When Tolerance is a Bad Thing

I spent most of my life in a high-functioning freeze response before I found my way to trauma healing. I self-propelled in constant motion, over-scheduling and then gaslighting myself with the insistence that I preferred it that way. My friends and colleagues marveled at how much I achieved in a day, unaware that the price was never resting, because even my self-care involved endless to-do lists. I saw my calendar as a challenge to meet, packing in experiences and treating my relationships as entertainment instead of intimacy.

Like most well-meaning millennials, I went to therapy to make peace with my past and with the vague intention to feel better. Investing years of time and money yielded plenty of pithy insights but didn't do much to budge my over-activated nervous system. 

Post-therapy, I remained as relentlessly fast-paced as ever, now armed with an intellectualized understanding the past — but no clear path to fix how it continued to burden my body. 

I ground my teeth at night and clenched my jaw during the day. I talked so fast I ran out of air. And I breathed in short, shallow pulls of oxygen, ready to sprint at any moment. My body wore the scars of my past like battle armor I never took off because I’d forgotten how.

I learned later that my high-velocity baseline signified a chronic stress response. My body didn't feel able to relax because I didn't know how to complete the stress cycle and find my way back to rest and self-connection. I lived immersed in a never-ending stress response, increasingly desperate to learn the tools to heal.

I stayed stuck there for years, trying everything (yoga, breathwork, even psychedelics) while simultaneously resigning myself to the fact that maybe this was just my life, I should get used to it, and stop complaining.

If you had asked me then, I would've said that I was mostly fine. But underneath that “fine” was hopelessness and exhaustion that I’d learned to tolerate because I couldn’t find the way out.

I was trapped in the quagmire of stable misery — high-functioning enough that I'd never hit rock bottom, but more despairing every day that rest and joy continued to elude me.

Life would've stayed that way, if I hadn't stumbled on The Body Keeps the Score and Dr. Judith Herman's complex trauma work. Suddenly, it made sense why talk therapy hadn't shifted my trauma. I needed to learn new approaches that could meet — and melt — the beliefs, emotions, and memories from the past I still carried in my body. 

And so, I did.

Insight is Overrated

The biggest shift happened, for me, when I stopped trying to understand why I felt so much tension and accepted the sensations in my body. Instead of, "Where did that come from?" I taught myself to ask, "What am I feeling?" I started learning the language of my felt sense – what the physical sensations in my body communicated to my mind.

For all my insight, I had never learned the basics of embodiment — how to work with felt sense and the nervous system, to not just heal from the past but to create a fully sensational life. 

I slowly moved from knowing to feeling, which felt frustrating and at times impossible. I could name feelings well enough, but my mind bounced into distraction whenever I tried to focus on how those feelings physically constellated in my body.

I started to see that my high-achieving demeanor masked something deeper. My productivity and competency hid beneath them a subtle sense of dread that I couldn't quite stay with long enough to understand. My refusal to rest served to deflect and dismiss the emotions waiting beneath the surface, which became more threatening the longer I avoided them.

I used my intellect to manage my emotions, then wondered why I didn't feel spontaneous. Instead of connecting with my own needs and desires, I silenced them out of a misplaced sense of propriety and "professionalism." It wasn’t great, but it was tolerable.

My patterns of numbness and over-activity protected me. Slowing down only made me feel worse — of course I avoided it. My high-functioning kept me safe from emotions, surrounding me with activities and achievements — but I couldn't enjoy the life I created for myself.

Trauma Disconnects Us from the Body

Until I did my trauma work, I rarely relaxed enough to feel. Whenever I paid attention to my body, the tension in my jaw and the clenching in my stomach threatened to overrun me with intolerable discomfort.

It makes sense that I learned to use the rush of over-activity to dull the sensations. The problem was, the physical disconnection I felt in my body extended to my emotional life as well.

I didn't realize how rarely I was emotionally vulnerable. I stayed too frozen in high functioning to notice my emotional needs. I had masses of friends and a full social calendar, but few relationships that felt authentic and deep.

I longed for spaciousness in my life — the kind of exhale that would soften me from the inside out. I wanted days that didn't start with bracing and end in depletion. I wanted rest that felt deeply restorative, not numbing. And I wanted a reclamation of relational intimacy — vulnerability, empathy, and closeness in which I felt seen and loved, and reflected the same.

I wanted self-trust, not more self-discipline. I wanted to see my patterns shift, without needing to endlessly analyze them. I wanted to feel my body as an ally, not a liability. I wanted to feel self-care as self-tenderness, not another achievement to check off on my to-do list.

My high functioning freeze served to stabilize my low-grade misery. I feared losing what I had, by daring for more.

What if I tried yet another approach — invested time, money, and hope — and it didn't work out? How could I face the bitterness and disillusionment, if I tried but nothing changed?

The Audacity of Trauma Healing

The way out of the stuckness I experienced happened unexpectedly. I stopped trying to force my way out of over-activity. I stopped believing that if I just learned one more thing, I would figure out how to stop avoiding my inner pain.

I realized that as long as I was willing to tolerate my misery, because I didn't want it to get worse, it would never get better.

I needed to want more for myself — to dare to rock the boat of my high-velocity life and demand something different.

No one handed me a map.

I had to make one.

I read books. I took classes with Dr. van der Kolk, Dr. Gabor Mate, Peter Levine, and every trauma pioneer willing to teach me. I took obscure certification courses on ancient Tantric and Daoist pathways to sexual reclamation and nervous system healing. I learned everything I could about the neurobiology of trauma, so I could gently whisper to my nervous system and find my way back to feeling.

And then I spent hundreds of hours practicing with peers, perfecting the science of my work into an art form. It became a labor of love, to save myself and then offer the same work to others.

Now, I take the spark of my own healing and use it to light a lamp. I go with people into the darkest places of their experience, find the parts of them in the most pain, sit next to them for a while, and then guide them back to a life worth living.

The targeted trauma resolution work I offer is rapid and effective. It goes deeper than I've experienced most work goes, safely and reliably leading to life-changing transformation — in the body, in relationships, and in how we show ourselves to the world.

Whether you ever do this work with me or someone else, I want you to know that it's possible. Rock the boat of your life and dare to demand goodness and joy for yourself.

Risk it. You’re worth it.

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Elie Losleben supports individuals and couples internationally through trauma resolution and embodied healing. She brings extensive training in somatic approaches and a deep understanding of how the nervous system shapes our capacity for connection. To learn more about working together, you're welcome to reach out.