Braking, not Broken
Shifting from freeze to flow in the face of cultural conditioning.
This essay shares some very personal pieces of my journey—particularly around sexuality and money—that feel important and healing to speak aloud. It’s also a final call to join us for Sex, G⟡d, & Money. If you’ve been circling this “course”, I hope this gives you a deeper sense of what is underneath this work, and what might be possible for you inside it. Today is the last day to register, and we begin on Sunday.
If you have any questions or concerns about joining, please feel so welcome to reach out. This is tender material in all of our lives, which is why we take a highly relational approach to the support and connection we offer, and that often begins before someone signs up. Know you can reach out to and I any time to help you clarify if this is a good choice for you right now. A good fit and good timing is much more important to us than sales, so we’ll always approach those conversations honestly and with no pressure.
I very rarely use mechanical metaphors. This publication is literally called The Living World because I am incredibly focused on, and passionate about, shifting our language and worldview from the Clockwork Universe of recent centuries toward an integrated Living Systems view of life.
So when a mechanical metaphor teaches me something and makes a substantial difference in my life, I pay attention. That happened a few years ago in the first session I had with the first therapist I’d seen since college.
The result I was seeking in therapy was to have a more reliably steady sex drive, one which reflected the love and passion I had for my partner (now husband). Emotional and intellectual intimacy flowed more beautifully between us than anything I’d ever experienced before, but something was stuck in my ability to open to physical intimacy. Not always, but I had the sense that I was only able to connect with the physical dimension of my love at about 20% of what I could, what I wanted to, but something in me felt frozen.
This was a few months before I took my first professional training on facilitating Post-Traumatic Growth in individuals and groups, and a few years before Seth and I would begin serious study and practice of the nervous system.
So the metaphor my therapist shared with me that first session really stuck with me because it was early framing of something I’ve continued to study and understand in myself, others, and our culture as a whole. He said,
“What happens when you press the gas and brakes at the same time?“
Now, I’m going to tell you something that I rarely talk about publicly because I’ve been shamed a lot for it in my life (but we’re practicing the Prosocial Shame Ladder here), which is that at that point, in my mid-20’s I had never driven a car before. So I wasn’t actually able to answer that question. But this is what the AI tool that we can’t get rid of from google says when I asked the same question:
Pressing the gas and brakes simultaneously creates a conflict, with the brakes generally overriding the accelerator, causing the car to slow down or potentially stop. This can lead to erratic movements, stalling, or damage to the vehicle. In modern cars, the brake override system recognizes this action and prioritizes braking to prevent unintended acceleration.
See where I’m getting here?
Our approach in therapy was to understand why my foot kept hitting the breaks when every other part of me was eager to keep moving forward.
Once I understood that I wasn’t broken, that my system was simply confused, protecting me the only way it knew how, something softened. I want to be measured and say that not everything changed overnight, but actually Seth did come over within an hour of that session, and let’s just say it was memorable. I was able to access dimensions of my sexuality pretty quickly that had been locked up for a while.
That opening became a path, one I’m still walking.
And I’ve come to see that this gas-and-brake dynamic shows up not just in our individual lives, but across our entire culture. Seth has written about the collective trauma we’re all swimming in here if this is a new idea for you.
That trauma doesn’t just live in events—it gets transmitted through cultural messages. It gets handed down in family scripts, in school silence, in what we’re punished or praised for. We internalize those patterns, and they become the stories that press the brake even as our foot is on the gas.
Here are some of the common patterns I see that contribute to the gas-brakes dynamic, but I want to emphasize that we are all holding some really unique and specific nuances within our bodies, within the stories of our lives, and nothing I write could capture the nuanced narratives that shape your own life and choices. But you might see your experience in some of these:
About sex, we are given the message that we should know what we’re doing without being taught or supported in any meaningful way. We’re told to never talk about it lest we be considered crude or lewd, and when we have a bad sexual experience, we’re given the message that it’s our fault and that we were asking for it by desiring sex at all.
About God, we are taught either that only religious leaders communicate directly with the divine or that all religion and spirituality is a scam. We’re trained to not ask questions about God lest we blaspheme or sound stupid or offend someone. We hold shame for longing to connect with something greater than ourselves, and get stuck between a secular society that judges religion in an often very sloppy way, and new and old religious institutions that often miss the mark (at best) or cause very real harm as they seek to hold or grow their power.
About money, we are conditioned to not talk about our financial reality with anyone, ever, at all, unless of course we’re paying them to help us manage it. Money is private, we’re told, and that privacy is always shielding some degree of shame. We’re often given either (or both) the message that rich people are bad and greedy and/or that poor people are lazy or stupid. And of course we internalize judgements about ourselves based on where we perceive ourselves on that spectrum. We are rarely taught that each one of us is born into circumstances far beyond our control or our goodness and we each of us have to figure out how to make the best of a profoundly messed up system.
These messages are not just ideas we can “mindset“ our way out of. They live in the tissues of our bodies. They perpetuate themselves in our decision making patterns. They show up in how we self-sabotage. They create chronic tension, shutdown, shame, and self-censorship. They say:
It’s not safe to feel this.
It’s not safe to want this.
It’s not safe to need this.
We want so much.
We want intimacy, connection, pleasure.
We want to feel God, to trust something greater, to believe in what we cannot see.
We want to feel safe, resourced, generous. We want to spend money with joy, and receive it with ease.
But so often, our foot is on the brake at the same time.
And when the gas and brakes are both engaged, both in our bodies or in our culture, movement stalls. The system locks up. Worse than going nowhere, we burn out trying to force motion that our nervous system isn’t ready for. It lives in our tissues. In the tight jaw. In the held breath. In the frozen or fawning or fleeing response our nervous systems learned a long time ago. It’s not safe to go there, we were taught. Don’t ask. Don’t tell. Don’t even think about it too hard.
And yet: these are the very places where our aliveness and power are found.
This is why Seth and I created Sex, G⟡d, & Money. Not because we had the answers, but because we realized we might be among the few people equipped to hold a space for the questions. A space capacious enough, gentle enough, brave enough to meet the spiritual, somatic, systemic, and ancestral complexity these topics carry.
Because we live them.
One of the most tangible ways I’ve felt this spiral in my own life is through something surprisingly mundane: tax season.
The first year Seth and I ran Sex, G⟡d, & Money , we were brand-new parents and had made a lot of big financial and professional pivots including a lot of sacrifices in order to both be fully present parents and partners. We were still in the Trauma of Money training and actively working with this material.
We were sleep-deprived, overwhelmed, trying to keep up with everything, and there was a lot we didn’t know about the tax and financial implications of some of our choices. We didn’t file our taxes until October. When we did, we found out we owed far more than we had anticipated—and we weren’t at all prepared. The fear and shame hit hard. But we were in this work. And because we had built this container, we could meet the contraction with far more presence than we otherwise would have. We breathed through it, together. We made a plan, and we learned so much from that experience.
The next year, even though our cashflow was nearly nonexistent for a few really stressful months that year, we did a bit better. We were now registered as an S-Corp. We paid our taxes every time we paid ourselves. We filed in July. We were owed a refund—but it was absorbed by the debt from the year before that we were still paying off in a payment plan to the IRS. It was a wash. But even that felt like movement. A different kind of relationship with money was taking root.
This year, we filed within two weeks of tax day. [Almost] on time, and with so much more clarity and ease. And we’re receiving a refund—nearly $6,000.
Tracking this sequence of not just the numbers of each tax season, but the way they felt, the level of stress held in my body, the dark cloud of shame and frustration hovering over me getting lighter each year until this year, when it actually feels good. That’s the deep long spiral work we’re here for.
That arc might sound small to some of you, or it might feel to you like a really big deal. Each of us is coming from an absolutely unique place. It’s not about where anyone else is in the journey, it’s about the slow spiral of moving from stuckness, fear, and disempowerment into clarity, trust, and agency.
Shifts happen, and they are relieving, joyful, and liberating as hell. And that’s an experience we want for everyone.
Sex, G⟡d, & Money isn’t a course in any traditional sense. It’s a carefully held spiral, a space for inquiry, for unfreezing, for remembering what your system already knows but has been too afraid, too exhausted, or too alone to trust.
It’s a process of learning how to move gently and consciously when everything in you wants to both go and stop at the same time.
It’s a practice of noticing: when your foot is on the gas, what calls you forward? And when your foot is on the brake, what are you protecting?
And it’s a space to learn how to respect and tend to both without shame.
If your body is saying yes, even quietly, even with a little tremble in it, there’s still time to join us for this round. We begin this Sunday and we’d be honored to move through this spiral with you.
You’re not broken. You’re not behind.
But you might be pressing the gas and brakes at the same time.
And that’s something we can gently repattern together.