A man told me once that he could close a seven-figure deal without breaking a sweat and couldn't tell his wife he'd had a hard day. He wasn't being dramatic.

Asking felt like handing someone a kind of power over her she'd spent years making sure nobody had.

A lot of people are told this is just how it is now. After the birth. After the surgery. After menopause. After enough years that nobody thinks to question it anymore.

It isn't just how it is. It's just rarely treated like something that can change.

Someone told me recently that her doctor said everything looked fine. The scar had healed. The follow-up was clean. And still, years later, she couldn't lie a certain way without something pulling, and a part of her body had simply stopped feeling like hers.

Somatic bodywork works with that directly. Not by relaxing the muscle for an hour. By working with the nervous system underneath the muscle, the part that decided, at some point, that staying braced was safer than letting go.