Written by Ada Garza, a Somatic Practitioner, Alchemical Breathwork Facilitator, and founder of Love. Alchemy. Life. Ada works with individuals navigating life and identity transitions, helping them regulate their nervous system, build self-trust, and access greater clarity, inner power, and embodied self-leadership through a blend of somatic healing, breathwork, and nervous system regulation practices.
For most of my adult life, I was very good at being who I was asked to be.
In both of my marriages, I adopted a version of myself that fit what my partner needed. Not dishonestly. Not resentfully, at least not at first. I took on the role because it seemed to be what the relationship called for. Because fitting in felt like love. Because making myself smaller felt like contribution.
And for a while, I was very good at it.
But the body keeps its own record.
Over time, quietly, persistently, a tightness began settling inside my chest. It showed up most when I was around people who weren’t aligned with who I actually was, when I was asked to show up in ways that contradicted my values, my instincts, my sense of what was true. When I smiled through situations that forced every part of me to want to leave.
I didn’t have language for it yet.
I just knew that something didn’t feel right.
And I knew that I had started to feel like a stranger in my own life.
The Role We Didn’t Choose
There is a concept in somatic practice that Richard Strozzi-Heckler articulates in his book The Anatomy of Change. He describes how living in fear of what we might feel leads us to adopt roles based on ideas of who we should be, rather than felt experience of who we actually are.
He calls people who live this way orphans to themselves.
That phrase stopped me in my tracks when I read it.
Because most of us learn early what version of ourselves is acceptable. What traits are rewarded. What emotions are tolerated. What roles earn love, safety, and belonging.
And so we build ourselves accordingly.
The accommodating wife. The good daughter. The strong professional. The one who never asks for too much. The one who holds everything together.
We inhabit these roles so thoroughly, for so long, that we mistake them for identity.
But they are not identity.
They are armor.
And underneath the armor, the actual self is still there, waiting, often exhausted, to be acknowledged.
What the Body Knows
Here is what somatic research consistently shows: the body keeps a record of everything the mind learns to ignore.
Every time we override a genuine feeling to maintain the performance, every time we say yes when we mean no, stay silent when we need to speak, keep going when the body is asking us to stop, the nervous system stores that override as tension, tightness, disconnection, or chronic low-grade anxiety.
Over time, this accumulates.
Not always as a dramatic breakdown, though sometimes that too, but as a quiet but persistent sense that something is missing. That the life we are living, however functional it looks from the outside, does not quite fit.
Research in interpersonal neurobiology shows that chronic disconnection from our felt sense, our body’s direct experience of emotion and sensation, actively limits our capacity for authentic decision-making, genuine connection, and the kind of purposeful action that comes from being authentically aligned with who we are.
The performance is exhausting because it requires constant vigilance, managing the gap between who we are and who we pretend to be.
The Moment I Ceased Pretending
It was my second marriage that finally brought everything into focus.
By then I had begun paying attention to my body in a way I never had before. Somatic work had given me a language for what I had always felt but never been able to name. And what my body was telling me, clearly, repeatedly, without apology, was that the relationship had run its course.
Not in anger. Not in blame.
Just the quiet, undeniable truth that both of us had stopped trying to find our way back to each other.
Admitting that, really admitting it, in the body before the mind caught up, was one of the most frightening and most liberating moments of my life.
Because once I released that truth through my body, something astonishing happened.
The words came.
Not the rehearsed words. Not the managed, careful, conflict-avoiding words I had invested years perfecting.
The real ones.
I was able to sit with my partner and have the most honest conversation we had ever had. To name what was true without cruelty. To acknowledge what had ended without pretending it hadn’t. To let the relationship close with the dignity it deserved.
That conversation, that moment of speaking from a regulated, embodied, truthful place, was the beginning of the life I am living now.
Our bodies are always talking to us.
We have to learn to listen.
Coming Home
Embodiment, the practice of returning to the body and living from that connection rather than around it, is not a wellness trend.
It is the difference between a performed life and a lived one.
And it is available to every woman who has spent years being exceptional at being who she thought she needed to be and is quietly, persistently wondering what it might feel like to be who she actually is.
The path back is not dramatic. It does not require dismantling everything overnight.
It begins with something much simpler:
Learning to feel what is actually happening in your body without immediately trying to fix, suppress, or rationalize it away.
Asking, in any given moment: Does this feel true? Or does this feel performed?
Noticing where tension lives. Where the breath goes shallow. Where the body contracts or expands in response to a situation, a relationship, a decision.
These are not small observations.
They are the beginning of a return to yourself.
The tightness in your chest is not a malfunction.
It is a message.
And when you finally learn to hear it, really hear it, you will find that it has been trying to lead you home all along.
The performance was never the point.
You were.
Ada Garza is a Somatic Healing Practitioner, Alchemical Breathwork Facilitator, and HeartMath Certified Practitioner. She supports women navigating life’s most meaningful transitions, helping them return to their bodies, trust what they feel, and build a life rooted in presence rather than performance. Follow her at @lovealchemylife on Instagram.
