When The Body Knows: Voice Without Adjacency

Feb 23

What does it mean to reclaim your voice when you no longer want to borrow safety from proximity to power? In this solo episode, host Robrenna explores the concept of adjacency, including how we align ourselves with power structures for protection and what happens when our bodies signal it's time to stand on our own terms.

In This Episode:

A dream that revealed how the body protects through survival and self-preservation.
Adjacency as adaptation, not weakness.
The difference between hypervigilance and lived intelligence.
How fawning functions as a trauma response alongside fight, flight, and freeze.
The hidden cost of borrowing safety through alignment with power.

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REFLECTIVE JOURNAL PROMPTS:

1. Where does my body lower itself? In what types of rooms do I shrink, soften, or disappear?

2. What specifically feels dangerous there—misunderstanding, erasure, or premature visibility?

3. Where have I borrowed safety through adjacency?

4. When have I aligned myself with power to feel protected? What did it cost me, and what did it give me?

5. What would visibility on my own terms look like?

This transcript was generated and has been edited for clarity.
Robrenna: There are moments when our bodies tell the truth before our minds can explain it. I had a dream recently. I was in a house that wasn't mine. Standing next to a tall white man near a window with long curtains, my mind tells me I'm supposed to go somewhere with the group. Someone walks into the room, he immediately begins to engage with this person.
I duck behind a table and crawl, not dramatically, not chaotically. My body just lowered itself. What stayed with me in that dream wasn't the man. It was the instinct. That's survival energy. I need to be unseen to be safe, and it made me ask a deeper question. What does it mean to reclaim your voice when you no longer wanna borrow safety from proximity to power?
Welcome, reclaiming Women. I'm Parker, your Storywork and Somatic Attachment Coach. This is reclaiming her resilience, a space for women navigating transitions, trauma, and relational and spiritual harm. If you're new here, welcome to this space where we listen to our bodies, tell our stories, and reclaim our sense of self.
So today we're talking about reclaiming voice without adjacency, and we're talking about lived intelligence in the body, the kind that isn't pathology, but wisdom earned through experience. And we're asking what it means to be visible without being erased to speak, without being extracted. And to stand without needing protection from dominance.
If your body has ever lowered itself in a room, physically or metaphorically, this conversation is for you.
So I decided to do this episode because of that dream, and the dream reflected what some of the. Experiences, some of my own experiences of using adjacency as safety and belonging, and also what it feels like to finally step into your own voice on your own terms. As always, take what resonates with you and leave the rest
so. In that dream, when I stated that I crawled, I'm not saying it was like for drama, I'm saying, I'm telling you because bodies don't lie. And I've learned what we often call trauma response can sometimes be lived intelligence. My body wasn't afraid of a person. It was attuned to a room, and there's a difference.
There's something many of us have learned to do, especially as women navigating power, race, culture, and that is whether it's in the form of spiritual, political, or family systems, we learn adjacency, proximity to power as protection, alignment as safety. Safety through association through, uh, belonging.
Belonging through alignment or association. And I wanna say this gently, adjacency is not weakness. It's an adaptation. Stephen Porges, known for the polyvagal theory, talks about what happens when your body no longer feels safe. He explains how our nervous system constantly scans for neuroception of safety.
Adjacency is a form of fawning. The fourth trauma response after fight, flight, freeze, and fawning is used to appease power to stay safe. Betrayal Trauma expert Jennifer Freyd informs us that when the system we depend on for safety is also the source of harm, the body learns to ignore its own voice to maintain the attachment.
This is common in spiritual and family systems. And when I say spiritual systems, I'm not just talking about church. I mean a system that uses a higher being or higher power to wield guilt or shame. It's a form of coercive control. I just finished reading a book called Fawning by Dr. Ingrid Clayton, and she states that fawning is how we manage the emotions of unsafe people to ensure our own survival. When we talk about adjacency, we mean a body that has become a master at reading the room. It's a strategy of the nervous system to mirror or align with the threat, but there's an internal cost.
Dr. Clayton reminds us that at times we gravitate towards adjacency to ensure survival, while acknowledging that the people of the systems we depend on may not be safe, can feel too overwhelming for our psyche to bear or for our hearts and minds to take in. She emphasizes that we often develop these adaptations to craft a reality where we feel okay.
As long as we are aligned with what we believe to be true in this process, we may unintentionally exchange our authentic voice for a sense of predictable safety. Seeking comfort. In the familiar, there is a cost to the adjacency. There's a subtle erasure that can happen, and the internal split between belonging and selfhood.
But what happens when your body no longer feels safe? Borrowing safety. Now, we've been told at times that a finely tuned nervous system is overreacting, but what if it's informed? What if the body that lowers itself has learned something real about misunderstanding, erasure and being asked to speak before ready?
Hypervigilance is fear without context. Reactivity without clarity lived. Intelligence is discernment shaped by experience, pattern recognition, relational discernment, and wisdom earned through proximity to harm, and I personally refuse to call wisdom pathology.
Crawling is preverbal. We do this before language, most of us before choice, before strategy. It's what the nervous system does when the body remembers with the mind rationalizes visibility feels unsafe. Or when power feels asymmetrical, power over instead of power with or when the environment is or becomes unpredictable.
This is not with weakness what you're experiencing. The body mobilized low to the ground, crawling. Is data, it's intelligence. This may happen metaphorically in rooms where belonging is conditional. Rooms where you are present, but not centered. Rooms where the cost of being misunderstood feels too high.
There comes a time when the cost of the adaptation exceeds the benefit of the protection.
Dr. Clayton describes this as the moment the conditioning starts to feel like a cage. Your body is essentially saying, I can no longer pretend that being near this power is the same thing as being safe. The lived intelligence that once saved you is now signaling it's time to leave the perimeter.
The body crawled because it learned that remaining standing or upright equals exposure and being low. It equals protection. When I don't control the narrative, invisibility keeps me intact. Hack.
How are we reclaiming voice as internal authority? How do we do that after relying on this adjacency? Well, in her book, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House, Audre Lorde argues that using the tools of the powerful adjacency will never lead to true liberation. And reclaiming voice without adjacency doesn't mean becoming loud at all.
It's becoming sovereign. Standing within yourself, listening to our bodies, and providing the care that it needs helps us to become what? Resmaa Menakem in My Grandmother's Hands, his book, names as settled bodies. No longer feeling safe, borrowing safety. It's about moving from a borrowed calm to a self-generated somatic healing calm.
It means that I don't need proximity to power to validate my presence. I don't need to be extracted to prove I have something to say. I don't need to stand in rooms that make my body lower itself, and when I do stand, it's because I chose to too.
Reclaiming voice without adjacency means speaking because you are ready. Choosing rooms instead of enduring them, not needing endorsement. From power not shrinking to remain safe,
and sometimes it simply means staying up. Right.
If your body has ever crawled, shrunk, quieted, or stepped back, I invite you to consider this. That might not have been weakness; it may have been intelligence. Imagine staying upright, not performing, not hiding. Just being present in a body that no longer needs to disappear, and now you get to decide where you stand.
Okay, so some of you may be wondering, well, how did the dream end? Did I stand? The answer is after I hid, the two men had a conversation. My dream moved on eventually. Not only did I stand, but I left the room. My body finally let itself rise, and I moved forward into the next space.
I had like to invite you now to pause and reflect on your own experiences. To take a moment to consider your body, your voice, and the spaces that you inhabit. You might notice patterns you've been carrying, the ways you shrink, the ways you borrow safety, the ways you might begin to speak or show up on your own terms.
I have a few reflective journal prompts, uh, that I'm going to put these in the show notes, but I invite you to think about where does my body lowers itself and what types of rooms do I shrink, soften, or disappear?
What specifically feels dangerous there? Misunderstanding, erasure, or premature visibility.
Where have I borrowed safety through adjacency?
When have I aligned myself with power to feel protected?
What did it cost me,
and what did it give me?
What would visibility on my own terms look like?
Well, thank you for joining me today on the episode. My voice is cracking now. I would thank you for joining me today on the episode and, um, for being on this journey with me as I navigate myself in real time. Reclaiming voice without adjacency. Not aligning to power, prestige, or status, but allowing myself to build slowly, softly.
I thank you again. You could be listening to anything, but you've chosen to spend your time with me today, and I greatly appreciate it. I will be ending season two in March, and I will be on a sabbatical. Until next time, take good care of yourself and your neighbor.
If something you heard today stirred recognition or softened something within you, allow yourself a moment to pause and breathe. Reclaiming HER Resilience is executive produced and edited by me, Robrenna Parker. If this podcast encourages you, I invite you to follow, subscribe, or leave a review.
This podcast is published by RHR Media Co. Where voice is honored, and the story unfolds. RHR Media Co is the publishing and media arm of Reclaiming Her Resilience, LLC, creating story-centered media that honors voice, restores agency, and invites women back into authorship of their own lives. Your story matters, and you're not alone, and it deserves to be held with care, consent, and choice until we meet again.
Take gentle care.