Your Body is Not Broken: How Sensitive Bodies Adapt to a Complex World
“I feel so betrayed by my body. Why is it so broken?”
I look into the imploring eyes of the woman sitting across from me. My chest feels heavy - I notice, wondering if my body is quietly mirroring the weight she is carrying in her own tender heart.
This is not the first time I’ve been asked this question. In fact, this feels deeply familiar.
There is a particular kind of woman who often finds her way to my somatic nutrition therapy couch.
She arrives with a body in pain: joints that flare without warning, digestion that feels unpredictable, a nervous system that oscillates between vigilance and collapse. She may carry diagnoses like autoimmune disease, dysautonomia, IBS, reproductive hormone disruption, or chronic fatigue. She may also carry a long and complicated relationship with food.
When I sit with these women, part of me wants to gather them into my arms, reassuring them that their bodies are the furthest thing from broken.
But that is not my role.
My role is to sit beside them. To listen with love. To create space for a different relationship with their body to emerge - one grounded in curiosity, compassion, and a growing trust in the extraordinary wisdom held within.
This is not simple work.
By the time she arrives in my clinic, she is often exhausted from years of trying to fix herself: following protocols, rules, and plans; bouncing between specialists because they are too complex; being repeatedly prodded and tested, only to be told her bloods are “normal.” She has often been told - directly or subtly - that her body is malfunctioning, failing to regulate itself properly, or worse, that she is overreacting, hysterical, a hypochondriac.
And so, my therapy couch becomes an invitation to slow down and begin to listen, and from there a very different story starts to emerge.
Not of a body that is broken, but of a body responding exactly as it has been shaped to do.
A relational body in a complex world
In my training, I learned to study the body by dividing it into systems: the nervous system; the immune system; the digestive system; the endocrine system.
This way of learning is useful, even necessary. But it is incomplete, because bodies do not experience life in compartments, and what we now understand through fields like psychoneuroimmunoendocrinology is that these systems are in constant conversation, responding to one another, and to the world around us, all the time. It’s why stress is never “just psychological”. Inflammation is never “just physical”. Hormones, immunity, digestion, and neural signalling are woven together in an ongoing dialogue shaped by safety, threat, nourishment, rest, and meaning.
This means that a body which has learned to stay alert - to push through, to brace, to endure - will begin to express that vigilance biologically.
The nervous system remains on watch.
The immune system stays activated.
Digestion becomes erratic or inflamed.
Hormonal rhythms lose their steadiness.
These are not separate problems. They are different expressions of the same adaptive intelligence. An intelligence which is shaped by what happens inside the body, and by the conditions it must survive within.
Our nervous systems are constantly orienting to other nervous systems - reading tone of voice, facial expression, pace, power, and belonging. Safety and danger are learned in relationship.
Our immune systems respond not only to pathogens, but to prolonged stress, grief, social precarity, and the quiet absence of rest and repair. Vigilance becomes biological.
Our digestive systems do not simply process nutrients - they listen, registering speed, pressure, scarcity, and the conditions under which food is eaten.
Even our connective tissue - the fascia that weaves through every muscle and organ - carries the imprint of chronic tension and adaptation, despite being largely absent from mainstream medical and nutrition trainings.
Beyond the body itself, we are shaped by wider systems too:
Food systems that prioritise efficiency over ecology, leaving many people doing the best they can within limited, imperfect choices, constrained by access, time, money, and energy.
Social systems that elevate productivity over rhythm, independence over interdependence, and self-control over communal care.
Cultural narratives that frame sensitivity as weakness, rather than as a form of deep attunement.
None of this is a personal failing; it is simply the terrain modern bodies are navigating.
From this perspective, symptoms begin to look less like dysfunction, and more like adaptation.
Where food fits into this conversation
When we understand the body as a relational system, our relationship with food also begins to make sense: control around eating; restriction; hypervigilance; bingeing; fear of fullness.
These are not failures of willpower or knowledge, but nervous system strategies - attempts to establish safety, predictability, or relief in bodies that have learned the world is unpredictable or overwhelming.
Food becomes charged not because we are broken, but because nourishment, scarcity, pleasure, and threat have become entangled over time.
This is why working with food in isolation so often falls short - and why purely behavioural or cognitive approaches can feel incomplete for sensitive, chronically stressed, inflamed bodies.
Somatic nutrition therapy as I practise it
This is the lens of somatic nutrition therapy as I practise it.
An approach that honours food and physiology. That understands trauma not just as a story in the mind, but as patterns held in nerves, immunity, digestion, and rhythm. That listens to the body as an intelligent, adaptive system - rather than a problem to be solved.
Healing, from this place, is not about fixing ourselves to meet the demands of a rigid world.
It is about restoring relationship with food, with the body, and with the environments we are always responding to.
A closing note
Many of the women I work with have been told their bodies are too sensitive.
But that’s not how I see it. I believe these bodies are exquisitely perceptive - shaped for responsiveness in a world that has forgotten how to move slowly, cyclically, and with care.
And so, the work at Alitus is an invitation to listen again. To trust the body’s language. A place to remember that healing is not domination - it is dialogue.
This way of listening to the body is the foundation of my work at Alitus.
In sessions, we explore food, physiology, and the nervous system together - gently, lovingly, collaboratively, and at a pace your body can tolerate. There is no pressure to fix or override what is happening. Instead, we build safety, curiosity, and relationship, allowing the body’s patterns to be met with understanding rather than force.
If this perspective resonates, you can learn more about working together.