We say we want expansion. But have we built the framework to hold our expanded selves?
What happened when we dared to expand before? We were punished. Punished for choosing freedom over marriage, over silence, over systems that were never made for us.
In the 1970s, our mothers needed permission to borrow money, male signatures to buy homes, co-signers to build futures in their own names. In many countries, we still can’t vote.
This is the soil we come from. And our bodies remember.
We are living in homes built on fear-coded DNA, constructed from survival blueprints passed down by an unshakably resilient lineage.
Our habituated smallness isn’t mindset. It’s memory etched into the nervous system.
So when expansion knocks, we feel threatened.
Our inner homes tighten.
We freeze.
We call it resistance, but it’s really learned protection.
So we build false freedoms… tiny windows to breathe inside our walls. We learn to survive through:
- Peacekeeping inauthenticities (smiling while screaming inside)
- Resentful responsibility (doing it all, hating it all)
- Masked intimacy (sharing everything except what actually matters)
- Quiet rebellion (saying yes while plotting no)
- Perfectionist paralysis (needing it to be flawless or not doing it at all)
- Hypervigilant harmony (constantly reading the room, managing everyone’s emotions)
- Manipulative vulnerability (sharing pain to control outcomes)
- Passive-aggressive truths (saying what we mean in ways that can’t be heard)
- Self-sabotaging caregiving (giving until we disappear)
- Strategic shrinking (making ourselves small to stay safe)
- Codependent generosity (giving to get)
- Numbed ambition (wanting less to hurt less)
- Choked identities (becoming who they need)
- Defiant indulgence (saying yes to excess as a form of rebellion after deprivation)
- Body betrayal (disconnecting from physical needs, desires, intuition)
- Grateful settling (accepting less while being thankful for crumbs)
- Invisible competence (doing exceptional work while staying unnoticed)
- Caretaking control (managing others’ lives to feel needed or safe)
- Calculated honesty (sharing selective truths to control outcomes or avoid rejection)
These architectural lies are not badges of honor but decorated cracks we breathe through. Brief inhales of freedom, just enough to keep from suffocating.
And then we wonder why we cannot hold the power we crave. The power to speak lightning. To lead storms. To live unapologetically vast.
Because the bigness of who we are cannot fit into the smallness we’ve inherited from childhood wounds, from cultural cages, from bloodlines forced to bow.
Our bodies, wired to fear the unfamiliar, short-circuit in the face of expansion: anxiety, depression, shutdown, manipulation, overdrive.
Because how can we run new power tools in a body that still runs on old circuits?
To hold more power, we must rewire our inner system.
The body.
The breath.
The beliefs.
Transform your resistance into your roadmap.
A quiet thunder in your chest, calling you back to the vastness you once knew.
Before the world convinced you that smallness was safety.
Before you were taught to survive by shrinking.
You’ve known your vastness far longer than you’ve been told to be small.
This shrinking isn’t the truth. It’s the interruption.
Reminding you that you were whole for eons, compressed into smallness in the blink of history.
Resistance is your archaeology.
Every buried layer tells the story of your smallness, and the way back to your bigness… your full power.
If this stirred something in you, trust it. Subscribe to reclaim your power.
This post was inspired by a powerful conversation on Kate Northrup’s podcast: Rebel Spending, Financial Freedom & Sabotage. If money habits fascinate you, it’s a must-listen.
