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For most of my life I carried a weight I couldn't explain.
I had done many years of therapy and personal transformation work. Twenty years of it.
And still something felt off. Like I was missing a piece of myself I couldn't quite find.
Maybe you know that feeling too...
That sense that no matter how much work you do on yourself, something larger is still holding you back.
Like there's a weight you can't quite name.
A story that isn't entirely yours, but lives in you anyway.
If you've ever felt that way, this letter is for you.
Because today I want to talk about where that weight might actually be coming from.
And when we understand it, it changes everything.
All of us have been shaped by systems larger than ourselves.
Patriarchy. Colonialism. Capitalism. Racism. Misogyny. Sexism. Cultural conditioning. Religious ideologies that told us who we were allowed to be.
These systems show up everywhere.
In the cultures we grow up in. In economic structures that measure our worth by our productivity. In social expectations around gender, belonging, and how much space we're allowed to take up. In religious teachings that policed our bodies and our expression. In the dominant ideology of the country we live in.
These are not abstract concepts.
They live in our bodies.
Patriarchy benefits from compliant women. Colonial systems sever us from land and lineage. Capitalism tells us we are only as valuable as what we produce.
And so we learned to shrink.
Of course we did.
It was the only way to survive.
But shrinking has a cost.
It shows up as numbness. As over-functioning. As hyper-independence. As the mind loops that won't quiet down at 3am.
It shows up as perfectionism. As people-pleasing. As staying busy so you never have to feel what's underneath.
It shows up as calling your exhaustion strength.
As spiritual bypass — reaching for the light because sitting in the dark feels too dangerous.
As a cynicism that, if you look closely, is really just disappointment that has nowhere to go.
These are not character flaws.
These are adaptations.
Intelligent, necessary adaptations to systems that were never designed to support your wholeness.
When you finally understand that these patterns — this weight that you carry — aren't personal failures but adaptations to systems that were never designed to support you, something in your DNA changes.
I remember the moment it happened for me.
I was in a room full of women who looked like me — women of color, daughters of immigrant women, women navigating these systems from the inside — and someone named it out loud.*
This weight you carry. This shrinking. This over-functioning.
It's not because you're broken.
It's because you've been navigating systems that benefit from your compliance, your silence, your smallness.
And I realized — I had spent twenty years in spaces that didn't have language for this. White spaces. Spaces that talked about healing as if these larger forces didn't exist.
And so I carried the weight in silence, thinking it was just me.
But it wasn't just me.
In that room, I finally saw it. Finally understood it. Finally felt the weight lift — just a little.
And for the first time, I felt compassion for myself instead of shame.
For a long time, much of healing work has focused primarily on the family system.
And that work is important.
Our early relationships shape us in profound ways.
But the family is not the only system that influences who we become.
These forces influence how we relate to our bodies. To our emotions. To pleasure. To anger. To rest. To desire. To our sense of belonging.
If you've worked with a therapist or coach and still feel like something is missing, here's why this might be.
Most therapeutic and coaching approaches work within the existing system — they don't always question it. They are designed to help you cope, adapt, and move forward.
They don't name the systems that created these patterns in the first place.
They don't ask:
What if your people-pleasing isn't just a family dynamic, but an adaptation you learned to stay safe in a world that punishes you for taking up space and speaking your truth?
What if your perfectionism isn't just a personal pattern, but the internalized voice of capitalism that measures your worth by your productivity?
What if the numbness — the disconnection from your body and your feelings — isn't a personal failure, but a brilliant survival strategy in a world that wasn't safe enough for you to feel?
These are not character flaws. They are survival strategies. And they make complete sense given everything you have been navigating.
Real healing has to ask these questions. Real healing has to go there. And even further than that — it has to explore the anger, the grief, the shame, the parts of you that have been buried.
Because without that understanding, even the best healing work stays incomplete.
If you have carried this weight for a long time — if you have done the work and still wondered why something felt missing — I want you to know something.
It was never just you.
It was never your fault.
The weight you have been carrying has a name.
It has a history.
And it has been carried by more women than you know — women who looked like you, who tried like you, who longed for something more like you.
That moment of recognition — when we finally understand why we have struggled, why we have shrunk, why we have over-functioned and people-pleased and called our exhaustion strength — that moment is not just relief.
It is the beginning of something.
Because when we understand the systems that shaped us, we stop blaming ourselves.
And when we stop blaming ourselves, something begins to loosen.
Something that has been held for a very long time.
And in that loosening — in that first exhale — something new becomes possible.
In my next letter I want to talk about what that something is.
So stay tuned because there is more to come.
With love,
Teresa
*That experience happened inside The Alignment Sanctuary, held by Dr. Rocío Rosales Meza — a Seer, Medicine Woman, and Counseling Psychology PhD whose decolonial healing work cracked something open in me that twenty years of healing hadn't touched.
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