01/27/2026
Ailie Jolie expresses something I wrestle with as someone people turn to for help re-regulating and calming down. Yes, I want you to “feel better.” But feeling safe in a dangerous situation isn’t helpful. Nor is being numb or oblivious.
Maybe the best thing I can help you do is to find a pocket of breathing room so you can rest, get a good look at what’s going on, and choose a different path. Or decide to re-up on the path you are on, consciously and with renewed energy and purpose.
"You cannot breathe your way out of patriarchy. You cannot cold plunge your way out of structural oppression. You cannot meditate, journal, or yoga your way out of conditions that were designed to dysregulate you.
This is not to say that nervous system regulation tools aren't valuable. They are. I use them. I teach them. I believe in the body's capacity to settle, to find ground, to return to itself.
But when regulation tools are offered as the solution to chronic activation without naming the cause of that activation, they become a form of gaslighting. They locate the problem in your body rather than in the conditions your body is responding to.
The message becomes: if you're still anxious, you haven't tried hard enough. If you're still activated, you haven't found the right technique. If you're still struggling, the failure is yours.
But what if your nervous system isn't broken? What if it's accurate?
What if your chronic activation is a correct response to living in a world where your body has never been fully safe? Where your rights can be legislated away? Where your value has been tied to your appearance, your compliance, your ability to serve? Where violence against women is endemic and normalized. Where the mental load is invisible and unpaid and never ending?
You're not dysregulated because you're doing something wrong. You're dysregulated because your body is reading the environment correctly.
This is the problem with nervous system work that doesn't include political analysis. It pathologizes accurate perception. It tells you to calm down when calm would actually be a form of denial. It trains you to regulate your way into tolerating conditions that should not be tolerated.
What if regulation isn't always the goal?
What if sometimes the goal is testimony?
What if your body's activation is not a problem to be solved but a truth to be witnessed? What if the shaking, the racing heart, the inability to settle is your body saying: this is not okay. This was never okay.
And I refuse to pretend it is.
There's a reason oppressed peoples have always used the body as a site of protest. The body that refuses to be calm is a body that refuses to comply. The body that stays activated is a body that is telling the truth about what it has survived.
I'm not saying don't regulate. I'm saying regulate with your eyes open. Know what you're regulating for. Notice if your regulation practice is helping you show up more fully for your life, or if it's helping you tolerate conditions you'd be better off changing or leaving.
There's a difference between settling your nervous system so you can be present and settling your nervous system so you can continue to be extracted from.
One is healing. The other is sophisticated dissociation.
Your body knows things. It knows what's safe and what isn't. It knows what's sustainable and what's depleting. It knows when you're in the wrong relationship, the wrong job, the wrong room.
The question is not how do I make my body stop reacting. The question is what is my body trying to tell me that I haven't been willing to hear.
Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is not calm down. Sometimes the most radical thing is to let your body speak. To let it be a witness. To refuse to regulate yourself into compliance with conditions that are slowly killing you.
Although you cannot breathe your way out of patriarchy, you can listen to the body that has been registering its impact all along."
—Ailey Jolie
Art by Arna Baartz
