Your Body Remembers Being a Child

Hello ,

You became an adult.

But your body remembers being a child.

The longer I sit with people in therapy, the clearer this becomes. Most of us are children in adult bodies, doing our best to navigate a world that rarely feels safe, steady, or kind. We grow older. We take on responsibility. We build careers, manage households, show up for others, and hold ourselves together in ways that look impressive from the outside. But the nervous system does not age on a résumé. It does not care about titles or timelines. It remembers tone. It remembers unpredictability. It remembers what it felt like to be small in moments when the world was loud, demanding, or confusing.

So many adults I meet are not failing at life; they are surviving environments that never taught their bodies how to rest.

And the world does not make this easy.

It isn’t only personal hardship that weighs on us. It’s structural strain. It’s living under systems that ask us to be endlessly productive while quietly eroding our sense of safety. It’s capitalism forcing impossible choices between thriving and paying the bills. It’s job loss, financial instability, and the low-grade anxiety of never quite knowing how secure tomorrow really is.

As a Black Ghanaian immigrant woman, I can say this plainly: it is exhausting.

There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from constantly adapting to expectations, to systems, to environments that were not designed with your nervous system in mind. A tiredness that doesn’t go away with sleep. A tiredness that lives in the body.

Sometimes it feels as though the environment itself is dysregulated, reactive, impatient, harsh, and always demanding more. And when the larger system is dysregulated, our bodies absorb the impact. We carry it in our shoulders, our breath, our digestion, our sleep. We carry it into our relationships, our work, our sense of self.

No wonder so many people feel on edge, shut down, or overwhelmed.

No wonder joy can feel fleeting or fragile.

No wonder rest can feel unsafe.

So the question I keep returning to both personally and professionally is this:

How do you parent the child within when the world itself is dysregulated?

Not with force.

Not with more pressure.

Not with self-criticism for “not being healed enough.”

But with:

• gentleness, especially when you want to be harsh with yourself
• structure that creates safety, not rigidity
• kindness that is consistent, not conditional
• grounding when your mind is racing
• compassion for the parts of you that learned to survive early
• curiosity instead of judgment
• and yes, play, even when it feels unfamiliar or undeserved

Re-parenting yourself is not about fixing what’s broken. It’s about offering your nervous system what it may have missed: steadiness, reassurance, and permission to exist without performing.

It looks like pausing before pushing through.

It looks like asking, What does my body need right now?

It looks like letting rest count as productive.

It looks like choosing presence over perfection, again and again.

This work requires intentionality with the present moment, not because the future doesn’t matter, but because your body can only learn safety now. It asks you to slow down enough to listen inward, even when the world is telling you to hurry.

And it invites you to embody joy not as a performance, not as toxic positivity, but as a quiet, radical practice of choosing life alongside survival.

This work is not loud.

It is not urgent.

It is not optimized.

It is human.

A Gentle Grounding Practice (2 minutes)

Before you move on, I invite you to pause for a moment.

Place one hand on a part of your body that feels neutral or comforting. There is no right place.

Take a slow breath in through your nose.

Exhale through your mouth, as if you are gently fogging a mirror.

Now, without changing anything, notice:

• one thing you can see
• one thing you can hear
• one physical sensation you can feel right now

You don’t need to analyze it. Just notice.

If it feels right, you might silently say to yourself:

In this moment, I am safe enough.

Let that be enough for now.

Ways to Work With Me

• I am currently accepting new clients for EMDR and body-based therapy (Ohio & New York residents only). I am in-network with select insurance plans. You can schedule a complimentary 15-minute discovery call using this link.
• You can also begin this work gently on your own with the Coming Home to Yourself 30-Day Digital Journal, a guided space to slow your pace, reconnect with your body, and practice coming home to yourself one day at a time.

Wherever you are today, I hope you remember this:

You are not behind.

Your body has been protecting you.

And you are allowed to move through this world with more softness than it ever taught you to expect.

With care,

Dr. Alice