Landy Peek (00:38)
There's something almost no one talks about, but every strong woman feels in her body the moment she walks into a family gathering. You can build an entire life that you're proud of, one that feels grounded and real, and still feel that tightening in your body the moment you see your family. Because holidays don't just bring people together.
They bring back versions of you that you've outgrown. Versions you've healed well in the past, versions you no longer live in, but your nervous system, your nervous system still remembers. And here's the part that most people aren't aware of. Your nervous system isn't reacting to the present moment.
It's reacting to the familial patterns that live in that space. And it's not regression, it's recognition. I'm Landi Peek and welcome to the Landi Peek podcast. I invite you.
To come along as we're talking about the experience so many strong women have at the holidays, but rarely we talk about out loud. And that's that feeling of sliding back, back into the old roles, back into the old dynamics, back into a version of you who over functions, over accommodates, and holds it all together.
often at the expense of your own body.
If you're this in the week of Thanksgiving, you might already feel it in your system. The anticipation, the tightening, the mental planning, the quiet dread that you'll walk in as the woman you've become and somehow walk out as the girl you were.
In this episode, we're gonna name what's actually happening in your body and your nervous system when you feel that sliding back. We're gonna talk about why holidays are so loaded for so many women. And we're gonna reframe that feeling that you're back at square one, that the therapy didn't work. So you can stop shaming yourself for it.
I invite you to just think for a moment about the holidays, not the Pinterest version or the Hallmark version, your holidays. Because for a lot of strong women, the first feeling isn't joy. It's a mix of pressure, responsibility, and that, big breath, here we go again. You might notice
The clenching in your system as you run through the list of dishes, the gifts, the travel, the timing, the emotions that you're going to have to manage. Your shoulders might start to creep up as you think about that one person whose comments always seem to sting. and the quiet grief that the season doesn't feel magical for you.
because you're the one making it magical.
Every year, you tell yourself, this year will be different. I've grown, I've done therapy, I've read the books, I'm gonna honor what I need. And yet, when you get there, old patterns start to take over. You realize you're tuning in to your parents and your siblings' moods. You're trying to smooth over the tension. You're the one who jumps up to help. You might laugh off comments that,
really hurt and you might stay longer at a gathering than you really want. And then on the drive home or when you're lying in bed later that night.
It hits. Ugh, I did it again. I thought I was past this. I thought I'd healed this. Why am I like this? If you recognize yourself in that, I want you to hear this. You're not back at square one. Your nervous system is doing what it learned to do in the environment where you learned it. Your slide back is not a failure.
It's a really old blueprint being activated. See, your nervous system is a pattern recognizer. It's a historian, a body-based memory keeper. Researcher Stephen Porges behind the Polyvagal Theory, he talks about neuro-seption, and it's the way your body picks up on cues of safety and danger long before your mind gets involved.
This is where the holidays come in. You walk into that familiar house. You sit at that familiar table with all the familiar people and your body remembers. Your body remembers the tone someone used when you spoke up as a kid. The moments that you felt misunderstood. The emotional labor that you absorbed. The expectations you never agreed to, but lived inside.
So when you suddenly feel smaller or on edge or hyper aware or unlike that grounded woman who you are in a lot of areas of your life right now, that doesn't mean your healing disappeared. It doesn't mean you're standing on the original stage where these patterns were written. Of course your body responds. Of course the old reflexes show up. You are not thinking your way through this.
Your body is protecting you the way that it learned to.
So much of the work we do is in our heads, right? We are talking it out. We are going through therapy and we are reading and cognitively learning new strategies. And that's great. It's gotten you a long, long way. But I don't want you to feel like you're a failure because your body, your body hasn't learned to catch up to what your mind knows. That's not failure. That's physiology.
So if you're listening and you're nodding your head yes, you're likely what I call the strong one. The one who keeps things moving, smooths the friction, reads the room, anticipates the needs, absorbs the emotional currents,
holds everything together, has the constant list going in your mind, you know the schedules, you know when picture day is, you know when you have to get the holiday cards out, you know it all.
You didn't choose this existence. It formed around you. And the strong one often becomes the emotional shock absorber at the holidays. And it looks like noticing who feels left out and welcoming them in. Something you were probably praised for as a kiddo. Filling emotional gaps without really realizing it.
Jumping into action to prevent tension. You see it coming. You go and disrupt it. Taking responsibility for the experience everyone else will have. Hoping, quietly, that maybe this year someone else will notice how much you hold. And under that hope, under that hope lies grief. Grief that no one ever said.
you shouldn't have had to carry all that weight. And grieve that even now with all your healing, that old dance still finds you. But again, this is not regression. What if we reframed it and I invite you to look at this as connection. You're bumping into the wound not because you're unhealed, but because
This is where it lives.
The wound lives within the family system.
And I wanna give you something to think about as you go into the holidays, that you can let yourself know that this isn't you going backwards, but this is you connecting with something very old. And that connection is realizing this thing that I've healed from didn't start in my adult life, it started here. It started here.
in this room with these people in this dynamic. And that doesn't mean that you had a traumatic childhood. It means that we as kiddos, we learned to support in the ways that we needed to that our adults needed us to. Because I don't know about you, but I haven't met people who really grew up with parents who are emotionally
had the emotional capacity and knowledge to really support themselves and their kiddos all the time.
Your system is not malfunctioning. It's oriented to the deepest level imprint. So when you feel the pull to play your old role, what you're really feeling is a younger version of you trying to protect you. It's an old choreography rising from muscle memory. It's a survival pattern your body believes is still required in this setting.
and it's being awake inside the pattern that is different this year. Because when you're awake inside the pattern, you're not being swallowed by it. You're noticing where it doesn't match who you are in the rest of your life. And that awareness, that's progress. Even if the behavior isn't shifted,
You're aware of it, which allows that growth that you need and that you so want. This is the part that cuts the deepest for strong women because we have interwoven shame and our internal narrative becomes, Why can I hold boundaries everywhere but here? Why do I feel so reactive?
why do I know all of this nervous system language, but still get pulled under? Because knowledge doesn't erase history. It gives you context, it override wiring overnight. Healing isn't about eliminating your triggers. It's about reducing the abandonment of yourself when they hit.
you're probably not going to slide through the holiday dynamics untouched. But perhaps you could meet the parts of you that still tense, brace, over function with compassion, with curiosity, and with knowing
That no matter how much you cognitively have learned,
Your nervous system has an imprint that you're running on.
Shame collapses you, but curiosity brings you back online.
So there's a couple things you can do to really bring yourself into that curiosity instead of the shame. It's really acknowledging that this is just an old pattern.
And when we can tune in and tap in and say, okay.
reacted like I typically do in this situation. That's just an old pattern.
It takes off that pressure of I'm not good enough and leans into this is just really familiar.
I invite you to resource yourself as you go into the holidays.
knowing that you can set up a plan inside your head that allows you to meet your needs. Perhaps it's giving yourself permission before you walk into the event that you're allowed to leave earlier and you don't need to justify it.
that you can set a small no without having to have a big boundary. And it doesn't have to be a performance. And it can just be one quiet refusal, letting yourself get out of the pattern. So stepping outside when you're feeling yourself start to get overwhelmed or anxious.
It's letting yourself debrief afterwards, noticing if something came up and how you could perhaps meet it with compassion, noticing that it felt old, just honestly letting yourself see it. The holidays often bring up grief, not traumatic grief, but cellular level grief.
And it's something that we have so intertwined and intermixed with our holiday experience, we often don't label it as grief. But for a lot of the strong women out there, we're holding the grief of a little girl who carried too much. Or grief for the woman who still shoulders it all. Grief for the patterns that shaped you, grief for the support you didn't have.
Grief for the version of you who still wants to be seen and doesn't know if she ever will. Grief for the little girl who didn't have the mom or the dad or the grandparents or the support that she really, really craved, even though she may have had those people in her life.
and letting yourself recognize and feel that grief, it's not regression, it's clarity, it's your body telling the truth. And there's hope. You are not the woman that you were last time you sat down at the table. You are not the woman who survived that childhood. You are not the woman who thought her only job was to be easy.
Even the fact that you're listening to this episode tells me something. You're ready for something different. And readiness matters.
So as you go into this holiday, I invite you to really give yourself grace, to really notice that they are just old patterns and that all of the healing work that you have done has been valuable. It shows up in your regular daily life.
at a nervous system level, that's your next step It's allowing you to bring safety into the moments. It's knowing that these are really old patterns and they're not gonna change overnight. It's allowing you what you need.
even if it makes somebody else a little uncomfortable.
You're allowed to act on who you are now.
even when the room remembers an older version of you.
You don't have to match the energy of the environment you walked into. I talk about in my magnetic her program of becoming the thermostat instead of the thermometer. Because as little girls, we learned to be really good thermometers. We took the temperature read on every single person in the room. We were constantly bending ourselves to match the needs of our parents, of our siblings, of the energy, right? We were
always reading and often we still are. But if we shift from being the thermometer to a thermostat, we're setting our own internal energy. This is where my nervous system is. This is where I am. And in that thermostat, this isn't having and setting the stage for everybody else in the room. In that thermostat, you get to say, I'm not matching my energy to everyone else in the room.
I'm setting my energy at 72 degrees and at 72 degrees, even if somebody else throws a tantrum or somebody else has tension, I'm going to be okay. I'm going to be me right here at 72 degrees.
It shifts from constantly changing yourself for everyone else to being okay when everyone else does their own thing and falls apart or has the highs or the lows. You get to create your own energetic space. You don't have to shrink to keep the peace.
even though that feels really familiar and safe.
And if you do, notice it and give yourself compassion and grace. You don't have to play the role that people expect you to play just because it's familiar. Just because you've always been the person who doesn't mean you have to this year.
And the moment that you notice yourself slipping into that old pattern, the over-functioning, the managing, the soothing, the it's fine, the automatic yes, the laugh to the joke that just cuts so deep.
you can interrupt that pattern.
by taking a breath, by stepping back, literally a physical step back.
by allowing yourself to just notice and honor.
It doesn't have to come out as aggression. It doesn't have to be we're holding boundary theater, right? That gets to be really tiring. And it doesn't have to be dramatic.
but it can be a quiet refusal. A quiet refusal to disappear. A quiet refusal to do whatever you're expected to do when it doesn't feel right.
And that refusal might look so incredibly ordinary. It's that moment you feel like you need to jump out of the chair to fix something that you sit back and keep your butt in the chair. It's letting someone else be uncomfortable instead of absorbing it. It's saying, I'm good. When somebody tries to hand you
the plate of food or ties you into emotional labor or anything that you don't want to do or you don't want to have.
and not accepting it. But that firm, I'm good, even though they say, I know you're good, but no, really don't want any. It's not laughing at the comment that actually stung.
It's choosing to leave at the time that works for you, not the time that makes you look easygoing.
It's noticing when your kiddo's melting down that it's time to leave if you want to leave and not having to try to push through. It's allowing you to take your entire family outside when it feels too big for everyone or even just for you. They aren't big moves, but they are small interruptions.
There are micro shifts that send a very loud and clear message, not to the rest of the world, but to your nervous system.
I'm staying with you this time. I'm not abandoning you to get through this. This isn't the holiday to overhaul your entire family system. And honestly, it's not your job to overhaul your entire family system. Although often we take it as if it were.
We become the pattern interrupters, the generational healers, but you don't have to carry that weight. The work that you want to do with your own system, it will automatically change and interrupt the family system without you lifting the finger, without you doing any heavy work. You don't have to be the perfectly regulated woman at the table.
You don't have to prove anything. But I do invite you to hold on to one thing. Self-loyalty in real time. If you need to, think it through ahead of time. What are the rules that you want for yourself? What do you need? What do you know? Your system knows this so well. It can tune in and say, okay, I need, what I use is anchors.
I create anchors and I teach this in my magnetic reset and magnetic her how to use anchors to help support your system. But we're not supporting it just in the stressful times. We're using anchors in our life when we don't necessarily have high stress and
when we want to grow our capacity so we can receive more goodness into our life.
Because even 2 % change changes the entire trajectory of who you are becoming. Think about that. We're not talking about an overhaul or a huge transformation. A 2 % change changes the entire trajectory.
That's reorientation in the lived moment because honestly, you don't have time to overhaul an entire system or the capacity but you want change that's real and lasting. And that happens with reorientation in the moment.
I want to wish you an incredible holiday season.
I invite you to be kind to yourself and to look for the supports that you need so that you can come out in January not feeling like you just went through the wringer.
if this episode has been landing in that deep wordless place inside you, that place that's tired of being the strong one, tired of holding the world, tired of bracing, tired of being the one, just wanting someone to see you and to help carry the load, I invite you to come into Magnetic Her.
because Magnetic Her is when we unravel all of that together. It's where women like you come to finally stop living from survival patterns and start to live from the truth, from capacity and grounded self belonging.
because you've already done all of the cognitive work, now's the time to start with the nervous system work, supporting your system at the deepest, deepest level.
if you've been nodding along saying yeah this is me you are already the woman magnetic her was built for
I'm gonna drop the link in the show notes.
If you're unsure, want to talk about it, reach out. I'd love to chat. Because I know how this work changes the women who have done all of the work and still don't feel like they have the capacity and the life that they want. The woman who still gets triggered, the woman who still feels like she's not seen and heard.
And I know the stories because the women inside Magnetic Her, they're showing up differently in their lives. Not because it's an intensive system, but because we've interwoven it into their lives. This is different than any other program because this isn't cognitive learning. This is taking this work and embedding it into your natural existence so it doesn't feel like more work. So you notice,
that your kids tantrum less and even your dog is more chilled out because you became the thermostat. Knowing that you have more energy to do the things that you want because you stopped reading everybody else's.
noticing that you are taking better care of yourself because you're not bleeding out energy for everyone else.
You don't have to figure it out alone because I'm here and the women inside Magnetic Her are also here. This is a community of support because the strong one, one of her greatest weaknesses is receiving support because she holds it all for everyone. I know I'm one of them. But I also know the life changes in how I feel and how I live.
have been incredible when I started receiving support. Because the thing that you want the most, you're not gonna get it pushing and doing. Because if you want money or more clients or more time or more energy, that all comes from receiving. And we have to flip the switch with your nervous system.
to allow it to know that it's safe to receive. So as you move into this holiday, into this next week, into this next holiday month, I invite you to remember, you are allowed to be human at the table. You're allowed to be triggered. You're allowed to choose yourself quietly and consistently. And you're not sliding back.
You are coming into connection with the places that shaped you and you're meeting them as the woman you are now.
and you get to change the story one quiet shift at a time, one moment of safety at a time.
If this episode resonated, I invite you to share it with another woman who might need to hear it this week. I know there's a lot of us.
And I want to share how grateful I am as we go into Thanksgiving that you are here in my life, that you are showing up, that you're listening. I really do appreciate your support of me.
I am receiving that gift from you.
Because being open to receiving means that my world can grow.
And so can yours.
I want you to know that you are changing the world just by showing up, by being who you are.
I truly love you and I like you. And I wish you a great holiday season. I will talk to you on the next episode.
Speaker 2 (31:05)
Hey, before you go, just a little bit of legal. This podcast is designed for educational purposes only. It is not to replace any expert advice from your doctors, therapists, coaches, or any other professional that you would work with. It's just a chat with a friend, me, where we get curious about ideas, thoughts, and things that are going on in our lives.
As we're talking about friends, if you know someone who would benefit from a conversation today, please share because I think the more that we open up these conversations, the more benefit we all get. So until next time, give yourself a big hug from me and stay curious because that's the fun in this world.
