Our Body Never Lies
147. Our Body Never Lies
People often message me on Instagram (@sandykaufmann_lovecoach): “Sandy, I don’t understand, I didn’t have a difficult childhood, but I still feel a lot of insecurity in relationships.”
I always answer: “Your body isn’t lying to you; if you feel insecurity in a relationship, there’s a real, good reason for it.”
- Either there really is insecurity and you rightly need to change the situation
- Or it’s the story you’re telling yourself
- Or the situation reactivates an insecurity from the past, and that’s why you feel this insecurity
In this episode, I try to explain why your assessment of your past can differ from what your body actually perceived.
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How Does a Love Pattern Form at the Level of the Body?
It’s simply all your past experiences that overwhelmed you emotionally (because they were too much, too soon, too intense, too little, or too long) AND where you weren’t able to regulate yourself or receive outside help (particularly through co-regulation).
Explanation 1: Explicit Memory versus Implicit Memory
Your memories (what you can recall) are stored in your explicit memory, while what traumatized you is stored in implicit memory and in the body.
You may have few memories of what marked you, either because certain events were very impactful or because they happened very early (before age 3): in that case, they don’t reach explicit memory and stay stored in implicit memory and in the body. Your insecurity reactivates when you perceive something similar to what’s stored in your implicit memory — what I call your survival database.
Explanation 2: It’s Not Only Relational Experiences That Cause Your Emotional Insecurity
Other experiences, such as a difficult birth, an accident, the loss of a loved one, distressing medical procedures, or prolonged stress (physical or psychological), can also impact your love life.
You can listen to episode 37 on the impact of your birth on your love life and episode 38 on the impact of your view of death on your love life.
Explanation 3: Reality versus Perception
Your emotional reaction depends on your perception of the event. So you may have been marked by certain events in childhood through a child’s eyes, while an adult wouldn’t find that event as serious. A child doesn’t have a mature rational brain (it reaches a first stage around age 5, and this development continues into adulthood) to gain distance from what’s happening — which explains why, with adult eyes, you can see your childhood as happy and still have love patterns that negatively affect your love life.
Explanation 4: Every Time Your Feelings Were Denied
You’re more likely to develop a love pattern if, in childhood, your feelings were often denied when you had them (“stop crying”, “no, that doesn’t hurt”, “stop acting like a baby, it’s not that serious”), than if you went through many emotionally challenging events but felt that your parents welcomed your emotions and were there for you.
Explanation 5: Your Parents’ Intentions versus the State of Their Nervous System
You may have had parents who wanted the best for you and tried to say and do the best they could, but what you register and hold as true is the state of their nervous system, not what they told you.
For example, you may have had a depressed mother who told you that you could count on her, that she was solid and there for you — but what you actually perceived was the state of her nervous system, perhaps a dorsal state of exhaustion and hopelessness — and so you really couldn’t count on her.
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Explanation 6: Idealizing Your Childhood and Your Parents
A final explanation for this gap between your perception and what your nervous system actually recorded is idealizing your parents and your childhood, while minimizing what you experienced as traumatic or stressful. This is a common survival process that a child uses to survive in the environment they grow up in.
This can also happen when you tend to justify your parents’ actions based on their own history — for example, telling yourself they did the best they could, that they were good parents given their past, that they went through a lot of hardship while you were young, and that’s why they acted the way they did. Even if your parents’ suffering was real, it doesn’t excuse minimizing your own suffering and the impact they had on you. Both can be true at the same time.
Take What Your Body Is Telling You Seriously
In the end, what matters most is to take what your body is telling you seriously, and rather than questioning its insecurity, to help it free itself from what’s causing that insecurity, and to support it in moments of insecurity until it develops a wider window of tolerance.
And to do this, you don’t even need to remember your whole past or understand exactly what was recorded — this liberation happens at the level of the body.
This is what you do in the program Opening up to love.
Sandy Kaufmann
is a somatic therapist and coach, based in Switzerland. She is the author of two books published by Éditions Eyrolles and has accompanied more than 600 people. She is the creator of the Somatic Deprogramming method and hosts the podcast ” S’ouvrir à l’amour“, ranked in the French top 50 in the relationships category.
