You Checked Out of Your Body Years Ago
Being able to explain feelings while struggling to locate them in the body is not a failure of insight. This essay examines the neck-up life as an adaptation, the professional rewards that can reinforce it, and the slow, non-demanding process of helping the body feel welcome enough to return to awareness.
Your therapist asks where you feel it in your body. There’s a pause. Not a long one, a second, maybe two, and then you locate something. The chest, probably. The chest is the reliable one. You say the chest and you move on, and neither of you mentions the fact that the pause happened, or that it happens, reliably, every time the question comes.
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Or maybe you don’t have a therapist and the question comes from somewhere else: the yoga teacher asking you to breathe into your hips, and you do something with your breath that you think might be what they mean, and you spend the rest of the class not quite sure. The partner who asks what you’re feeling and you say frustrated because that’s true, but when they ask where you feel it you realize you’ve already moved into analysis, into the explanation of why the frustration is reasonable, and the question of where it lives in the body is somehow further away than it was a moment ago.
Or maybe it’s simpler: you’re excellent at understanding your emotional life and genuinely uncertain how to find it below the neck. You can describe the experience. You can theorize it. You can connect it to its origins with impressive precision. The body itself, the sternum, the belly, the hands, is a country you visit but don’t quite live in.
It isn’t a failure of self-awareness. It isn’t a sign you haven’t done the work. It isn’t something a better meditation practice or a different kind of yoga will straightforwardly fix. It isn’t numbness in the clinical sense, though it’s in the neighborhood.
You checked out of your body. At some point, in some environment, that was the right move. The body became louder than the situation could hold, or the body’s signals were inconvenient, or dangerous, or simply not received, for long enough that the mind learned to go ahead without it. The mind was excellent. The mind was praised. The mind got promoted. And the body kept the score while the mind took the meeting.
“I was nothing more than an observer,two eyes planted inside a beige cadaver with a nest of ratty brown hair.My senses had shut off,my body a nerveless mannequin.”
Miller, Chanel. (2019). Know My Name. Viking. Chapter 1.
The proverbial house of our adult lives, the intellect we’ve cultivated, the professional identity we’ve built, the particular excellence that gets us the table and keeps us there, was built partly on a foundation that determined the body was not the safest place to be. Not as a conscious decision. As an adaptation. The mind offered something the body couldn’t, in the specific environment where the adaptation was made: distance from what was happening, precision in the face of chaos, the ability to function when feeling would have been too expensive. We became, very early, people who live primarily from the neck up. And then the neck-up life got rewarded so consistently that we forgot it had ever been a strategy.
The body didn’t leave. The body stayed in the room with everything we were managing, keeping records in its own medium, the tension, the symptoms, the pause when someone asks where we feel it, and waiting for the moment the mind might finally be ready to check back in.
The Neck-Up Life
She could tell you exactly what she was feeling. That was the first thing I noticed.
(Names and all identifying details have been changed for confidentiality.)
She could describe it with clinical precision, the specific quality of the anxiety before the board meeting, the way shame had a different texture than guilt, the distinction between anger that had an object and anger that was free-floating. She had the vocabulary. She had done the reading. She had been in therapy, on and off, since her late twenties, and she was one of the most psychologically articulate people I’d sat across from in years of practice.
What she couldn’t do, she told me somewhere in the fifth session, was feel it in her body while she was talking about it. She could tell me she was angry and she could explain why and she could trace the anger back three generations if I asked her to. And if I asked her where the anger lived right now, in this room, in her body, there was the pause. And then the chest. And then we moved on.
Helena was forty, a VP of Engineering at a company in Palo Alto who had, by her own account, been living primarily in her head since approximately age ten. Her father had been an academic, brilliant, emotionally unavailable in the specific way of men who experience intellect as their primary mode of relation. Her mother had been warm but overwhelmed: three children close in age, a husband who was present but unreachable. What Helena had learned, in that household, was that the mind was the currency that got you love, or at least attention. Thinking clearly, solving things correctly, being the smart one, these were what earned the room.
“I think I’ve been…” She stopped. Started again. “I’m aware that I’m very comfortable talking about feelings and not very comfortable having them. Like, the talking is easy. The having is…” Another stop. Her hands were folded in her lap, completely still. “I don’t know where it goes. The having part. I know it happens. I can describe it afterward. But while it’s happening… I’m somewhere else, I think.”
I didn’t say anything right away.
There was a quality in how she said somewhere else, a very precise quality, careful and a little tired, that I recognized as the voice of someone who has been managing the distance between herself and her own body for long enough that she’s started to experience it not as a problem but simply as the way things are. She was describing the adaptation as if it were her nature. That distinction, between the adaptation and the nature, was the entire work.
my mind my body and i
all live in one place
but it feels like
we are three completely different people
, disconnected, Kaur, Rupi. (n.d.). Home Body. Andrews McMeel Publishing.
Why the Body Learned to Leave
I found the most precise description of Helena’s experience in Livia Shapiro’s somatic therapy work: that no one vacates their body because they want to. They vacate their embodied experience because they learned they could, in order to survive. And that to thrive, well-being and embodiment are inextricably linked. That sentence, they learned they could, is the one I’ve returned to most. The departure from the body isn’t a failure of self-awareness. It was the solution to a problem the body couldn’t solve while it was still being fully inhabited.
The capacity to notice and inhabit present-moment bodily sensation, emotion, and experience rather than relating to life primarily through analysis.
In plain terms: It can begin with simply recognizing that there is a pause before you can name where a feeling lives.
Pat Ogden and Janina Fisher’s clinical work on sensorimotor approaches to trauma describes how a disconnection from the body can be healthy and helpful at the time of trauma, it allows us to distance ourselves from a painful situation while remaining physically present. The problem is that over time, we may learn to disconnect in anticipation of hurt, not just during an actual crisis. Because so much of our experience as humans is focused on the mind, many of us who use this strategy end up, as they put it, living in our heads, unaware of our bodies. The strategy that protected us becomes the architecture of how we move through the world. And the body, which has been keeping its records the whole time, eventually begins to insist on being read.
A survival-based disconnection from bodily experience that can help someone function during overwhelm but may persist after immediate danger has passed.
In plain terms: Living mostly from the neck up may have been the way your mind kept you moving when being fully in the body felt too costly.
David Treleaven’s work on trauma-sensitive approaches describes what happens in the body when sensations are continually sending threatening information: disconnecting from the body is a way to minimize stress. He names it as a smart, survival-based strategy, which is exactly what it was for Helena at ten, in a household where being in the body meant being overwhelmed by what the body was receiving. The mind offered precision. The mind offered the only form of safety available. The mind became home.
We can hardly bear to look.
The shadow may carry the best of the life we have not lived.
Go into the basement, the attic, the refuse bin.
Find gold there.
Find an animal who has not been fed or watered.
It is you!!
This neglected, exiled animal, hungry for attention,
is a part of your self., Woodman, Marion. Quoted in: van der Kolk, Bessel. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking. Chapter 17.
Coming Home at the Body’s Pace
Here’s the structural argument that belongs in this conversation.
The mind is what we reward. The credentials, the promotions, the board invitations, the conference keynotes, these are the fruits of the neck-up life. And for women who grew up learning that intelligence was the currency of love, the professional world confirmed that lesson with everything it had to offer: more intelligence, more analysis, more strategic precision, more of the thing that had always been safest. The body, which carries the emotional cost of the neck-up performance, receives very little professional validation. It gets sick days and medical appointments and the occasional concerned question from a partner. It does not get promoted.
Helena’s disconnection from her body wasn’t only a response to her father’s emotional unavailability. It was a response to an entire professional culture that had built its demand for her output on top of a childhood that had already taught her the mind was the only part of her that fully counted. Both systems required the same thing of her. Both rewarded her for providing it. And the body, which had been keeping records from the beginning, eventually started presenting them in the form of a TMJ diagnosis and an inexplicable fatigue that no amount of sleep was touching.
I’m not saying the intelligence is a compensation for the disconnection. I’m not saying the professional success isn’t real. I’m not saying the mind should be trusted less. I’m not saying the body’s record is more accurate than the mind’s analysis. I’m not saying any of this means the therapy hasn’t been working.
What I am saying: the body went somewhere for good reasons, in a specific environment, at a specific age, and it left a forwarding address. AND, the mind has been managing extraordinarily well in the body’s absence, and the management is real, and it has costs. AND, the body hasn’t left the building. It’s been in the building the whole time, running the systems the mind doesn’t have access to, keeping the records the mind didn’t have time for. AND, Helena has been described, by every institution she’s passed through, as exceptional, and not one of them thought to ask what the exceptional performance was costing the body that was carrying it.
What becomes possible, when the body begins to be welcomed back: the pause when someone asks where you feel it gets shorter. Not because you’ve located the answer faster, but because you’ve started living slightly closer to where the answer lives. The chest remains the reliable answer for a while. But then the belly. Then the hands. Then, sometimes, a location you hadn’t known had a name. Helena described it this way, a year in: she’d been in a board meeting when something shifted in the room, and instead of moving directly into analysis, she’d felt something in her sternum first. I noticed it, she said. I actually noticed it before I started explaining it. That’s it. That’s the beginning of coming home.
Drone of the neighbor’s mowing, a red mailbox flag erected,
a dog bark from three houses over,
and this is what a day is.
A siren whining high toward town
repeating that the emergency is not here,
repeating that this loud silence is only where you live., Limón, Ada. (n.d.). “Late Summer After a Panic Attack.” The Carrying. not provided.
The next time you’re asked where you feel it, by a therapist, a yoga teacher, a partner, or just a quiet moment, try this before you answer:
Don’t locate it first. Just put one hand on your sternum. Hold it there for three slow breaths. Not to find the feeling. Just to let the body know you’re in the same room with it. That you’re willing to wait.
The body left for good reasons. It will come back at the pace it trusts. And you don’t have to do anything except show up, regularly, with a hand on your sternum, and let it know: I’m here. I’m not leaving this time. You can come home.
Q: Why can I explain a feeling but not locate it in my body?
A: The essay describes this as a possible adaptation in which the mind learned to create distance from overwhelming bodily experience.
Q: What is embodiment?
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A focused self-paced course on overfunctioning, achievement-first self-concept, and the trauma response that masquerades as a personality. Not a productivity problem. Not a boundary problem. A nervous system that learned competence was the only safety.
A: Embodiment is the practice of being in contact with present-moment bodily sensation and experience, rather than only analyzing it.
Q: Is living in my head a failure of therapy?
A: No. The essay treats it as a strategy that may once have been essential and can be understood with compassion, not as a personal failure.
Q: What is protective dissociation?
A: It is a survival-based disconnection from bodily experience that can help during overwhelm but can become a familiar way of moving through life.
Q: How can I begin to reconnect without forcing it?
A: The essay suggests holding a hand on the sternum for a few slow breaths, not to find an answer but to let the body know you are willing to stay with it.
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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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