You Cannot Keep Calling It “Unsafe” Every Time Expression Feels Uncomfortable
Expression Highway will create heat, but discomfort is not always evidence that the relationship is dangerous.
Data Collectors,
I hope you are all doing well. When I think about writing this essay I too want to model what touching expression highway is like for me. My personal life feels chaotic at the moment. So many bits of uncertainty, the unknown, are we moving? Are we not moving? Whats the military going to do for my husband. What if, What if, What if…
For me, I have learned so much about my nervous systems need for certainty and bloody hell. It’s rough when life just can’t give you that certainty. I want to sit on expression highway with you all today and for me this is very difficult due being a private person and not really feeling the need to share every vulnerable thing that occurs in my life. However, I have been experiencing storms of burn out, marital tension, family dynamics and an overall feeling of justing wanting to crawl into bed and stay there in the fetal position. Not to be dramatic or anything. Being online is very draining, people tend to believe that once you reach a certain number of followers that you automatically have a team of people and make X amount of money. Not me. I chuckle here because a team means I would have to hire people, and hiring people requires trust, and ya girl struggles with that. 🥴 I know I know. This is apart of life I get it, but when it comes to my content and my platform, there is so much noise that it can become so overwhelming to the point where I get tempted to just unplug it all— I won’t— but I do at times need to take a step back.
Once I take a step back the questions start to happen. People DMing me, people in my personal life reaching out to me. Etc etc. I have learned so much about myself through this rewiring out of resentment series. Especially when it comes to receiving care, concern, or even love from others. I have limiting beliefs too, that I have developed from the imprints within my own timeline. Now, I have had to slow down a bit with my content, my written work, my community. All the things. I have a full case load of clients and I am doing all of this alone. Sometimes many of us out there in the wild load our plate to the brim because we feel it’s honorable, productive, whatever the narrative may be. I am realizing the implications of loading my plate while also needing to keep priority on my clients as well. It has been a whirlwind of navigating the demands of being online, the amount of people reaching out to collaborate, and overall learning how to balance while also not losing myself in the process.
When I think about expression highway I have thought so much about my own personal expression within my platform. You see I try to keep it very educational. Not sharing too much about my own personal life and challenges. There is a push to share more but I also don’t want to over share. That’s an art in itself. For me— expression can feel very vulnerable, especially publicly. Now, when it comes to expression in our relationships—whether romantic or platonic or with family. There is a difference between a relationship being unsafe and expression feeling unfamiliar inside your body. I think we keep collapsing those two experiences into one, and then we wonder why so many relationships stay stuck on Logistics Highway, why they stay superficial or even shallow in nature. We talk about schedules, groceries, children, work, money, appointments, gossip of others and everything else that keeps the household moving, relationship intact, or connection feeling stable. The moment we have to say, “This hurt me,” “I miss you,” “I need more affection,” or “I am scared you don’t understand me,” suddenly the whole nervous system starts acting like we are standing in front of a firing squad.
That does not automatically mean the person across from you has created an unsafe environment. Sometimes they have. Some people mock vulnerability, interrupt, dismiss, punish honesty, weaponize what you share, or become so defensive that there is no room left for your experience. We need to be honest about that. But we also need to be honest about the possibility that nobody ever taught you how to stay present through the heat of expression, just like nobody may have taught the other person how to stay present in that same heat while being on the receiving end.
Let me explain.
Expression Highway is not always peaceful. It can be clumsy, awkward, activating, embarrassing, and deeply uncomfortable. Your voice may shake. You may forget what you wanted to say. You may feel the urge to overexplain, shut down, leave the room, get louder, or suddenly make the conversation about something else. That internal distress can become so intense that you conclude, “I cannot talk to you,” when what may also be true is, “I do not yet know how to tolerate what happens inside me when I speak.”
That is where distress tolerance matters.
Distress tolerance is the ability to remain present with emotional heat without immediately escaping it, exploding it, suppressing it, or handing full responsibility for it to another person. It is being able to feel exposed without deciding exposure is danger. It is being able to hear your partner misunderstand you without immediately believing they never cared. It also looks like being able to pause, clarify, breathe, and return instead of treating every imperfect conversation like proof that the relationship is doomed. Even for us with licenses and degrees, those do not exempt us from the distress tolerant skills necessary to help regulate ourselves in the face of activation.
The ability to build distress tolerance skills and have capacity for intense conversations also connects to how we receive love.
Some people deeply crave softness, care, affection, and nurturing, yet they reject it when it arrives, simply because they do not know how to receive it. A man may want to be cared for when he is sick, overwhelmed, or stressed, but his socialization may have taught him that receiving care makes him weak. A woman may want emotional support, but if care has historically come with control, disappointment, inconsistency, or a hidden cost, her body may brace against it before her mind even understands what is happening.
Then we minimize our own ache.
We say we are fine when we are not. We pull away when someone reaches for us. We laugh off what hurts. We become uncomfortable when someone tries to soothe us, hold space for us, or even be willing to just listen. We reject affection, reassurance, help, and tenderness, and then over time the people around us learn to stop offering it. They assume we do not want it. They believe we can handle everything alone. They start responding to the version of us that we have repeatedly presented.
Then the narrative becomes, “Nobody cares about me.”
That story may feel completely true by the time we say it. The affection has decreased. The check-ins have stopped. The person may no longer reach for us the way they used to. But when it comes to healing— it requires us to ask whether that absence was the beginning of the pattern or the outcome of it. For me in this example the narrative could be assuming motive, feelings of others, or potential rejection in anticipation of walking on expression highway. “What will people think of me if I share xyz.” Now, in Sav style I also have to say. Okay…and? But here are some other reflections to consider.
Did people truly refuse to care for me, or did I repeatedly make care difficult to give?
Did I communicate my needs clearly, or did I expect someone to interpret my withdrawal correctly?
Did I say, “Please sit with me,” or did I become cold and hope they would chase me?
Did I ask for affection, or did I reject it so many times that my partner learned to protect themselves from the rejection?
These questions are uncomfortable because they move us out of the courtroom and resentment loves a courtroom. It collects evidence, assigns roles, and keeps replaying the same testimony. I am the one who gives. You are the one who withholds. I am the one who tries. You are the one who does not care. Once those roles harden or start to solidify within the nervous system, confirmation bias starts to grow and it will help both people keep proving the story true. You cannot compete with another person’s limiting beliefs forever. If someone believes they are unlovable, ignored, disrespected, or destined to be abandoned, every imperfect moment can become evidence. You may offer reassurance, consistency, affection, repair, and patience, yet one missed bid for connection becomes proof that you never cared. The relationship slowly turns into an endless attempt to disprove a conclusion that existed before the current moment.
That is exhausting.
At some point, both people have to become responsible for examining the stories they keep bringing into the room. One person cannot spend the entire relationship trying to love the other person out of a belief they are committed to protecting. Reassurance can support healing, but reassurance cannot replace self-examination. Love can create safety, but love cannot force someone to trust safety when their entire identity has been organized around expecting disappointment.
This is part of rewiring out of resentment.
We have to stop automatically treating our feelings as complete evidence, or the default truth. Feelings give us information, but they do not always give us the whole story. “I feel like I cannot talk to you” deserves exploration. What happened when you tried? Were you dismissed? Were you mocked? Were you interrupted? Did the person become threatening or retaliatory? Or did your own body become so activated that you abandoned the conversation before the other person had a real opportunity to meet you? Sometimes the answer is both. Maybe your partner has poor listening skills and you also have poor distress tolerance. Maybe they become defensive and you become accusatory. Maybe you minimize your needs until you explode, and they only hear your needs once they are wrapped in criticism. Maybe both of you keep waiting for the other person to make Expression Highway completely comfortable before either of you agrees to travel it.
That road does not become easier through avoidance. It becomes easier through frequency. We must gain our frequent flyer miles on expression highway in order to build the necessary distress tolerance skills to navigate the heat and discomfort that comes with expression highway and being vulnerable. The more often we practice naming small truths, the less every conversation has to carry six months of resentment. The more often we ask directly for what we need, the less likely we are to rely on testing, withdrawal, mind-reading, or emotional scavenger hunts. The more often we practice sitting with discomfort, the less likely we are to confuse activation with danger. You do not need to wait until you are perfectly regulated to express yourself. We just need enough awareness to recognize what is happening while we are are doing the expressing. So here is an example, You can say, “I am getting overwhelmed, but I want to finish this conversation.” You can say, “I notice I want to shut down.” Or, “I need a pause, and I am willing to return.” You can also say, “I am afraid you will dismiss me, and I am trying to give you the opportunity to hear me.” That is practice.
This is vulnerable, Much of the reasons why we avoid expression highway is because of the fear of how the other party may respond to us. Shame, fear, guilt, rejection. These emotions we have not built tolerance skills for. Rewiring out of resentment requires us to become curious about our own participation without using accountability as another weapon against ourselves. The goal is not to blame yourself for every way you have felt unseen. The goal is to understand the full pattern clearly enough that you stop recreating it. Blame is also a way we get stuck in gridlock. Trying to get accountability from others while not being accountable for what we are unwilling to express—that can be problematic.
Ask yourself:
What happens inside me when someone tries to care for me?
What kind of affection do I reject even though I later complain that I am not receiving it?
When I say I cannot express myself, what specific behavior am I responding to?
Am I asking someone to disprove a belief that I have never seriously questioned?
Do I know how to stay on Expression Highway once the conversation becomes emotionally hot?
Resentment grows in the space between what we ache for and what we are willing to risk asking for.
Rewiring begins when we learn to tolerate enough discomfort to tell the truth, receive the response, and remain present in ourselves long enough to discover whether the relationship is actually unsafe or whether intimacy has simply asked us to use muscles we have never developed.
Till next time data collectors
