Interior Alchemy by Natalie Kirkpatrick

When Containment is Missing

How the absence of anchoring fractures intimacy—and what it feels like when the body begins to stay

I've been thinking about what happens when we 
can't hold what we feel.
How some men run and call it freedom.
How others freeze and call it sensitivity.
Different choreography.
Same missing anchor.

Running—motion as mastery, distance as safety.
Freezing—stillness mistaken for depth.
Both reaching for ground that wasn't there.

I've lived both ends of that spectrum.
I know what it is to collapse into stillness, 
to hold everything so no one else has to.
To confuse containment with suppression,
and control with strength.

What I'm learning now is that containment isn't 
about constriction.
It's about anchoring.
It's the quiet gravity that lets us stay with what
moves without making someone else carry it
or abandoning ourselves to it.

When containment is missing, the body doesn't
rest; it circles.
It lives in low-grade flight.
Sleep is thin, breath shallow, appetite uncertain.
There's a hum of effort underneath everything—
the mind always scanning for the next task, the
next fix,
the next hit of purpose that might quiet the
noise for a minute.

For some, it looks like depression—
not sadness exactly, but heaviness,
a gravity that pulls the body down while the
mind keeps running.
For others, it looks like constant motion—
work stacked on work, phone lighting up,
the calendar so full there's no space to feel the
ache that's driving it.

Running becomes the only way to avoid the
collapse waiting underneath.
Stillness feels like threat,
because when you stop, the truth catches up.

That's what the absence of containment does:
it splits the system.
The body either outruns what it feels
or sinks into it until there's no air left.
Neither brings peace.
Both are exhaustion disguised as living.

And then the body begins to tire of its own
patterns.
Not in some graceful epiphany—more like a slow
surrender.
The chase stops working.
The collapse stops soothing.
The busy starts to taste like panic.

That's where willingness begins.
Not enlightenment—just the moment you decide to stop rehearsing the old escape.
To stay.
To let the restlessness rise and not reach for
distraction.
To move, but this time toward yourself instead of away.

It's not gentle at first.
Anchoring burns a little.
The body shakes, argues, bargains.
It grieves the version of you that only knew how to run or freeze.

But the pain is clean.
It has direction.
Each breath widens the ground under you.
Each pause teaches the body: safety isn't
out there.
It's in the capacity to remain—awake,
uncomfortable, intact.

That's the real labor of containment.
It's not a natural landing, it's a practice.
A thousand small choices to stay in contact with 
what's true,
even when it hurts.

When there's no anchor, intimacy becomes a
storm.
It isn't that the love or attraction isn't real—
It's that the nervous system can't hold the
charge of it.
So connection turns into management.

One person floods the room with care,
the other regulates by retreat.
One chases closeness,
the other gasps for space.
The rhythm between them becomes about
survival, not presence.

Without containment, intimacy is borrowed.
It relies on the other person's stability to exist at
all.
The moment that stability wavers, so does the
bond.
Everything feels high-stakes because there's no
internal gravity—
only the hope that the other body will stay still
enough to feel safe in.

Anchored intimacy moves differently.
It doesn't need constant contact to prove
connection.
Space stops being threat, silence stops being
weapon.
There's room for honesty, even rupture,
because neither person is holding the other's
nervous system hostage.

Two anchored bodies can argue and still feel the
floor beneath them.
They can desire without possession.
They can hold grief without drowning.
They can meet each other, not manage each other.

That's the difference containment makes—
it turns love from something you perform
into something you can inhabit.

I'm still learning how to anchor.
Not as a concept, but as muscle memory.
To notice when I start to over-hold,
when I begin scanning for the other person's
pulse instead of my own.
To breathe before reaching,
to listen before explaining,
to stay long enough to feel what I usually run from.

Anchoring hasn't made me immune to pain—
if anything, it's made me feel more.
But the feeling is cleaner now, less tangled in
reaction.
I can sense the edges of what's mine to carry
and what isn't.
I can love without disappearing.

That's the work:
to build the architecture inside the body that 
can hold joy, grief, and desire
without outsourcing them.
To let containment become not a cage, but a 
home.

Because when we learn to stay—
not perform stillness—
love stops being a place we lose ourselves.
It becomes a place we return to.

—

Stay with what stirs. Feel the ground hold you.