Your Body Isn't Overreacting. Things are genuinely not okay.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being told, in one form or another, that the problem is you.

Maybe it shows up as a therapist handing you a breathing exercise while the news cycles through another legislative attack on your community. Maybe it's a wellness influencer selling you a nervous system reset course while you're working two jobs and can't afford to get sick. Maybe it's subtler: the persistent cultural message that if you were just more regulated, more grounded, more present, you'd be able to handle all of this better. Does anyone else get the feeling too that the goal of being able to handle more is to actually just keep being productive and not about your individual wellness.

You've probably internalized some version of that message. Most people have. It's everywhere. White supremacy culture is woven into the fabric of the United States and with it, immense pressure to be well; be thin, able bodied, wealthy, etc.

But here's what that message gets wrong: your body is not failing you. It is reading the room. And the room is genuinely difficult.

Regulation as a product

In the last decade, nervous system regulation has become an industry. There are apps, courses, retreats, content creators, and yes, therapists, selling the promise that if you learn to regulate your nervous system, you will feel better. More calm. More able to cope.

Some of that is genuinely useful. Knowing how your nervous system works, having tools to resource yourself, being able to access some degree of steadiness when things are hard: these are real and valuable capacities.

But the way regulation gets sold most of the time carries an assumption worth examining: that the goal is to increase your tolerance of current conditions. To become better adapted to a world organized around white supremacy, extractive capitalism, transphobia, and climate collapse. To feel calm enough to keep going.

That is not a neutral clinical goal. It is a political one. And it places the burden of adjustment entirely on the person least responsible for the conditions causing the distress.

What your nervous system is actually doing

Your nervous system is a threat detection system. It has been shaped by evolution, by your personal history, by epigenetics, and by the specific social and political conditions you have moved through. It is very good at its job.

When you are living under ongoing systemic harm, your nervous system responds accordingly. The hypervigilance of a person of color navigating white institutions is not a trauma response that needs to be healed. It is an accurate reading of an environment that has repeatedly demonstrated its danger. The anxiety of a trans person watching legislation systematically dismantle their rights is not dysregulation. It is appropriate. The exhaustion of anyone trying to survive capitalism while also being a full human person with needs and relationships and a body is not a sign that something is wrong with them.

These are not overreactions. They are often correct perceptions.

The problem is not your nervous system. The problem is what your nervous system is correctly perceiving.

What this means for therapy

This is where a lot of therapy goes wrong, including well-meaning, somatic, trauma-informed therapy.

When the implicit goal of treatment is to help you feel less distressed by conditions that warrant distress, therapy becomes a tool of adjustment rather than liberation. It pathologizes accurate perception. It asks you to work on yourself in ways that leave the conditions unchanged and locates the failure in you when the distress persists.

Good therapy, in this moment, in this political and social context, has to start from a different place. It has to be able to say: your body is not wrong. Your responses make sense. We are not here to talk you out of what you are correctly perceiving, or to help you become more functional within systems that are causing harm.

What we can do is something different. We can work on expanding your capacity to be present to your own experience, including the hard parts, without being consumed by it. We can build relational resources, because isolation makes everything harder and connection is one of the few things that genuinely helps. We can work on helping you access more choice in how you respond, not because your current responses are wrong, but because having range matters. We can be honest about what therapy can and cannot do, and support you in connecting to whatever collective and community resources matter to you.

What it can do, when it's done well and honestly, is help you stay in contact with yourself and the people who matter to you while you navigate a world that is genuinely hard. That is not nothing. But it is also not the same as telling you that you need to regulate your way into tolerating conditions that shouldn't be tolerated. My goal as a clinician is to foster a therapeutic relationship that can support your connection to not only yourself, but your community.

You are allowed to not be okay

If you are struggling right now, if your body is activated, if you are exhausted, if you feel like you cannot get on top of it no matter what you do: that is not a personal failure. It is a reasonable response to an unreasonable set of conditions.

You do not need to be fixed. You do not need to be more regulated. You do not need to optimize your nervous system into a state of equanimity that would require you to stop paying attention to what is actually happening.

You are allowed to be affected by what is affecting you. That is not weakness. That is being a person in contact with reality.

What you might benefit from is support. Not the kind that asks you to adjust better to harm, but the kind that meets you where you actually are, takes seriously what you are carrying, understands that a lot of it did not originate inside you, and works with you in a way that honors both your body's wisdom and the very real conditions shaping it.

I am here to bear witness to this moment in history with you. To support with increasing capacity to be present with suffering while deepening your capacity to pendulate to experiences of joy and liberation.

That kind of support exists. It is worth looking for. And if you are looking, it is worth asking the therapist you're considering whether they understand the difference.

Sage Swiatek is a licensed clinical social worker and somatic therapist practicing via telehealth across California. Compassionate Tides Therapy specializes in somatic therapy, EMDR, and trauma-informed care for OCD, trauma, anxiety, and grief, with a particular commitment to working with clients whose distress has been shaped by systemic harm. If this resonated, I offer a free consultation and would be happy to talk.