"I know that. I don't feel it."
That came out of my mouth, out loud, in front of strangers, in the middle of a prayer exercise at a leadership conference last week. It just came out, before I'd thought it through, before I could clean it up into something that sounded more put together.
They'd asked a simple question. Who am I? My head had the answer instantly. Daughter of Christ. I could've recited it without thinking.
And then, almost involuntarily: I don't feel it.
I sat there a little stunned at myself but the more I sat with it, the more I realized I wasn't actually saying anything new. I was just saying out loud what I hear constantly, in different words, from almost every woman I work with.
The gap nobody names
There's a massive difference between knowing something and living from it. You can know you're loved and still spend your whole day proving you deserve to be. You can know your value isn't tied to your output and still work like it absolutely is. That gap isn't a faith problem. It isn't a discipline problem, even though it feels exactly like one from the inside. It's a wound problem.
Until the wound gets touched, you can collect all the right information, all the right affirmations, all the right theology, and still end up exactly where I was in that prayer room. Knowing it. Not feeling it. Not even close.
For most of the women I sit with, this shows up in three very specific ways.
You're overworking but because some part of you still believes that stopping isn't safe, that your worth is still tied to your output, that rest has to be earned before it's allowed.
You're undercharging because part of you doesn't believe you're allowed to take up that much space, ask for that much, be worth that much out loud.
You're hiding your real self, in life and in business both because somewhere along the way, being fully seen got connected to being hurt. Your body decided smaller was safer. It made sense at the time.
None of that is a personality flaw. It's a nervous system that learned, faithfully and intelligently, how to survive something. The problem is, it's still running that program long after the danger is gone.
Why managing it doesn't work
This is where most coaching, most wellness content, most well-meaning advice stops short. It teaches you to regulate: Breathe through it. Journal it out. Build a better morning routine. And those things help, for a little while. But if the wound underneath was never touched, you're not healing. You're just getting better at managing a body that's still in survival.
That's the difference between regulation and healing. Regulation is what helps you function. Healing is what makes the function unnecessary.
I'm not interested in teaching women to perform stability. I'm interested in helping them become stable, so they stop needing to perform it at all.
That means going back to where the pattern actually started. Not to stay there. To finally understand why your body decided overworking, underearning, and hiding were the safest options available to you at the time. Once that gets seen clearly, and healed at the root, it stops quietly running your life from the background.
Your strengths formed in your struggles. Your wound isn't disqualifying you from the life you actually want. More often than not, it's pointing straight at it.
If reading this felt like I was describing something you've never said out loud, that's not a coincidence.
I have afree Telegram group where I go even deeper into this kind of work.
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