When Your Body Braces Before Your Mind Knows Why
By Terri Crosby
Have you ever noticed your body tighten around a conversation that hasn’t even started yet? You’re bracing for it, right?
Maybe you didn’t grow up with shouters, but you did grow up with tension. Shouters are big and loud, but tension is something you feel first. That’s how most of us first learn about bracing. We feel it.
I arrived on this beautiful earth as part of a family of eight on a farm in Iowa. Summers were hot and winters cold. After size-able December storms, we woke to a white-hushed landscape, the fierce wind having sculpted snowdrifts that often rose to the eaves of barns or sheds. Our simple home was heated with a wood stove. We raised our own food and cooked at home. There was no TV until the year I graduated from high school.
Family talk centered around events in our Quaker community, farm work and chores, or school activities. We didn’t speak about emotional matters, at least not much. Nobody knew how. There was plenty of “unsaid.”
In my family, even when things appeared friendly and civil on the surface, tension often lingered underneath. The undercurrent of the unsaid had a profound effect on me. I often wondered whether others could hear unspoken words in the room too, or feel them, but I never asked.
What Is Bracing?
As I headed to college, I became more aware of that undercurrent, especially in the moment before a hard conversation. I noticed it in my body first, when my shoulders lifted like shields. Or when my breath paused mid-inhale. When something tightened in me at the doorway of another person’s truth, or my own.
This is bracing. It’s not a weakness or a strength. It’s more like an instinct or a survival response.
It’s our nervous system saying, “I remember what happened last time, and I will protect you from ever feeling that way again.”
We brace when we expect criticism or misunderstanding. When we’re afraid our truth will create distance. When we expect not to be heard or understood — we’ve been shut down before and don’t trust this moment will be any different.
We brace when we feel unsafe being honest. When we fear that what we’re about to hear will confirm something painful — I’m wrong, I’m too much, I’m not enough — and we prepare to defend ourselves all over again.
But there’s a cost. When we brace, we lose access to the very qualities and skills that could help us, such as our curiosity, creativity, and the ability to truly listen. In effect, a conversation is lost before it begins.
Still Bracing. Far From Home.
In my early twenties, even though I had left the farm and my external reality had changed, my old identity kept showing up and steering me.
Deep down, I was still that farm girl trying to stay loyal to her roots: Don’t say it. Stay in your lane. Work harder. Keep a safe distance from emotionally honest conversations.
I was also bracing when others told me their truths.
Being accepted as a head resident for my dorm at Iowa State University brought inevitable tough conversations with residents and management. I didn’t handle them well. I was fired.
Then I married my college sweetheart, only to discover he wouldn’t talk about intimacy or closeness. Our life together probably looked fine to most people, but at home it was filled with awkward eggshell moments. So much unsaid. So much bracing. After four years, we divorced. He had been having affairs.
During those years, I worked in a large preschool serving two hundred low-income children in Kansas City, run by a Catholic nun who was tender on the inside and tough on the outside. To avoid possible criticism from her or the other teachers, I often kept my thoughts to myself, drifting toward fitting in rather than trusting my own sense of what was right. Even though she appointed me vice principal, I didn’t feel at home with myself or my ability to lead.
Each experience was its own kind of lesson, though I couldn’t always see that at the time.
Does Your Old Identity Still Run the Show?
At some point, I realized I needed to heal what had been dealt to me early on, what I’d learned through experience or inherited without knowing it. My unconscious loyalty to my past was costing me, and I felt it.
Maybe you have an old identity that keeps you from your full expression, too. Maybe it drains your energy, taxes your resources, and holds you back from being the star-bright kind of person you really are.
At a deeply subconscious level, our old identities attract people and situations that match. We gravitate toward relationships with patterns familiar to us, even when those patterns no longer serve us. Familiarity can feel like home, even when we can’t hear our own inner wisdom or receive wisdom from someone else.
Bracing is one of those protective reactions we learned long ago that try to protect us years later, whether we need them or not.
But once we notice the brace, something shifts. We gain choice.
Instead of powering through on automatic, we can take a breath, soften, and get present. We can ask: Shall I resort to my usual defenses? Or can I calm myself enough to connect with my own wisdom?
Sometimes that pause tells us we need more time before we’re ready for a conversation. That’s okay. Sometimes it tells us it’s time to leave a relationship. That’s okay, too. Other times, we feel a prompt to seek outside help rather than continuing to struggle in circles.
When the parts of us that have been hurt, overlooked, or scared finally feel seen and heard, they begin to calm down. They no longer need to protect us in panicked or outdated ways. Little by little, they can soften and give the reins to our wiser adult self.
That shift changes how you move through your days, how you relate to others, and how much of your true self you’re able to bring forward.
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If any of this resonates, you don’t have to figure it out alone. The brace that protected you once can be gently, kindly unlearned. And what comes after that — more ease, more honesty, more of your true self in the room — is worth every bit of the work.
Client Testimonial:
My sessions with Terri have been transformative. What she does feels similar to therapy, but so very unique and special at the same time. She integrates her intuitive wisdom with learnings and modalities she has collected over her lifetime to hold space for me in a way that no therapist or coach ever has. She understands both my words and my energy and enters a playful and exploratory accountability when there’s a dissonance. She allows me to examine issues in a way that is both compassionate and powerful that leaves me feeling more in tune with my true self. I cannot recommend her highly enough. ~Rachel, from North Carolina |
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