15. April 2026
Stress, Belonging and the Courage to Feel
The invisible weight of chronic stress
Chronic stress is a health issue that often goes unnoticed and is rarely talked about. Typically, people adjust emotionally and get used to their symptoms unless an ECG indicates problems such as high or low blood pressure, or other persistent physical pain reminds them of an underlying distress.
The difference between acute and chronic stress is obvious: Acute stress: a predator, a crisis, a sudden threat is something the body knows how to handle. Chronic stress is something else entirely. It becomes the background hum of daily life: the crowded inbox, the relentless pressure to achieve, the sense that there is never quite enough time. And because it never fully switches off, people stop noticing it. This is their normal. This is just how life is.
What gets lost in that normalisation is the awareness of how deeply this ongoing state of activation shapes everything, including intimacy. People are puzzled when desire fades, when connection feels difficult, when they feel emotionally flat. But the nervous system doesn't distinguish between job stress and relational stress. It is simply running, constantly, without ever completing the cycle.
Completing the cycle
Peter Levine introduced a perspective that deepens our understanding of stress: the idea that what we carry is not just emotional, but physiological. In his work on Somatic Experiencing, he describes how the body initiates survival responses — fight, flight, or freeze — that are meant to move toward completion. When these responses are interrupted, the activation does not simply disappear. It remains in the nervous system as unfinished energy.
It is not only that emotions need to be felt but the body itself needs to finish what it started. The stress response is not just a feeling state; it is an action pattern. An impulse to push away, to run, to cry out, to defend. When these impulses are suppressed or overridden, the organism holds onto them.
Trauma, in this sense, is not the event itself. It is the incomplete response to it.
Movement, creativity, connection, rest are not indulgences. They are ways in which the system finds its way back into flow. I often compare it to brushing your teeth: we don’t debate whether to brush our teeth, yet we treat emotional processing as optional, even self-indulgent. Meditation, mindfulness, yoga, body scan practices are not luxuries for the spiritually inclined. They are how we keep the emotional system clean.
Emotions as a tunnel
EMDR processes are commonly compared to driving through a tunnel. The same applied to experiencing emotions itself: You cannot go around them. You must pass through them to reach the light beyond. Stress is not caused by feeling itself but by the stopping, the resisting, the refusing to feel through.
In my work, what makes that passage possible is the relational container. Holding two points simultaneously: the place of activation and distress on one side, and the unconditional positive regard on the other. The body often needs another's presence to finish what it cannot complete alone.
This is where the work of Carl Rogers meets Levine’s understanding of the nervous system. The organism moves toward completion, and it does so most fully in a space where it is not alone.
The animal guides I use in my practice serve a similar function. They offer an anchor, a way of staying connected to something supportive while moving through what is difficult. Trust the process. Emotions are not permanent. They complete, if we let them.
The places where we are allowed to feel
Chronic stress exhausts us and erodes our access to safe spaces. In Western culture particularly, and especially for men, emotional expression is still widely treated as weakness. People learn early to suppress, to manage, to appear functional. But suppressing the stress response doesn’t resolve it. It locks it psychologically and physiologically.
This is part of why Carl Rogers began working with encounter groups and why group therapy remains so powerful today. In those spaces, people gather who value feeling. Who have agreed, implicitly or explicitly, that emotion is welcome here.
Everyone needs at least one place in their life where they can just have all the feels without worrying about being judged or freaking people out. (Nagoski, 2015, Come as you are)
That place is not a luxury. It is a health requirement.
Intrusive thoughts and the weight of shame
Many people with OC(P)D experience intrusions. This is anxiety expressing itself through imagery — not desire, not intention, only conflict. The conflict between what we have been taught to feel, and what we actually feel. The relationship between the organism and the rules it has internalised.
The cruelty of intrusive thoughts is often compounded by shame. When people cannot speak about what is happening in their minds, the thoughts grow louder, more threatening. But when they can bring them into a safe space like a therapeutic relationship, a group, a trusted friendship where they will not be judged or pathologised, the intensity diminishes.
The thought becomes what it always was: information about internal conflict, not evidence of moral failure.
Reaching out is not weakness. It is the beginning of integration.
We are all normal
I think that to feel normal is to feel that you belong. We are just trying to belong somewhere. We want to know that we are safe within the grounds of shared human experience, that what's on our heart is the same as what is on other people's.
Home is not a place. It is a feeling. And what we are seeking in relationships to find our way back to that feeling. To inhabit ourselves without apology.
Everyone's different, but we're all human. This is why I introduced animal guides not to reduce anyone to a type, but to offer a different lens: one that celebrates difference as inherent variation rather than pathology. The fox is not a failed wolf. The owl is not a broken sparrow. And you are not a disordered version of someone else.
Belonging begins with being witnessed. Being unconditionally accepted instead of conditionally tolerated by another person creates something that slowly becomes internal. We internalise the experience of being safe. Of being seen. Of being enough. And from that ground, confidence grows. Trust in the body returns. The feeling that our unique setup is just right.
That is everything.