In the early 50s, a teenage girl mistook her first period for an STD and ended her life. She had not been taught about her reproductive system and didn’t know that what her body was doing was natural.
While this may seem like a one-off story, and you might have the urge to think that would never happen to me, or if you’re a man, that can’t happen to me—this isn’t just about periods.
There are a lot of naturally occurring bodily and emotional processes that culture and society shame us for. And sometimes, a natural reaction to stress or trauma can lead us to feel ashamed, alone, or convinced that there’s something fundamentally wrong with us.
It’s important to understand what natural responses may look like, because even though they’re normal, it may not feel that way. Especially when no one has ever shown us.
Natural responses
If you touch something hot, you flinch, wince, and pull your hand away. No one would fault you for that.
But if you’re in an overwhelming situation and start to cry, which is your body’s natural way of releasing tension, then, depending on your gender and who you are with, you might be judged.
This isn’t to say every emotion should be dumped out in public with no filter. But a release of tears, inside safe boundaries, is not a failure—it’s a function. And since a release a tears can help us regulate, it’s smart.
When we label our natural responses negatively, we hide them, reject them, and feel ashamed for having them. In this process, we end up losing ourselves
This can look like:
- Shutting down emotionally during conflict because that felt safest growing up
- Overexplaining yourself out of fear you’ll be misunderstood or rejected
- Reacting to a situation based on how a character responded in a movie or TV show because you’ve never seen it modeled in real life
- Getting angry at yourself for freezing in a stressful moment, even though freeze is a common stress response
- Feeling guilt for needing rest because you were praised for being “low-maintenance”
- Laughing during a sad or serious moment because you don’t know what else to do
- Disassociating during a crisis and using unhealthy coping mechanisms after it ends
Long-term damages
This isn’t just about feeling guilty and moving on. When we don’t understand our natural responses, or we constantly beat ourselves up for having them, it can lead to long-term self-rejection.
Over time, we may start to distrust our instincts, think we’re too sensitive, too reactive, too cold, too needy.
This can lead to:
- Deep self-hatred that hides beneath perfectionism or people-pleasing
- Avoiding relationships or opportunities because we don’t think we’re capable of being a “good” partner, friend, or parent
- Taking on shame from abusive or toxic situations that was never ours to carry
- Feeling like we’re hard to love, simply because our natural responses weren’t understood or accepted
- Struggling with identity and more susceptibility to trends and societal pressure
- Unhealthy coping, overspending, and addition
- Emotional illiteracy and anger issues
When we don’t name what’s natural, we start to think there is something wrong with us for simply being who we are. We’re more likely to be influenced by bad actors with extreme messages about who we need to be. And instead of working with our emotions, we spend years trying to reject them—as a result, we reject ourselves.
Name and remove shame
When we name our natural responses for what they are, we take back power and stop carrying shame for being human. And when we stop internalizing reactions that were never wrong to begin with we stop wasting energy on rejecting ourselves.
This isn’t just about feeling better in the moment, it’s about coming back to ourselves.
Many people live with a constant, quiet inner turmoil that gets labeled as depression, when, in many cases, it’s the natural result of being disconnected from who we are and what we really feel.
When we remove the shame around natural responses:
- We stop gaslighting ourselves for how we respond to life
- We get clearer on what we actually want rather than what we were conditioned to want
- We become better at setting boundaries and recognizing manipulation
- We’re more equipped to hold abusers and harmful people accountable because we’re no longer carrying their shame
- We start to move through the world from a place of self-understanding instead of self-erasure
And this doesn’t just impact us individually.
A society where people are more emotionally literate, more self-connected, and less ashamed of their natural responses is a society that’s harder to manipulate, easier to heal, and more humane for everyone.
What natural responses look like
The first step in reducing shame, and making real societal change, is knowing what natural reactions look like.
When you understand your responses are valid, you stop questioning your sanity or value every time you feel something deeply, shut down, cry, freeze, or speak up.
When you model emotional honesty, you give others permission to do the same.
And when you no longer feel like you have to defend yourself for having a human response, instead you’ll start to wonder why someone would have a problem with it to begin with, resulting in confidence to stand firm in your experience, leading by example and educating others instead of shrinking for them.
The natural response series
To survive in this world we need to keep building a clearer, more honest understanding of ourselves.
This article outlines the foundation of the problem, but there’s still a lot more to say. Since there’s a lot to cover, this will be a running series outlining natural responses to specific experiences like trauma and being encouraged to reject our emotions.
Link articles we be posted here as they go live:
In the meantime, just know: it’s natural and normal to feel a mix of emotions when you start learning more about yourself and how you’ve been shaped.
It’s natural to feel relief that you’re not as “messed up” as you thought, excited about learning something new, annoyed or angry that you were steered in the wrong direction (sometimes by people who had good intentions but didn’t know better themselves), and overwhelmed at the idea of changing how you respond.
That doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong, it means you’re starting to see things clearly, and that’s the beginning of coming back to yourself.