The Year the Floor Disappeared

I was newly married when both of my parents went to prison.

Our wedding day. Little did we know how soon everything would fall apart.

And my new in-laws were going through their own struggles and lost everything. My husband and I went from having two amazing career options, following in both of our families' legacies, to having nothing.

This was not how it was supposed to go.

I'm not going to tell you their stories — those are theirs, not mine. What I'll tell you is mine.

I was young. I was supposed to be in the happiest chapter of my life. And instead, I was carrying something I couldn't say out loud in most rooms I walked into, because the moment I did, I could feel people rearrange me in their heads.

It wasn't that people were cruel. Most of them weren't. It was much more subtle than that. It was the

pause before they answered. It was watching someone's face while they tried to figure out what to do with what I had just told them. The conversation would shift, and it never quite shifted back.

And once you have watched that happen a few times, you stop offering the information. You get very good at general answers. You learn how to answer questions about your family in a way that isn't a lie, but also doesn't actually tell anyone anything.

Visiting my father in prison. I took 2 month old baby with my mom and brother on a 20 hour car ride so my dad could meet his new grandson.

So, I didn't say it. For a long time.

I wouldn't have called it shame back then. I don't think I would have called it anything. If you had asked me, I would have told you I was just being private. That it wasn't anyone's business.

But private is a decision you make once. This was something I was doing in every room, all day, without ever noticing I was doing it.

That was the belief I let myself have, because it felt safer than the alternative. What I couldn't see was the pattern it was quietly building — withholding, and secrecy.

What that taught me — and I mean taught me in my body, not in my head — is what unspoken things do to a person. It isn't loud. It's a low hum, always there. It shows up as a tight jaw and shallow breathing and a habit of scanning every room to figure out how much of yourself is safe to show.

And underneath the hum was something I didn't find until years later. Somewhere in all of it, I had quietly decided that something was wrong with me. Not that something was wrong with the situation, which obviously it was, but that something was wrong with me.

That part I would call shame. But it never announced itself. It just sat there and colored everything, and it took me a very long time to go looking for it.

This is why the first thing I do in a session is build safety. I don't do it because it's a nice thing to do. I do it because nothing releases in a body that is still bracing. You can have all the training and all the modalities in the world, but if the person in front of you doesn't feel safe, nothing is going to move.

My clients tell me things in sessions they haven't told anyone. I don't think that's because I'm special. I think it's because I've been the person with the thing she can't say, and something in people recognizes that I'm not going to flinch, or judge.

Nothing about that season went the way it was supposed to. We rebuilt from the ground up. It took years, and it looked nothing like the plan.

I don't think I'd be any good at this work without it. That's not me making it beautiful — some of it was just hard. But the reason I can sit across from you while you say the thing you've never said out loud is that I know exactly what it costs to hold it.

So, if you are carrying something you can't say out loud, I want to be clear: I'm not asking you to say it. Not to me, not to anyone, not until you want to.

But your body is carrying it too. And here is what I have found, in myself and in my clients: the body can start to put it down long before you ever find the words for it.

That is the part I'd love to help you with.