Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] There is a trauma response no one teaches you to name because it doesn't look dramatic, it looks like politeness, it looks like shrinking, it looks like walking at the angle so others don't have to move for you.
[00:00:18] I call this yielding trauma.
[00:00:21] And today I'm going to share how exile, violence and long term threat train your body to give up space before anyone asks and why this response is being misread, misdiagnosed and misunderstood.
[00:00:42] I am Anna Mail, Somatic experiencing therapist for PTSD and Trauma Recovery. I'm a founder of Somatic Trauma Recovery Center.
[00:00:52] At the end of the episode, I will read a piece from my book, the Trauma we Don't talk about called Walking at the Angle.
[00:01:03] Let's begin Yielding trauma.
[00:01:10] Very typical for yielding trauma.
[00:01:13] It has a somatic testimony in your body and the way how it's present is as you're walking at an angle. And this is what the body does when it has learned repeatedly straight line existence and taking up space or visibility is not safe. When your body does not assume right to be here, and it assumes it must explain itself.
[00:01:46] The body learns that standing straight invites collision, occupying space invites correction.
[00:01:59] So it justifies itself in advance.
[00:02:04] And this is yielding trauma, where your body yields before anyone ask it to it.
[00:02:13] So very common we have this pattern of walking on the street, but you're walking at an almost like an angle. And that's a deep somatic strategy.
[00:02:28] Walking at the angle is not clumsiness, it is not courtesy, it is not cultural politeness.
[00:02:40] It is a, uh, preemptive survival maneuver. It tells you have been overpowered by someone or by the system.
[00:02:56] It tells that you have been living or still live under the threat.
[00:03:03] And angled with walking or this yielding accomplishes several things at once.
[00:03:13] It reduce your visibility, right?
[00:03:18] It lowers perceived threat, it minimize interruption and it signals I will not cost you anything.
[00:03:32] And this is the work in somatic therapy for all somatic therapists is this ability to look into our client's movement. Because through the movement, trauma speaks out, speaks out in volumes. And in a yielding trauma, the body becomes an object navigating around others rather than a subject moving through the world and taking up the space.
[00:04:10] The trauma body who yields does not simply avoid others.
[00:04:19] It assigns higher moral value to everyone else's life.
[00:04:28] It's saying others are more important, more legitimate, more urgent, more deserving of space.
[00:04:42] And this is not self esteem damage.
[00:04:46] This is relational hierarchy embodied in your muscle memory based on oppression you live through or still living in.
[00:05:01] So who walks at an angle? Who has this yielding trauma.
[00:05:08] Women, women are taught very early, Occupying space can provoke harm.
[00:05:20] Inconvenience equals punishment.
[00:05:25] So what do you do? You step aside.
[00:05:29] How many times you have been walking on the street and a man would come towards you?
[00:05:40] How many times you step aside and how many times men did yielding trauma, making yourself invisible, not wanting to inconvenient his rite of passage. And then you soften you angle, not because you are kind, but because you are conditioned.
[00:06:16] Please make a count for a week, just for a week. How many times as a woman, when you're walking on the street, you step aside and how many times mended. And if you're a man, observe this as well.
[00:06:36] Is it even in your awareness that woman is stepping aside M so you can fully move and not stop yourself?
[00:06:59] Second, Black people, indigenous people of color, visible and invisible, minorities, racialized bodies absolutely know this, because visibility invites surveillance that's in your brain.
[00:07:29] Just your presence can be seen as a threat.
[00:07:37] And straightness is read as defiance.
[00:07:42] You know that seeing black man or a woman walking towards you and you're a white person, how that makes you feel?
[00:08:00] Are you stepping aside or they're stepping aside? They do, because their presence culturally was seen as a threat to white people.
[00:08:20] If you're not right ethnicity or religion. If you're a minority, if you're invisible, minority.
[00:08:30] So not right ethnicity, not right religion.
[00:08:36] How many times you stepped aside?
[00:08:43] That was my life.
[00:08:47] I wasn't right. Quote, unquote, uh, ethnicity and religion. No one was in my family.
[00:08:56] Everyone who survived genocide knows that they have that history or work.
[00:09:04] And walking at angle becomes a way to signal compliance without speaking.
[00:09:15] Yielding trauma. We know that place.
[00:09:20] Third, disabled bodies.
[00:09:24] Disabled people learn to pre accommodate others or apologize for accessibility needs.
[00:09:36] They learn to minimize impact.
[00:09:41] And they yield not only space, but expectation. And everyone who has been displaced, exiled, traumatized bodies, refugees, survivors of the war. As I said, if you've been even exiled in your own family unit, where you have been made less, you learn to yield.
[00:10:06] You also learn that space must be negotiated. You're not taking any space for granted.
[00:10:14] You learn that belonging must be earned, and you yield. This is what I want to dismantle here, that this myth that yielding equals virtue.
[00:10:31] Where society, and by society, I mean privileged society, people, groups, person thinks that this behavior means you're considerate or you're easy to be around.
[00:10:52] You're kind if you're yielding someone.
[00:10:55] But this is not a compliment.
[00:10:58] Yielding trauma is not kindness. It's not someone is showing you nice manners. It is self Erasure and survival under the threat. Yielding trauma trains people to accept this hierarchy without question.
[00:11:22] Some lives are treated as inherently more important and urgent.
[00:11:31] When you're a minority, when you're exiled, your life is negotiable, you don't need, you can wait. Nothing is urgent in your life.
[00:11:45] And this is how oppression sustain itself very quietly, not only through laws or violence, but through our bodies that move aside.
[00:11:57] They yield aside automatically.
[00:12:03] And we can see our political dimension in the space where we are.
[00:12:15] When a body learns to yield, it is not choosing humility and kindness, it is remembering danger. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you have been privileged in your life.
[00:12:36] That's a good thing.
[00:12:38] That's a good thing. No shame about that.
[00:12:41] What is shameful is not having awareness of people who are yielding to you.
[00:12:52] In yielding trauma, the body apologizes for existing and um, existence itself becomes something to apologize for because of your ethnicity, because of your religion, because of your skin color, because your identity, because of your gender.
[00:13:18] When you yield, this is not your low self esteem and it's not lack of confidence.
[00:13:25] It is moral inversion stored in our body.
[00:13:31] And you simply your trauma body, your survival brain, assigns greater value to everyone else's life.
[00:13:41] Time, direction and urgency.
[00:13:46] So to simplify this, just if you're a woman, how many times without even questioning, you step aside because that man who is walking towards you has greater value.
[00:14:05] His life, his time, his, his urgency is more important than yours, is it?
[00:14:17] Others are allowed to move forward, not you. And this is what your body learned in order to survive. And your body did not shrink because it was small, it shrank because the world was unsafe. Or you were taught to be a nice girl from very young age.
[00:14:42] And this is invitation not for entitlement, not for dominance.
[00:14:48] This is invitation for you, for occupying instead of yielding with full rights, with your human rights to stand straighter, to walk forward, to sit at the center table, to occupy space without apology.
[00:15:12] Not because permission was granted, but because your body, your dignity remembers.
[00:15:21] It was always allowed to exist.
[00:15:27] And for my somatic therapists who are working in a field of trauma and PTSD recovery, I want to cover a couple things here.
[00:15:36] Yielding trauma describes a somatic trauma adaptation in which trauma body organize itself around preemptive yielding in order to reduce pressure received threat.
[00:15:58] And this pattern reflects a nervous system that has learned through repeated exposure to danger, humiliation or exclusion or punishment, that direct presence increases risk.
[00:16:20] So this is not a cognitive belief or, or personality trait. It is a procedural memory.
[00:16:28] And you can Observe this in your client in a posture, in a movement, spatial orientation and relational sequencing.
[00:16:40] So this pattern is yielding trauma.
[00:16:44] And yielding trauma refers to a learned survival response in which a person consistently relinquish physical, relational or psychological space, minimize visibility and presence, preemptively accommodates others, or assigning greater legitimacy or urgency to others needs and experiencing existence as, uh, something requiring justification. These are deep wound of existence.
[00:17:39] And how do we see this in body?
[00:17:42] If you're looking at your client, client is ready to please always.
[00:17:56] So we have a high hyper vigilance coupled with anticipating appeasement.
[00:18:06] Then we have dorsal vagal freeze coupled with vigilance, which looks in a body as a stiff freeze.
[00:18:16] And muscular patterning is characterized by reduced verticality and horizontality.
[00:18:28] So we don't have a body who is moving vertically or horizontally.
[00:18:36] That space is reduced.
[00:18:39] We have forward flexion.
[00:18:45] Gait is very narrowed. Look for the movement. Gait is very, very narrowed.
[00:18:51] Neck mobility very restricted.
[00:18:55] Neck is not moving.
[00:18:56] Eyes are moving very fast, but not from the neck.
[00:19:01] It's not combined with the neck movement, shallow breathing and spatial orientation shifts, including this diagonal movement, avoidance of central space and preferences for corners or periphery.
[00:19:24] And all these patterns that they emerge before the conscious decision making.
[00:19:32] And clinically yielding trauma may present as excessive apologizing, difficulty asserting needs, chronic over accommodation, over functioning, over serving discomfort with intention or recognition, or avoidance of central roles or leadership.
[00:20:02] Clinically also yielding trauma can present in misplaced rage. And very common is a road rage.
[00:20:11] And this is one of the main reasons, I believe, for the road rage so how it presents itself.
[00:20:21] It can be not in a fear, but in a sudden anger.
[00:20:27] And one of the clearest places, it appears, is when someone cuts in front of you while you're waiting in line for coffee, or you're standing at the bank driving on the road.
[00:20:43] And that reaction when you see someone is cutting in front of you can be immediate and very intense.
[00:20:51] Where your body floods with rage far larger than the moment seems to warrant.
[00:21:00] And this is where many people misunderstand themselves.
[00:21:05] What erupts in these moments is rarely about this person cutting this line.
[00:21:15] It is all about all the lines you were forced to yield in to survive.
[00:21:27] Because yielding trauma trains the body to step aside automatically to make room, to disappear, to let others go first.
[00:21:39] Because safety, once dependent on it, your life dependent on it.
[00:21:45] And you learned often subconsciously, that asserting space could cost you protection, right?
[00:21:55] So when someone cuts in front of you, now it's not registered a, uh, minor inconvenience.
[00:22:04] It registered A violation of your existence.
[00:22:09] And what your nervous system is saying to you is, I don't matter.
[00:22:19] I'm invisible, I'm not seen.
[00:22:24] I must move again for someone else.
[00:22:29] That's the cause of road rage.
[00:22:34] Not that someone. That someone can be Uber driver who in one hour tries to make as many deliveries he can so he can make money and pay for food.
[00:22:49] It can be a jerk.
[00:22:52] But it has nothing to do with the source of wound.
[00:23:02] It's rarely about, uh, traffic.
[00:23:06] It's about your body finally protesting decades of enforced yielding, Years of being small, years of being made small and quiet and compliant or grateful, invisible, quote, unquote, uh, kind.
[00:23:29] So we have this misplaced placed rage and understanding this changes everything.
[00:23:40] If you're afraid of driving because of road rage, use this, work on this.
[00:23:48] Pause, pause in that moment and reorient, reorient, do the U turn toward yourself.
[00:23:56] This is how you can also teach your clients. If you're therapist where you can say, so I'm now talking as you are my client, you can say to yourself, this moment is not making me small.
[00:24:15] This person cutting in front of me is not erasing, uh, me.
[00:24:21] These are very good reminders.
[00:24:25] You can say, I'm no longer in the condition where my survival depends on disappearing.
[00:24:35] I immigrated 10 years ago.
[00:24:39] War is over five years ago if that's true for you. And yes, when someone cuts the line in front of us, that context does not excuse the behavior and lack of mannerism, but it separates the present moment from the past trauma.
[00:25:01] That doesn't mean you need to be silent.
[00:25:05] And yet you just observe your rage where you can say, hey buddy, the line is behind my back.
[00:25:18] So being cut off is not the same as being erased. Uh, and this will not eliminate anger, but your anger, your rage needs to be placed in a rightful place to the core. Wounding. Also, let's look at the yielding trauma through social, political and intersectional lens.
[00:25:47] Who does it affect?
[00:25:51] It affects women under patriarchal conditioning, Black indigenous people of color navigating surveillance and racialized threat, visible and invisible minorities, undocumented, displaced refugees, survivors of war and genocide, exiled population, victims of domestic abuse.
[00:26:31] And in this context, you need to approach your client through this context, right?
[00:26:40] Their yielding becomes a protective strategy against social punishment.
[00:26:55] And the goal, uh, is not to eliminate yielding, but restore a choice around yielding versus occupying, not to pathologize yielding behavior. This is very important. This is a pure survival strategy.
[00:27:14] And if it's needed, it's better to be in use.
[00:27:23] It needs to be in use. If it's needed. And this is reality for many groups. Also, one goal would be to expand, uh, tolerance for visibility.
[00:27:39] Of course, when it's safe, only when it's safe. Someone who is undocumented, who is under constant threat, certainly will not make themselves visible, right? And something you can observe on yourself and start working on it is a posture and gait, which means how your body holds itself and how it moves through space.
[00:28:14] Is it moving with conscious awareness or unconscious?
[00:28:21] Because these are nervous system organized patterns.
[00:28:26] Posture is how your body organize itself while still.
[00:28:34] And that would be how upright or collapsed your spine is, where your head is positioned, how open or guarded the chest is, how the shoulders are held, where tension lives at the rest, and how much space the body allows itself to occupy. Somatic experiencing therapists and anyone who works in a field of soma somatic therapy, we are trained to observe this also. You can observe this on your body as well.
[00:29:14] Very important would be gait. Gait is how your body moves while walking.
[00:29:22] That includes speed of walking, stride length, direction of movement, how much the arms swing in yielding trauma. Gait often looks like walking diagonally instead of straight or shortened steps, quick yielding to others path, pausing or slowing to let others pass, or being always close to the walls or edges of space.
[00:30:01] Also, we can see minimal arm swing automatically. Observing clients, yourself, people matters because it shows us what the nervous system believes, not what the person thinks.
[00:30:25] Someone can say, I'm confident, I'm fine, I feel safe now.
[00:30:31] But body can still say so loudly, I must not be seen, I should not interrupt.
[00:30:44] The trauma is stored procedurally.
[00:30:47] The body has not yet adapted to safety, and cognitive reassurance alone will not resolve it.
[00:30:59] And we have many clients who spend years in a talk therapy, which is important at the beginning. But this is not healing of a deep trauma stored in your nervous system.
[00:31:15] It needs to be healed bottom up. So from your body up to your mind. Why?
[00:31:23] Because when we observe body, your body reveal history without words.
[00:31:31] It show adaptation rather than pathology.
[00:31:35] As I close this episode today, if you recognize yourself here, know this.
[00:31:44] Your body did not yield because it was weak.
[00:31:51] And it's not yielding because it's weak.
[00:31:57] It's yielding because it learned how to survive.
[00:32:02] There is nothing to force, nothing to correct, nothing to fix, only something to notice.
[00:32:13] With so much compassion, with so much gentleness.
[00:32:20] And healing begins not by taking space aggressively, it will be too much for your nervous system, but by reclaiming choice, by letting your body learn slowly and safely that it no longer has to disappear to belong.
[00:32:45] If it needs to disappear right now to belong.
[00:32:51] There is so much love here for you.
[00:32:55] I know this space deeply and you keep yourself safe as long as you need.
[00:33:05] You will occupy the space with all your human rights.
[00:33:14] You will, because you're allowed to exist without apology, with dignity, with respect.
[00:33:29] If this is something very new for you and you never yield, you never step aside for someone else, please start doing that.
[00:33:47] Observe and step aside with kindness and respect.
[00:33:54] Because there are many people who are holding, yielding trauma.
[00:33:59] And this can be someone you really care about.
[00:34:03] This can be your neighbor, this can be a colleague.
[00:34:09] Just observe as you walk on the street, who is walking on the angle.
[00:34:17] And now I will read from my book the Trauma. We don't talk about walking at an angle piece Walking at an angle.
[00:34:39] Having a trauma body means you continuously justify your existence and excuse yourself just for taking up space.
[00:34:51] Even when you walk down the street, you minimize your presence walking at an angle, as if you're apologetic for inconveniencing anyone for even walking on the same street as they do.
[00:35:14] You yield to everyone, diverting your body like an obstacle to avoid so they can rush ahead to their jobs, families and friends, all of which are obviously more worthy and important than yours.
[00:35:44] You can buy the book the Trauma We Don't Talk about.
[00:35:49] The link is in the show notes.
[00:35:54] Take a time, reflect, pause writings down what's emerging for you, what needs to be discovered, what needs to be called.
[00:36:13] Gently and with care.
[00:36:17] I am on a mile. This is exile and rising.
[00:36:23] Please support, donate, share, check all the links in the show notes and as always, much care.
[00:36:36] Much care.
