The Six Words That Let Something Go

I've been sitting with something for about five years.

I haven't said it out loud much. It's the kind of thing that lives in the back of your mind, quiet but persistent — the kind you manage and push down and think you've made peace with, and then it surfaces again.

I'm sharing it now not because it's resolved, but because the process of working with it is exactly what this work is about.

Someone close to me told me, more than once, that I lumber when I walk.

I'm a little embarrassed to write that. Part of me wonders if you'll be watching for it now. But I'm going to leave it plain, because plain is how it landed.

It hurt.

I told a friend. And she said, quietly: "Can I hold that for you?"

I sat with that question for a moment. And then I did something I don't always do — I let myself actually imagine it. What would I be handing over?

What came was an image: an old wood frame structure with rusty nails at each corner. It sat around my core, those nails pressing in at my shoulders and my hips, trying to hold everything in place. There was an X across the middle, bracing it, keeping it from falling apart.

I recognized that wood immediately. It was from the property I grew up on — the old stall and chute where cows had lived, where a Shetland pony had once escaped and roamed the neighborhood. Old wood. Weathered. Trying its best to hold something together long after the structure had served its purpose.

I cried.

Not from sadness exactly. From the tenderness of being offered something I didn't know I needed. Someone willing to take the rusty frame, the old wood, the thing I'd been holding in place at my own shoulders and hips — and carry it out of the room.

I told her: don't hold onto it. Just let it go.

She said she would.

And something in me — something that had been braced for a long time — finally relaxed.

If you let yourself imagine what you've been holding — what would it look like? What shape would it take?

The body needs a witness, not a counter-argument.

The mind wants to argue with a shame comment. To counter it, reframe it, build a case for why it isn't true. But the body doesn't need a counter-argument. It needs somewhere to put the old wood frame down. This is what Focusing does — it takes the things we carry and lets them speak in images and metaphors instead of logic and language. And in that language, something can finally move.

Connection is one of the most powerful nervous system healers there is.

Not connection as performance — not showing up bright and fine and holding it together. The real kind. The kind where you say the embarrassing thing and someone offers to hold it and you let them. One question from a friend on the phone. And your nervous system, in the presence of that safety, finally exhales.

Co-regulation doesn't require a formal practice.

Sometimes it's simply this: someone who stays steady while you say the hard thing. Your nervous system reads that safety and responds to it. Not because you analyzed or processed or reframed — but because you were met. That's co-regulation. And it is one of the most direct routes to healing the body has.

This is the work. Vulnerable. Patient. Worth it.

If you've been carrying something alone that needs somewhere to go — this is exactly what I do in 1:1 sessions. I'd love to sit with you in it.

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