Life Journeys Counselling & Training: Sue Genest MSc, CCC.

04/27/2026

I picked up Alice Miller's The Body Never Lies on a Tuesday night when I couldn't sleep.

You know those nights. When your mind is racing but your body feels heavy. When you've been telling yourself I'm fine, I'm over it, it's all in the past—but your stomach is in knots and your shoulders are up by your ears and you have no idea why.

I'd been carrying something for years. Childhood stuff. Nothing dramatic by outward standards—no huge tragedy, no one to blame dramatically. Just the quiet kind of hurt. The kind you swallow because you love your parents. The kind you bury because they did their best. The kind that sits in your bones anyway.

And then I read this line:

"The body never lies. It speaks the truth that we refuse to listen to."

I had to put the book down. Walk around the room. Breathe.

Alice Miller was a Swiss psychologist who spent her life studying childhood trauma. And in The Body Never Lies, she drops a bombshell: you cannot cheat your own biology. You can forgive someone with your words. You can rationalize their behavior with your mind. But your body? Your body keeps score. It remembers every slap, every silence, every time you were told you were too much or not enough.

And one day—maybe in a migraine, maybe in chronic back pain, maybe in anxiety that has no name—your body will tell you the truth you've been avoiding.

This book is not gentle.

I want to warn you about that. Miller does not believe in forgiveness as a cure. In fact, she argues that forced forgiveness—the kind you offer because you're supposed to, because you've been told it's the "healing" path—can actually make you sicker. Physically sick. Because your body knows when you're lying to yourself.

She shares story after story. Patients with mysterious illnesses. People who spent decades in therapy but never got better. And the common thread? They had honored their parents. They had suppressed their rage. They had smiled and said it's fine while their bodies screamed otherwise.

It shook me.

But here's the thing. Miller doesn't leave you in despair. She offers a way out. It's not easy. It involves something she calls "the enlightened witness"—a person who can validate your truth without needing you to forgive. It involves grieving what you never got. It involves finally, finally letting yourself feel angry at the people who were supposed to protect you.

I read this book with a highlighter in one hand and tears in my eyes. Whole pages are marked. Paragraphs I've returned to again and again, like checking on a wound to see if it's healing.

It's been three weeks since I finished it. I'm still processing. But I've noticed small shifts. I don't force myself to call when I don't want to. I don't say it's okay when it's not. And for the first time in years, my back doesn't hurt as much.

Coincidence? Miller would say no.

If you grew up in a "good enough" home but still feel something is off—read this. If you have chronic pain or anxiety that doctors can't explain—read this. If you've ever thought I should be over this by now—please read this.

It won't hold your hand. It won't tell you to hug your inner child and call it done. But it will tell you the truth. And your body already knows it.

04/19/2026

There is a word I have been waiting for my entire life.

Otrovert.

I did not know I was waiting for it. That is the thing about waiting for a word you do not know exists; you just walk around with a vague, low ache that you cannot explain to anyone, because you do not have language for it yet.

Here is what the ache felt like.

It felt like being at a party and watching everyone belong to it. Not performing belonging - actually *in* it, actually carried by it, comfortable in the collective the way fish are comfortable in water. And you standing there, drink in hand, genuinely happy to be there, and also - at some level you would never say out loud - not quite there at all. A millimetre outside. Present in body and slightly elsewhere in soul.

It felt like leaving early and feeling the relief of solitude fall over you in the car on the way home, and hating yourself for feeling relieved. Because what kind of person is relieved to leave? What is wrong with you?

It felt like loving people deeply, fiercely, one by one and still feeling the group close around you like a room with not quite enough oxygen in it.

Dr. Rami Kaminski is a psychiatrist who spent four decades watching people arrive in his Manhattan practice having been told something was wrong with them. They were labelled anxious. Avoidant. Unfriendly. Cold. And Kaminski would sit with them and notice, repeatedly, the same thing: nothing was wrong with them.

They were not broken joiners. They were something else - something the psychology books had never named, because the psychology books were written by people who assumed that belonging was the destination and that anyone who could not reach it was lost.

He named them "otroverts". And then he admitted, quietly and without apology, that he was one.

"The Gift of Not Belonging" is the book that takes every story you have ever told yourself about your own insufficiency and looks at it differently:

1.. Your self-worth belongs to no committee.
Most of us are quietly exhausted by the invisible labour of group approval - managing how we come across to our family, our colleagues, our social circles, our followers. We don't even notice we're doing it because we've been doing it our whole lives. Kaminski's insight here is both simple and stunning: otroverts never handed that power away in the first place. When no group owns your sense of self, no group can threaten it either. Now that isn't coldness or arrogance, it is one of the deepest forms of freedom a person can have, and most people go their entire lives without ever tasting it.

2. Every original idea in history came from someone who didn't belong.
Think about every person who ever changed the way we see the world. Scientists, artists, philosophers, rebels. What they shared wasn't always genius, it was the inability to simply accept what the group had already decided was true. Kaminski argues this is otroversion at its most powerful. When you have no loyalty to the consensus, you are free to follow an idea all the way to where it actually leads. In a world drowning in groupthink and algorithmic echo chambers, a mind that thinks for itself isn't just an asset. It's increasingly rare, and the world is desperate for it.

3. The deepest connections happen between two people, not inside a crowd.
Not belonging doesn't mean not loving or being loved. Otroverts, Kaminski shows, are often magnificent one-on-one. Deeply present, genuinely curious, completely undistracted by group politics or tribal obligations. When two people connect outside the machinery of a group, what's left is something far more honest - no membership to protect, no rules to perform, just two humans actually seeing each other. If you've always found a loud room draining but one real conversation deeply nourishing, Kaminski is telling you that's not a weakness. That's just how you're wired to love.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/48BBHl6

You can find and listen to the audiobook narration using the link above.

04/17/2026

04/13/2026

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04/13/2026

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