom, the confrontation with your mother, the letter you’ve been drafting for six years, I want to gently redirect you. The big moments are built out of jumping jacks. The question isn’t whether you can speak up when it matters most. It’s whether you can speak up this week, in a room where the stakes are low enough to survive, and let your body learn something.

Where your own sentence is waiting.

I don’t want to leave you with an inspiring feeling and nothing to do with it, so here’s how I’d start if I were you, and you’re allowed to take only the parts that fit.

Begin by noticing where you mention things at the door. Not fixing it, just noticing. The “by the way” at the end of the appointment. The “small thought” at the end of the meeting. The “it’s probably nothing” to your partner. For most women I work with, there’s a specific room where this happens most, and it usually rhymes with the room where the foundation was poured. You’ll know it when you see it. It’s the room where your voice thins.

Then write the full sentence down. Lori’s index card taught me this more than any training did. There’s something about seeing the whole truth in your own handwriting that gets it into the room, even before you say it aloud. “Something happened to me at fourteen and I think it’s why I can’t hear on the left.” “I don’t agree with this decision and here’s why.” “When you said that, it hurt.” The sentence doesn’t have to be said tomorrow. It just has to exist somewhere outside your chest.

There’s also a part I can’t skip, though I wish I could: you’ll have to expect the fear and go anyway, in a room that’s small enough. Not the boardroom. The fitness class. The friend who’s safe. The colleague you trust. Pick a place where the worst case is survivable, say one true sentence, and let your heart pound while you do it. Your nervous system doesn’t learn from the absence of fear. It learns from fear followed by an outcome it wasn’t braced for. That’s the whole mechanism, and it’s slow, and it’s the only thing I’ve ever seen work.

Afterward, pay attention to what your body does for the next hour. Does the shame spiral arrive, or does it not? Are you replaying it, or are you thinking about coffee? That hour is where the evidence lives. It’s where you’ll see, over months, that the ground is different even when the waves are the same. And if the shame does come, that isn’t failure. That’s the old data doing its job, and the new entry still got logged.

I think about that 26-year-old on the cushion in the yurt more than I used to. Not with the embarrassment I carried for years, but with something closer to tenderness. She had a sentence and a half in her and a house behind her where full sentences had cost too much, and she did the only thing her body knew how to do. I couldn’t have told her that seventeen years later she’d stand on a rubber floor at 6:15 in the morning, heart pounding, and say a plain sentence about her body to a room of strangers, and drive home thinking about nothing much at all.

But I can tell you. Your sentence is waiting somewhere too. It’s probably shorter than you think, the room is probably closer than you’d guess, and your heart will pound. Let it. Say it anyway.

References.