When the Body Ends the Bargain: Healing Lineage by Ending Self-Abandonment
This writing moves deeper into the cost my body carried, and the lineage contract my burnout finally ended some years ago. I use bodily language to describe what I feel in my body as the cost of a prolonged state of survival which eroded at my core. When I speak of the nervous system as currency, it means my body became the payment. The price my body paid is not only metaphorical. I am naming the ways my body was required to override and sacrifice itself to survive harmful systems and relationships.
My mind always scanning, locked out from rest.
My heart under emotional weight, overextending sustainability.
My organs in deep, chronic stress, tension, and exhaustion.
And in my blood, the chemistry of prolonged and inter-generational, erosive survival.
For those of us who grew up without the attunement, care, and protection needed to build emotional skin and safeguard inner strength, this erosion extracts from our core of life itself. Self-sacrifice and self abandonment develop out of necessity, in environments that require this in exchange for survival, for the illusion of safety, belonging, approval, or love — all of which are basic human needs. My entire being was paying the cost long before I understood there was a price.
This erosion is often unnamed, quiet, gradual, and normalized over time. Many do not recognize the cost until the body can no longer bear it. I share my own story to make this cost visible to others, in service of humanity.
I wrote this for anyone whose body has paid a cost too high.
I wrote this for my children, in time — the freedom that comes from ending this generational contract is yours now, too.
I wrote this for the little girl who had to self-abandon to survive and create safety for others.
Little girl,
You are free…
My burnout was my body’s awakening.
A final refusal to keep using my nervous system as currency.
For many years, I worked inside a system where my body paid a price I was not aware of.
My mind.
My heart.
My organs.
My blood.
My nervous system.
My sanity.
For crumbs of belonging.
Small.
Scattered.
Conditional crumbs.
I’d already been trading my nervous system to try to make a marriage work.
To become a mother.
To hold my family together.
But I never considered me. That she might have limits to what she can bear.
And for how long she can bear it.
Back then, there was an unnamed, hidden cost I didn’t know about.
I only knew to consistently force my body to override any stress signals.
From childhood, I had learned to ignore the constant burning in my stomach,
the painful tightening,
the knots within.
The no inside of me was easy to silence.
I learned this by watching my mother do the same.
I watched her override her own body to survive my father’s brutality.
My mother carried incomprehensible self-hatred.
And in loving her,
I learned to carry it too.
That inheritance did not make me broken.
It made me adapted to seamlessly disconnect from stress and danger signals in my body.
This is how a powerful, religious system found me.
My childhood fragmentation was cemented in adulthood through this clear message:
Only the spirit is good.
In that world, the goal was to overcome my own heart.
To overcome my own body.
To conquer the parts that were not “spiritual”enough.
And the way to do that was through more sacrifice…
More prayer.
More self-erasure.
More faith.
More self-abandonment.
After many years of self-sacrifice, my body started screaming for help.
The religious message was clear, “something’s wrong with you.”
And I believed it.
The extraction in this system was not only energetic — it drew deep from my heart, my spirit, my body, and from my deepest internal core that sustains life.
It mirrored the extraction I had known in my family of origin. There are some who are skillful at extracting, and discarding once they’re done.
In this system, more and more was required to earn a conditional place at the table.
But all of this felt familiar to me.
So I gave all.
My heart.
My mind.
My organs.
My blood.
My energy.
My nervous system.
Sacrifice was easy.
It was home.
I had been trained for this my entire childhood.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
At this tender age I learned that if I wanted to save my mother from my father’s violence,
I had to give it all.
My heart.
My mind.
My energy.
My blood.
My organs.
My nervous system.
My childhood.
I had to give it all until collapse.
So I did.
Again and again.
This cycle repeated throughout my childhood:
Give all.
Save her.
Collapse.
At that age, it wasn’t about belonging or safety.
Those were never even options.
The task was survival.
Buy her more time.
Save her life again.
This is where the bargain was presented.
At two.
And three.
And four, and five.
Her life.
In exchange for mine.
A little girl’s impossible bargain with her father’s violence to save her mother’s life.
This agreement matured later in exploitive systems that recognized my ability for chronic self-override, high pain threshold, and misplaced loyalty.
Systems that normalize, reward, and exploit our endurance and self-sacrifice.
Some years ago, unbeknownst to me, my body began a slow, painful process of breaking that agreement.
The bargain of the little girl to save her mother’s life in exchange for my own, was still at work deep within me.
This bargain showed up in many ways in my marriage,
and in systems that presented themselves as family, but fed on my self-abandoning to maintain their power.
So for me,
burnout was not failure…
It was painful. Yes.
Excruciating.
But for me, burning out was the beginning of healing my lineage from pain, violence, self-erasure, and self-sacrifice.
A sacred refusal to keep using my nervous system as currency for approval and counterfeit belonging and love.
The only way to finally begin to heal
My heart.
My mind.
My blood.
My organs.
My nervous system.
My body.
My lineage.
My childhood.
For me, burnout was…
Justice.
