If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen the 13-minute video I posted last week that has since gone viral. If you don’t follow me, I want to share the video with you above.

It’s not polished or pretty; it’s raw.

If you don’t follow me on Instagram, you also wouldn’t know this video has over 1,400 comments saying things like:

“Thank you! Thank you! You just described my entire life in a single video!”

“Are we the same person? Do we have the same story?”

“I have never felt so seen.”

“OMG, thank you for giving me the words! TERROR! That’s what I feel!”

“This is me.”

 

My Instagram account has not been in favor with The Almighty Algorithm for a couple of months, and videos over 3 minutes don’t “perform well” in my experience. It genuinely never occurred to me that the video would go viral!

 

But it did.

 

It’s still going nuts with 100k views at this point. And, I don’t think that’s because I was exhibiting dramatic, unstable behavior.

 

I think it went viral because we don’t often get to witness an Animal Body telling the truth FROM INSIDE the body.

 

That phrase — the Animal Body — matters to me.

 

Your Animal Body is not your mindset, your intentions, your values, or your Authentic Self. Your Animal Body does not care about your integrity, your good intentions, or whether your behavior looks reasonable to other people.

 

Your Animal Body is much simpler than all that.

 

It is ancient. Blunt. Loyal to survival only. Unconcerned with propriety, politeness, and others’ perceptions.

 

Your Animal Body is constantly asking just one question: Am I safe or unsafe?

 

What you’ll witness in the video is my own Animal Body accessing and expressing terror.

 

My Animal Body learned early on that love, connection, and attunement could disappear without notice. My mother’s silence was dangerous. My stepfather’s power was physical and abusive.

 

Together, they created a world where my Animal Body was exploited, controlled, abandoned, coerced, abused, and silenced for their benefit.

 

So, my Animal Body adapted for mine.

 

It learned to scan, anticipate, pursue, brace, explain, and organize around preventing danger before danger even fully arrived.

 

I think that’s why so many people recognized themselves in that video. They didn’t see instability or drama or “another woman crying on the Internet for attention.” They saw my Animal Body telling the truth about the terror it felt and all the clever, creative shit it had to do to keep me alive.

 

Often, our first instinct is to label Animal Body expression in some pathological way: “Look how dysregulated her nervous system is! What a drama queen. Overreact, much?”

 

I was pathologized in my own comment section — unqualified armchair psychologists casually diagnosed me with Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).

 

But, the Animal Body isn’t disordered. When a chameleon senses danger and its body adapts by automatically changing the color of its skin, we don’t diagnose it with Spontaneous Color Changing Disorder. We marvel at how wildly and creatively adaptive the chameleon’s body is for being able to cleverly protect it in this way.

 

My Animal Body, your Animal Body, also creatively, cleverly adapted. The fact that we survived childhoods where many of us were raised by actual predators and terrorists is proof that these Animal Bodies of ours are goddamn miracles.

 

Pathologizing the miracle of survival by labeling it a disorder has collectively gaslit us into believing our bodies are the problem for surviving instead of naming that our bodies were put in impossible positions — and survived anyway.

 

It is so important that you understand that adaptation is NOT pathology.

 

A body that learned to scan, brace, over-explain, pursue, self-abandon, or panic in the face of silence is not stupid, not weak, not failing.

 

It is doing what Animal Bodies do when they have had to survive too much for too long.

 

Most people have been taught to think about healing through the language of mindset, symptoms, diagnosis, coping skills, or emotional regulation.

 

But what I am interested in is something deeper than that — what happens when your Soul Body wants authenticity, expression, and connection but your Animal Body still sees the world through terror or abandonment or pain?

 

Your Animal Body is not your enemy and never has been. It has always been on your side, even if now it’s overprotective, reactive, sensitive, exhausted, and still living on an outdated operating system.

 

If the video touched something in you, I invite you to join me for ANIMAL BODY: a 10-day immersion to come into contact with the animal in you who learned too soon that it must scan for danger, brace for impact, chase to connect, appease for approval, collapse when no one comes, and feel terror when love is uncertain.