Why Your Body Knew Before You Did
Why Your Body Knew Before You Did
It isn't a hunch, and it isn't magic. It's a signal you were trained to talk yourself out of — long before anyone taught you how to trust it again.
By Janell Rae
She sat across from me, hands folded neatly in her lap, and told me she was fine.
I've learned to listen past that word more than to it. Her voice was even. Her sentences made sense. If I'd been going only by what she said, I would have believed her. But her field told a different story — chest pulled in tight, a heaviness sitting just under the sternum, everything about her contracted, guarded, holding its breath. Somewhere underneath the composure, something in her was not fine at all.
I named what I was sensing, gently — the tightness, the bracing, the sense that she'd been carrying something alone for a long time.
She burst into tears.
Her body had been telling the truth the entire session. It just hadn't found anyone yet who was listening on the right channel.
What is wrong with me?
That's the question underneath almost every version of this moment I've sat with, in thirty years of doing this work. And it's the wrong question. Long before we have words for what's off, the body already knows. It knew before the diagnosis, before the breakup, before we admitted the job wasn't working. The information was there the whole time — expansion or contraction, warmth or tightness, calm or agitation, a quiet yes or an unmistakable no.
Nothing was wrong with her signal. Something was drowning it out.
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