I Don’t Trust Kindness

Your nervous system speaks long before your mouth does. When no one helped you put the weight down, your body kept the receipt. Calm moments are how you start unloading it.

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I remember the first time an adult spoke soft to me
and my stomach dropped anyway.

No yelling.
No slammed cupboards.
No boots hitting the hallway like a warning.

Just a calm voice.
A normal sentence.
A face that didn’t change.

My body treated it like a setup.

I smiled like I understood,
then watched their hands
the way I used to watch my father’s eyes.

I sat through the kindness
with my shoulders ready to rise.

Later, alone,
I realized I had been holding my breath
during the safest part.

That’s the part no one sees.
Peace can sound like the door right before it opens.

“You learned to read danger before you could read words. That’s why your body tightens at calm voices. Peace still sounds suspicious.”

I used to think I was just “high strung.” Then I started paying attention to the pattern. My chest tightened when someone stayed calm. My jaw set when a conversation stayed gentle. I could handle chaos. Calm made me suspicious, because calm never lasted when I was a kid.

You can learn danger before language. You learn it in footsteps, silence, tone changes, the pause before a door closes. That becomes somatic awareness, even if you never call it that. Your nervous system builds a prediction machine, and it keeps running long after you leave the house that trained it.

A calm voice can feel like bait when you grew up around rupture. Your system expects the switch, so it stays in hyper-vigilance. You scan for the hidden cost. You rehearse what to say if it turns. You dissociate a little, just enough to stay functional. That’s your body doing what it learned to do.

Here’s the shift that helped me. I stopped arguing with my reactions, and I started collecting evidence. Evidence looks boring. A calm conversation that stays calm. A boundary that gets respected. A disagreement that ends in repair. Those repetitions teach containment better than any speech ever could.

If you want something practical today, try this once. When you hear a calm voice and your body tightens, notice your breath. Let it drop one notch lower, then feel your feet press the ground. Keep your eyes soft. Give your system ten seconds of proof that nothing is coming for you.

This whole thing gets easier when you stop judging the survival response and start understanding it. My daily text community started in silence, parked in a car, trying to turn loneliness into contact. The point was never perfection. The point was repetition, the kind that teaches a nervous system what safety looks like over time.

I’ve poured everything into this. Healing Thoughts II: 33 Poems and Meditations for Emotional Renewal is up for order now. These pages carry the deepest, sharpest work I’ve done, and I can’t wait for them to be in your hands.

When calm shows up, what do you brace for first?

If you’re peeling back wounds like this one,
the 365-Day Shadow Work Journals were made for moments like these.
They speak the same language you do. Truth before comfort.
Explore the journals →

Sprinkles of Healing Confetti:

🕊 New messages drop most weekdays. Quiet, but not gentle.
🔥 Paid subscribers keep the wounds lit long enough to be named.
📚 When the pain overflows, it becomes a book.
🧢 Healing wears well when stitched into something real.
☕ This newsletter runs on coffee and confession.
🖤 Shadow Thoughts carries the pieces too jagged for here.

If this hit a nerve, you’re not alone. Healing Thoughts is where I say the quiet parts loudly. If you’re not subscribed yet, now’s the time. It’s only getting rawer from here.

“You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down?” — Anne Carson, Glass