The Fist You Did Not Know You Were Making
You know that moment when you suddenly notice your own hands on the steering wheel, white knuckles wrapped around it like you are merging onto the highway in a blizzard, when in reality you are three minutes from Aldi with a toddler singing in the backseat? Your shoulders are at your ears, your jaw is locked, and nobody told your body to do any of that.
Here is the question nobody thinks to ask: if your hands, your jaw, and your shoulders were bracing without your permission, what do you think your pelvic floor has been doing all this time?
That question sits at the center of my conversation with Dr. Trina Winner, a pelvic physical therapist who is also a doula, a women's health functional nutrition coach, and a lactation counselor, and her answer will change the way you see almost every symptom you have been told to just live with.
Why the Pain Shows Up at Eight Months, Not Eight Weeks
A listener asked Trina about severe tailbone and low back pain that appeared eight months postpartum, pain so limiting that she could not stand at the stove or sit through dinner for more than five minutes. Like most women in that situation, she was confused, since it seemed obvious that if birth caused the problem, the problem should have shown up right after the birth.
What Trina explained is that early postpartum is survival mode, and your body knows it. There is a newborn who needs you fed, awake, and functional, so your body compensates by borrowing from other muscles, quieting its own signals, and letting you dissociate just enough to get through the nights. Your body carries the tab so you can carry the baby.
Then life settles into a routine, your system finally exhales, and the bill arrives. This is not your body betraying you. This is your body doing exactly what I am always telling you it does, remembering what your mind minimized, and choosing to speak up only once it decided you were finally safe enough to hear it.
Stop Assuming Weak. Start Asking Why It Is Gripping.
When women leak, hurt during intimacy, or feel that heaviness low in the pelvis, the standard advice is kegels, as if the only possible problem were weakness. What Trina sees constantly in her practice is the opposite: a pelvic floor stuck in high activation, so busy holding on that it has forgotten how to do anything else.
She describes a healthy pelvic floor like a trampoline, which only works because the fabric can both stretch down and spring back. If you pulled that fabric so tight it could not give at all, it would stop being a trampoline and start being a wall, and the kids bouncing on it would just hit the surface and cry.
A pelvic floor can get pulled that tight through chronic stress, through years of intense training, or through trauma, whether that trauma was a fall on your tailbone at nine years old, a birth that left you shaking, or something done to you that you have never said out loud. Trina and I talked about my own CrossFit years, and how all of that bracing during pregnancy likely contributed to pelvic tension that may have affected my baby's position. I was doing everything the strong-mom world told me to do, while my body was quietly learning that it was never allowed to let go.
If that sounds familiar, it should, since this is the same pattern I teach about the nervous system showing up in muscle. A body that learned it must hold everything together will hold everything together, including the one set of muscles that has to know how to soften for birth, for intimacy, and for basic daily function. Learning to let go down there is not a cute wellness tip. For a lot of women it is the whole ballgame.
What a Real Assessment Should Look Like
If a provider has ever dismissed you, you are not imagining it. One of our listeners was waved off by her own OB when she asked for a pelvic floor referral during pregnancy, and Trina was honest that this happens more than it should, since not all pelvic PT is created equal.
So here is what to look for. A good first visit runs 75 to 90 minutes and is spent mostly on your history: your symptoms, your births, your nutrition, your stress, your story. It involves breath work, since your breath and your pelvic floor move together like two ends of the same rope, and it never assumes an internal exam on day one, since consent has to come first, especially for a woman carrying trauma. If a provider wants to skip your story and go straight to a protocol, keep looking. You are not a checklist. You are a woman with a history, and your body has been keeping the records.
When the Cold Plunge Becomes a Golden Calf
We also went somewhere I did not expect a physical therapist to go, which is the entire biohacking world. Cold plunges, saunas, intermittent fasting, the endless optimization of a body that gets treated like a truck engine.
Trina's caution was simple and it was spiritual. These practices can become idols, one more thing to serve, one more system whispering that if you tweak enough variables you will finally feel safe in your own skin. That is not stewardship. That is a woman trying to earn from a protocol what she was always meant to receive from God.
There is a practical problem hiding underneath the spiritual one, too. Most of the research behind these trends was done on men or on post-menopausal women, which means almost none of it accounts for a cycling woman in her fertile years, whose hormones shift week to week and whose nervous system reads a fasted morning very differently than her husband's does. Skipping breakfast spikes cortisol in women like us, so the same protocol that makes him feel unstoppable leaves you shaky, snappy, and wondering what is wrong with your discipline. Nothing is wrong with your discipline. The instructions were written for a different body.
Eat Breakfast Like It Is Your Job
What actually helps turns out to be boring, beautiful consistency. Trina's advice was the opposite of a protocol: eat a real breakfast with protein, fat, and fiber, stabilize your blood sugar instead of white-knuckling until noon, skip the keto and carnivore extremes that strip out the fiber your body needs to clear old hormones, and drink the extra glass of water.
She put it in a way I loved, which is to add the good and let it crowd out the rest. You do not need an all-or-nothing overhaul. You need eggs and sourdough and butter from the farm down the road, eaten before the chaos starts, more days than not. Your body is not a machine to be hacked. It is a garden to be tended, and gardens do not respond to hacks. They respond to faithfulness.
Your Body Is Speaking. This Is What Listening Looks Like.
If you take one thing from this episode, take this. The tailbone pain, the leaking, the tension you just noticed while reading this paragraph, none of it means your body is broken. It means your body is honest. It adapted faithfully to everything you have lived through, and now it is asking you to come find out why it has been holding on so tight.
Sometimes listening means booking with a pelvic physical therapist who will do an internal assessment and find the root, and if that is you, go, since it is never too late for what Trina calls a tune-up, whether you are eight months or eight years postpartum.
Sometimes, though, the grip in your body is guarding a wound that no amount of physical therapy will reach on its own, since the body will not fully let go of what the soul still believes it needs protection from. That is the work I do, mind, body, and soul together, with Jesus at the center of it, because He is the healer and everything else is support staff.
Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Trina Winner here
If you are just getting started, grab the free audio training at https://www.loretowellness.com/free-audio-training, and come join the free Telegram community at https://www.loretowellness.com/telegram where I teach this every week.
Comments