Your Discomfort Is Data
I tried to watch Gilmore Girls.
Everyone said I'd love it. The dialogue, the mother-daughter relationship, the cozy small-town charm of Stars Hollow. So I settled in, fully expecting to fall in love with Lorelai and Rory the way everyone else has.
Instead, I felt this growing discomfort I couldn't quite name at first.
I kept watching Lorelai turn to her teenage daughter for emotional regulation. Making Rory responsible for steadying her constant turmoil. Missing her daughter's inner world entirely while claiming they were best friends.
And I saw Rory. A deeply attuned, hyper-responsible young woman, expertly managing her mother's emotions, keeping things stable, being the steady one.
This is classic parentification. And the show celebrates it. Holds it up as the relationship we should all aspire to have. No wonder something in me kept resisting.
Here's the part that I think is important to know.
I felt that discomfort from the first half of the very first episode. A familiar tightness in my chest, a kind of tension crawling up toward the base of my head, an urge to turn it off.
And I didn't listen to any of it for 4.5 episodes. "I don't want to be too quick to judge. Maybe I need to give it time. I mean, the show is loved by millions. Why wouldn't I like it?"
I work with these exact relational dynamics every single day. And I still overrode my body's signals for four and a half episodes.
Why We Learn to Override
It would be easy to frame this as a failure of awareness, but that's not what it is.
Overriding the body's signals is not a character flaw. For many high-achieving women, it's a deeply intelligent, unconscious survival strategy that was learned very early. Long before there was any intellectual choice in the matter.
When you were the steady one in your family, you needed to override the discomfort.
When you learned to read the room and attune to everyone else's emotional states, your own "something's off" signal had to be set aside so you could function in the role that was needed of you.
When you were praised for being mature and responsible and such a good listener, your body learned that pushing your needs aside was what kept you safe and connected to the people you depended on.
This is not a mindset pattern. It's a physiological one.
The nervous system adapts. It learns what's required for survival in any given environment, and it builds those adaptations into the body's automatic responses.
For women who grew up being the emotionally attuned caretaker…
The one who kept things stable, who anticipated needs, who absorbed tension so others didn't have to…
The body learned to process everyone else's emotional landscape while simultaneously turning its own signals inward. Downward. Quiet.
That adaptation was genuinely protective. It kept connection intact. It earned safety in systems that needed you to be reliable and selfless and easy. It was brilliant, and it worked.
The challenge is that the nervous system doesn't automatically update when the environment changes.
When you're no longer a child in a family system that needed you to be the steady one, when you're an adult woman in a fast-paced career, a relationship, a full life of your own, those same automatic overrides keep running.
Not because something is wrong with you. Because the body is doing exactly what it learned to do.
What the Override Looks Like Now
It doesn't always look dramatic. Most of the time it's quiet and entirely reasonable-sounding.
It's the tightness in your chest during certain conversations that you push past because you don't want to be difficult. "I can't stand this guy. But someone's got to get it done. The project's not going to finish itself."
It's the exhaustion after spending time with certain people that you dismiss because they're family or they mean well. "He doesn't know what he sounds like. He probably had a bad day. We all have bad days sometimes."
It's the "something's off here" feeling that you talk yourself out of because everyone else seems fine with it and you don't want to be the problem.
It's starting a show that makes your body say no and watching four and a half episodes because everyone else loves it and maybe you just need to give it more time. "How am I the only one who can't see we're celebrating dysfunction here?"
The override is so practiced it doesn't even feel like a choice.
It sounds like you're offering grace and a measured response.
It feels like being reasonable. Like being fair. Like not overreacting.
Your Body Has Been Trying to Tell You Something
The tightness in your chest is information. The urge to leave a conversation is a signal. The energy drain after time with certain people is your body trying to communicate something important about what that relationship is costing you.
This is not sensitivity run amok.
It's not looking for problems where there aren't any.
Your body is doing precisely what it's designed to do.
It's detecting patterns based on everything it has learned about what is and isn't sustainable for you specifically, even when those patterns are dressed up as love, or opportunity, or something you're supposed to want.
You don't need to justify it.
You don't need to try harder to see what everyone else sees.
You don't need to override the signal until you finally find a way to be comfortable with what your body is telling you isn't working.
You're also not behind for not catching this sooner.
The women I work with…
high-achieving, deeply attuned women who are genuinely brilliant at reading other people's needs…
have often spent decades in this pattern.
And sometimes, even when we do hear the signal, we make the trade-off anyway. Consciously or not.
Because somewhere beneath the surface, we know that following what our body is asking- setting a boundary, saying no, walking away from a conversation- carries a cost we're not ready to pay in that moment. So we file it away. "I'll deal with this later."
Learning to hear your own signals after years of quieting them doesn't happen in a single moment of insight.
It's gradual. It's nonlinear. And it takes the same patience you'd offer anyone else who is learning something new and genuinely complex.
I do this work every day, and it still took me four and a half episodes.
Learning to Listen
What changes isn't the signal. Your body has been sending signals consistently.
What changes is the willingness to create a little space before reacting. To choose your response instead.
It happens by pausing long enough to catch what's there before the override kicks in. "I feel my heart racing, my jaw clenching. Interesting. I wonder what information is here."
Not a dramatic life overhaul, not a sudden transformation.
Just a growing ability to feel what your body is already telling you, and to let that count as real information rather than something to manage or explain away.
Your body knows what it's doing. It always has.
The work now is helping your brain recognize that it's safe to stop running the whole show alone- that it doesn't have to carry all of this by itself anymore.
Your brain has been doing that for a very long time. And it's exhausted.
The path forward isn't pushing harder, following more rules, or finally getting it right.
It's gradually, gently creating enough safety for your body to speak again and for your brain to actually trust what it hears.
However long that takes. With genuine compassion for how long the override has been running. For many of the women I work with, it's been running since childhood.
This work is not for the faint of heart. It doesn't happen by reading more books or adding another practice to an already full life.
Most of the women I work with have already tried that. We’re proactive and we like to learn. The brain told us we needed more information. But information was never the missing piece.
What actually moves the needle is learning to get curious about your discomfort rather than managing it.
Sitting with what your body is already telling you instead of reasoning your way past it.
That's subtle and genuinely difficult work, especially when you've spent years being the one who figures things out and pushes through.
There's also something worth naming here. You are not broken.
The pattern that's exhausting you right now was once the thing that kept you functioning.
It made a lot of sense. It still makes sense to your nervous system, which is exactly why it's so persistent and why trying to think your way out of it rarely works.
You don't have to navigate this alone.
In fact, the nature of this particular work makes going it alone one of the harder paths.
You're trying to see patterns you're completely immersed in, which is a little like trying to read a label from inside the jar. Having someone outside the system with you changes what becomes visible.
That's the work I do. And it's for women who are done trying so hard just to feel okay.
Lisa Bobyak founded Living Fully Balanced LLC because she got tired of watching brilliant women break themselves trying to maintain excellence- in part, because she'd been one of them. For over a decade, she's worked with female founders, executives, and leaders who've achieved everything they set out to accomplish, only to realize the cost was higher than they wanted to pay. She helps high-achieving women build sustainable strategies so they can keep their edge without sacrificing their health, relationships, or the life they're working so hard to create.
If you're tired of choosing between excellence and sustainability, you shouldn't have to break yourself to prove yourself.
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