Compassionate Inquiry

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice. Sarah sits across from me, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, knuckles white against the soft fabric of her dress. For twenty minutes, she has been telling me about her successful career, her loving family, her beautiful home. Everything is perfect, she insists. Everything is exactly as it should be. Yet her body tells a different story. Her shoulders curve inward as if protecting something fragile within. Her breathing is shallow, confined to the upper reaches of her chest. Most telling of all, her eyes dart away whenever our conversation approaches anything remotely personal or vulnerable. This is the paradox I encounter daily in my practice as a trauma-informed therapist. People come seeking help for anxiety, depression, relationship difficulties, or chronic physical ailments, yet they often present their lives as puzzles with missing pieces rather than acknowledging the deeper wounds that shape their daily experience. They have learned, often from childhood, that their pain is not welcome in the world. They have been taught that strength means silence, that healing means forgetting, that moving forward means leaving the past behind. But the body remembers what the mind tries to forget. Pain that goes unacknowledged does not disappear; it transforms. It becomes the chronic headache that no medication can touch. It becomes the insomnia that persists despite perfect sleep hygiene. It becomes the relationship pattern that repeats despite our best intentions. It becomes the inexplicable anxiety that seems to have no source yet colors every moment of our waking life.