09/03/2026
When we don’t feel safety in belonging, it’s hard for the nervous system to truly allow for yielding into a wider support. You can think of this physiologically and metaphorically. The first need we have when we come into this world as infants is to be received, welcomed, and held.
Yielding is the first basic developmental movement pattern.
Before effectively pushing, reaching, grasping, or satiating - the foundation of those efforts must come from a fully embodied trust in the safety to yield.
When that doesn't occur, our efforts are fragmented and often filled with tension or disembodied collapse.
When basic safety and belonging don’t fully greet us as infants, the developing autonomic nervous system is the first line of defense. We either yield into the available support, or we physically and psychologically contract.
The basic, unconscious question “Am I welcome here?”, and primal protection that develops when we are not welcome remains embodied at the foundation of the nervous system as the brain, lived experience, and protective strategies become more complex as a person develops.
This primal protection is embodied as an implicit memory – not a memory that we explicitly remember the details of, but more of a fragmented sensory experience of emptiness, loneliness, and fear that’s often clouded by symptoms - mental, emotional, and physical.
When we don’t feel welcome, we pull away from the present experience. We pull away from the body. Dissociation and the flight response become our good friends in the moment of needing to protect ourselves from an unwelcoming environment, yet hold us back later in life when we desire more presence, connection, and self-trust.
This is why having a marginalized identity and/or developmental trauma requires not just internal individual work, but collective social justice, and community healing.
