What the Body Learns to Carry

Every pack on this trail is carrying more than what’s in it.

There's an experience of a kind of exhaustion that doesn't match what produced it. Nothing out of the ordinary happened outside the typical routine of what used to be manageable, but still something in a person gives out, way out of proportion to whatever set it off that day. The first instinct is almost always to go looking for what went wrong today, like today explains it, when today might have just been the day that happened to land on top of pressure that had been building for a lot longer than a day.

It tends to be hard to see this from the inside, because the alternative to pushing harder doesn't look like an alternative because it looks like giving up. Someone managing more than they were designed to hold, absorbing it, bracing against it, finding whatever reserve keeps the output steady, is doing something that genuinely works for a while.

The day gets through, but what doesn't get addressed is the real problem, which was never about effort. It tends to be about how much the underlying capacity could hold before something gave.

Nobody chooses to collapse. This is worth saying that directly, because afterward it usually gets told as a decision, a moment of weakness, a failure to keep managing what had been managed fine until now. That's not a reflection of what happened because what may happen by default when the other option, a deliberate release of pressure before things reaches that point, never gets used while there's still room to use it. The internal system and mind don't break because it got weaker but fractures because for a long time, height stood in for capacity, until nobody could tell the two apart anymore.

Hitting a real limit after enough pressure goes unaddressed isn't a new kind of malfunction because problem that had been quietly approaching for a while, finally arrived in the open. The disproportion, a small issue setting off a big response, is the giveaway.

There's an option tend to get overlooked which the first option is the choice that looks like giving something up rather than fixing anything: a deliberate, chosen release of pressure, on a schedule someone actually picks, before the only choices left are push harder or break. Work like this doesn't add capacity by force but focuses on clearing room in what's already there. Which, most of the time, is what was actually missing.

A disproportionate response is rarely about what triggered it. More often it's about what the body had already been carrying, quietly, for longer than anyone noticed. Room, not more effort, is usually what was actually needed.

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Nando Schlecht, LAC, is a trauma therapist in Tucson, AZ, specializing in complex trauma, dissociation, and nervous system regulation through DBR, Brainspotting, Ego State Therapy, and IFS-informed work. Sessions available in Tucson, AZ, and to adults across the state via online therapy Arizona.

Schedule a consultation: https://www.nandotherapy.com/therapy-contact