On shaking, surrender, and what happens when you let your body finish what your mind kept interrupting
The greatest percentage of healing I’ve ever experienced didn’t come from a therapist’s office. It didn’t come from a journal. It didn’t come from a 12-step program or a course or a podcast or a breakthrough conversation with a friend who finally said the thing I needed to hear. It didn’t come from understanding, which I’d been doing for years.
It came from shaking on my bedroom floor.
I realize how that sounds. Stay with me.
In the wake of my worst breakup, when I’d exhausted every cognitive tool I had, every framework, every way to intellectualise my way out of the pain that was sitting on my chest like a brick wall, someone suggested somatic and tremor release work. I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t care. I was desperate in the way that only comes after you’ve tried everything your mind can offer and your body is still screaming.
The first session, my legs started shaking. Not because I was cold. Not because I was scared. My body just started trembling, involuntarily, like something deep in my tissue had been waiting for permission and finally got it. Then my torso. Then my shoulders. My body moved in ways I hadn’t asked it to, releasing things I didn’t have words for, things that had been held so deep in my muscles and my bones that no amount of talking or writing or understanding could’ve reached them.
It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t Instagram-worthy. It wasn’t something I could’ve narrated in real time because narrating was exactly what I’d been doing instead of healing. This was something else entirely. This was my nervous system finally being allowed to do what I’d spent years preventing it from doing.
Finish.
Your body knows how to move through pain. It always has. Grief wants to be cried. Rage wants to move through the muscles. Fear wants to shake itself loose. The nervous system has a completion cycle for every overwhelming experience, a process that would, if we let it run, resolve the activation and return us to ground.
But we don’t let it run. We interrupt it. We override it. We tell ourselves to calm down, to be rational, to not overreact. We intellectualise it. We journal about it. We explain it to our therapist or recovery meetings in beautifully constructed sentences. We do everything except the one thing the body is actually asking for, which is to let the feeling move through us without managing it, without narrating it, without turning it into a lesson.
Every woman I know has been trained in this interruption. Not by trauma alone, but by a culture that’s taught us since childhood that our emotional responses are excessive, that our pain is dramatic, that our bodies’ signals are unreliable. You’re being too sensitive. You’re overreacting. You’re making a big deal out of nothing. These aren’t just dismissals. They’re instructions for leaving the body. They teach us, at the level of the nervous system, to distrust the very signals that are trying to heal us.
So when the body says let me shake this loose, we pour another glass of wine. When the body says let me cry this out, we tell ourselves to pull it together. When the body says let me finish, we reach for the phone, the distraction, the next framework that promises to explain why we feel this way, as if understanding the feeling and actually feeling it were the same thing.
They’re not. And the gap between them is where most of us get stuck.
What happened on my bedroom floor wasn’t a breakthrough in the way we usually mean that word. I didn’t suddenly understand something I hadn’t understood before. I stopped narrating and started surrendering. I let my body do the thing it had been trying to do while I was busy being the most self-aware person in the room.
The shaking wasn’t voluntary. That’s the part that mattered most. I didn’t decide to shake. My body decided. My legs trembled because they’d been holding tension I couldn’t name. My jaw released because it had been clenching around words I’d swallowed for years. Things moved through me that I couldn’t have accessed through talking, through writing, through any of the cognitive tools I’d spent years mastering. The body went somewhere the mind couldn’t follow, and what it found there was older and deeper than any narrative I’d constructed about my pain.
Afterwards, something was different. Not fixed. Not healed in the clean, finished way we want healing to look. But lighter. Like something heavy that had been sitting in my literal tissue for years had finally been allowed to leave.
I think about all the years I spent trying to think my way out of pain that lived in my body. All the patterns I named, all the journal entries where I mapped my wounds with surgical precision, all the learning that gave me language and recognition and told me I wasn’t crazy. None of it was wasted. It built the foundation. But the foundation wasn’t the whole house.
But the healing, the actual, felt, physical shift from carrying it to releasing it, that didn’t happen in my head. It happened on a floor, shaking like a leaf, looking nothing like the version of healing I’d been performing for years, trusting that my body knew something my mind hadn’t caught up to yet.
If you’ve done the therapy and the learning and the work and you’re still carrying something that no amount of insight seems to touch, maybe the next step isn’t more understanding. Maybe it’s less. Maybe it’s lying on the floor and letting your body do the thing it’s been asking to do since before you had words for any of this.
Your nervous system doesn’t need another explanation. It needs permission to finish.
Choose all,
xoxo Viktoria
P.S. Look into somatic experiencing, TRE (trauma and tension release exercises), or tremor release work. I recommend it to every woman I work with because it reaches the places that cognitive work alone can’t. Your body has been holding this for you. It’s time to let it put it down.
