The Little Girl Who Learned to Fawn Taught Me Everything About Embodiment
*content warning: this post discussed child abuse
I was in an abusive relationship.
I'm not sharing the details — not for secrecy, but because my body deserves peace. What I will share is what it taught me. Because it taught me something I genuinely don't think I could have learned any other way.
It taught me how to be in my body.
Not the beautiful embodied version of that. The hard version. The version where your body is screaming something your mind is trying to rationalise and you don't have the language for any of it.
I would tense the moment he entered the room. Flinch when he touched me. And almost every time I left his house, I would cry. Not from sadness. From relief. Pure, physical relief that I had made it through another night in a space where nothing in me felt safe.
My body knew. She had always known. I just hadn't learned to trust her yet.
The First Abandonment
I didn't learn to abandon my body in that relationship. I learned it much earlier than that.
Being abused as a child — as a little girl — taught me to freeze, to fawn, to tolerate what felt wrong and call it normal. To make myself smaller. To override the alarm bells because ringing them out loud wasn't safe. My nervous system learned early that the most reliable way to survive was to disconnect from what she was feeling and just get through it.
So by the time I was in that adult relationship, I had a lifetime of practice at overriding my signals. At staying when every nerve ending was telling me to run. At explaining away the bracing and the flinching and the crying in the car as something else. Something manageable. Something I was probably making too big a deal of.
That little girl who learned to fawn to stay safe — she was still in the driver's seat. Still doing the only thing she knew how to do.
Embodiment work cracked that open.
What Coming Home to the Body Actually Looks Like
The first time I did a movement practice with a somatic coach — properly in my body, not floating above it the way guided meditation had always let me do — I remember being almost shocked by how much information was just there. Waiting.
The weight of my feet. The tension across my chest. The specific quality of the feeling in my stomach. My body wasn't broken. She wasn't overreacting. She had been filing detailed, accurate reports for years and I had been somewhere else, not reading them.
This is the thing nobody tells you about embodiment work before you start: it isn't immediately pleasurable. It isn't soft and golden and flowing. The first thing you feel when you come back into a body you've been abandoning is everything she's been holding without you. All of it. Exactly as it is.
That's not a sign you're doing it wrong. That's the work.
The Moment That Changed Everything
Some time into my embodiment journey, I saw him. My ex. And before my mind had even consciously registered who it was, my body went into full panic. Shaking. Heat flooding through me. My chest closing. The edges of a panic attack arriving faster than I could think.
Before this work, I would have white-knuckled through it, dissociated as fast as possible, and pushed it way down to numb the feelings. Something to manage. Something to move past. Something to be quietly embarrassed about later.
Instead, I could feel each sensation distinctly. The shaking in my legs. The heat in my face. The way my breath had gone shallow and fast. And underneath all of it, I recognised what my body was doing. She was going into a freeze response. A completely rational response to genuine historical threat.
My body was telling me: I remember this. I am trying to protect you.
That's the moment I understood what this work actually is. Not the pleasure and the flow states and feeling gloriously alive in your skin — though that comes, and it's real, and it's worth every bit of it. It's the much less glamorous thing underneath. The signals your nervous system has been running in the background don't just disappear when you do embodiment work. They become legible. You feel them fully. You learn to move the energy, to create new messaging underneath the old one, to remind your body repeatedly: we are safe now. We are safe now.
Coming back into your body doesn't mean everything starts feeling good. It means everything starts feeling true.
What Safety Actually Feels Like
I still get that response sometimes, more than I'd like to admit. My body still sounds the alarm when certain things cross a particular threshold. And I don't want that to stop. That response is protection. That's love, in the most animalistic sense of the word. I just know what it is now. I know how to be with it instead of running from it. And I know — because I've felt it — what the opposite feels like too.
Safe masculine energy has a particular quality I couldn't have named before any of this. Presence without pressure. Strength that softens me rather than puts me on guard. Something anchored and clear that makes my nervous system exhale instead of brace. When I'm in it, my body hums. I melt. I bloom.
I know that now because I know what the opposite feels like in my body. Because I spent time in the opposite and learned, the hard way, to stop talking myself out of what I was feeling.
This is what embodiment gave me. Not a perfect, healed nervous system that never gets triggered. Not some arrival point where the past stops mattering. It gave me the ability to feel what is actually happening in my body in real time — and to trust it. To know the difference between bracing and blooming. Between surviving and safe.
That little girl who learned to fawn to stay safe — she was doing the only thing available to her. She was protecting us the best way she knew how. But she doesn't have to run the show anymore. Because now I can feel when we're safe. And I can feel when we're not.
She has always been telling you the truth.
The work is learning to believe her.
I will never abandon her again.
If this resonated with you, lets unpack this together in 1:1 Coaching — coming home to your body, learning to read her signals, and trusting what she's been trying to tell you all along.
