Sensitive Bodies are Hard to Exploit
They revolt against forty-hour workweeks. Get sick from processed food. Feel violence in what others call entertainment. Require genuine connection, not performance.
Honour seasons of rest, not constant productivity.
Your sensitivity isn't a disorder. It's your body's refusal to participate in collective dissociation.
As a somatic psychologist, I witness what happens when we pathologize accurate perception every single day.
Women arrive in my practice diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and chronic fatigue. But when we track sensation together and they learn to trust what their body knows, something else emerges.
Their bodies aren’t broken. They’re often precisely calibrated to feel what others have learned to numb.
Judith Herman discusses this concept in her book Trauma and Recovery, highlighting how women’s psychological distress is often pathologized, while the underlying conditions that contribute to that distress remain unexamined. What gets diagnosed as a disorder is often the accurate perception of ongoing harm, exploitation, violation or violence. Not just personal violence.
The same bodies that feel their own trauma feel the earth’s trauma. Because we are not separate from it.
When they tell you you’re too emotional, what they mean is: your emotions are inconvenient to capitalism.
When they say you’re too sensitive, what they mean is: your sensitivity makes them uncomfortable with their own numbness.
When they call you difficult, what they mean is: you won’t pretend dysfunction is normal.
When they diagnose your climate grief as depression, what they’re pathologizing is: your body’s refusal to pretend the earth isn’t dying.
Deb Dana’s polyvagal work shows us what’s really happening.
If you have benefited from my writing, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
That “anxiety”? It’s sometimes your nervous system accurately detecting the absence of genuine safety.
That exhaustion? It’s often your body saying no when your mouth can’t.
That “depression”? It’s dorsal vagal shutdown when you see the forests burning but can’t fight the fire.
Sensitive bodies feel the connection between all living things. Which often makes it impossible to be well in a world that’s unwell.
This is why the therapeutic work I support women with isn’t about them becoming less sensitive. Instead, it’s about what Deb Dana calls “befriending your nervous system.”
Learning that your sensitivity isn’t a flaw, it’s intelligence. That your body knows which relationships are safe and which slowly poison you. That your exhaustion in toxic environments is wisdom, not weakness. That your climate anxiety is clarity. That your body’s refusal to adapt to violation, exploitation or violence is evolution trying to save itself.
Your nervous system isn’t broken because it registers the breaking of the world. Your body isn’t disordered because it won’t conform to a disordered society.
Your sensitivity isn’t pathology. It’s a prophecy. It’s the earth speaking through the only bodies and nervous systems still listening.
This is why sensitive women have always been dangerous.
We leave jobs that demand we override our needs. We end relationships that require us to abandon ourselves. We can’t sustain friendships built on performative happiness. We feel the pesticides in our wombs. The microplastics in our bloodstream. The extinction in our bones. We can’t unfeel what we know. We can’t unknow what our bodies perceive. A sensitive nervous system is the Earth’s feedback system.
And they’ve spent centuries trying to silence it.
The question was never how to become less sensitive.
This is SO profoundly validating. Having had chronic illness for over 20 years, I TRULY appreciate the reminder that my body is attuned and wise to refuse to accept the current global reality! Thank you 🙏 so deeply from my heart for all you share
This is a really beautiful perspective. I am in so much pain from chronic illness and this made me feel more peaceful