What 20 Years Listening to Women’s Bodies Taught Me About Instinct and the “Good Girl”
- Sarah Hobbs
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
After more than twenty years as a bodyworker, I can tell you something uncomfortable.
I know exactly how sexual predators operate.
Not because I studied them.
Because I have spent two decades listening to bodies.
Thousands of them.
Predators are not looking for the strongest woman in the room.
They are looking for the woman who has been trained to ignore her instincts.
And our culture has become very good at producing exactly that.
The Grooming of the Good Girl
It begins early.
Give Grandpa a hug. Say you're sorry. Stop fussing. It doesn’t hurt. Don’t be rude.
Small moments. Ordinary moments often called parenting.
But each one carries the same message.
Your body is not the authority here.
Social harmony is.
Every time a girl overrides discomfort to make someone else comfortable, she moves one step further away from her instinct.
This is how the Good Girl is made.
She learns to silence intuition.She learns to override discomfort.She learns approval matters more than truth.
Predators know this conditioning exists.
They rely on it.
The Science of Losing Your Instinct
Neuroscience has a word for the body’s internal guidance system.
Interoception.
It is your brain’s ability to read signals from inside the body. Pain. Fear. Hunger. The tightening in your gut when something feels wrong.
It is the foundation of instinct.
But many children are trained early to override these signals.
Wait to go to the bathroom. Finish your plate. Stop crying. Give them a hug anyway.
The lesson becomes clear.
Trust authority outside you.
Not the signals inside you.
Over time the body still speaks.
But the mind learns not to listen.
Culture Didn’t Stop There
As girls become women, the disconnection often deepens.
Modern empowerment often told women we would gain equality by acting more like men.
Neoliberal feminism is a form of feminism that focuses on individual empowerment, personal success, and equality through participation in the existing economic system, rather than changing the system itself.
It sound like; be productive, be relentless, suppress emotion, push through the body’s rhythms. But feminine intelligence was never meant to function like a machine.
It is cyclical, relational, seasonal and somatic. (somatic means body up intelligence)
Then medicine stepped in with hormonal birth control began regulating the female body from the outside. ( I was 14 when it was proposed to me and my mother) "it will help with the PMS and acne as well as put your mother at ease about any unwanted pregnancies.
Sometimes necessary. Sometimes liberating.
But it also signaled something deeper.
The authority over the female body shifting away from the woman herself.
When hormones shift, instinct shifts!
Ask any unmedicated woman about this in regards to where they are in their cycle.
And instinct is the foundation of relational intelligence. You can watch more in this Oracle Body webinar.
Even Our Signals Are Masked
The body communicates constantly.
Through scent. Through posture. Through micro movements in the face.
Human sweat carries emotional signals. Fear. Stress. Aggression.
Our nervous systems read these cues automatically.
But modern culture layers over them.
Perfume masks scent.
Deodorant alters chemical signals.
And now we freeze the muscles of the face to appear calm, youthful, and composed.
But the human nervous system evolved to read micro expressions with extraordinary precision.
Long before language existed, survival depended on it.
The vagus nerve links facial muscles, vocal tone, heart rhythm, and emotional perception.
Your nervous system is constantly scanning faces.
Looking for safety. Scanning for threat.
When facial movement disappears, part of that signal goes quiet.
Something feels off.
But we cannot quite name why.
The Body Still Knows
A woman connected to her instincts reads the world constantly.
She senses posture, gesture. Physical tone shifts. Micro expressions. Subtle changes in emotional atmosphere.
Her nervous system is a sophisticated detection system.
But when a woman has been trained to override those signals, the system becomes muted.
Confusion replaces clarity.
And predators rely on confusion.
The Boss Babe Illusion
There is another strange story happening in culture.
We have started calling hyper-masculine performance empowerment.
Constant drive. Constant productivity. Emotional suppression.
The Boss Babe. Doing nervous system exercises to regulate her away from her feminine impulse. Ice baths for peak performance. ( "i love a cold plunge at the right time in my cycle - but a womans body is restored with pleasure not pressure)
Beneath that performance many women are exhausted. Hormones dys-regulated and Intuition muted from years of, "it's probably nothing"
Feminine power was never meant to be a copy of masculine power.
Real Empowerment
Real empowerment does not come from fighting men.
It comes from restoring instinct.
From returning to the body of radiance.
To hormonal intelligence, intuition, and the signals that live beneath language.
A woman connected to her instincts is difficult to manipulate.
Her body knows.
Her boundaries arise naturally.
Her presence changes the room.
She does not perform power.
She radiates it.
Because when a woman remembers the intelligence of her body, something ancient wakes up.
And every woman who remembers becomes something our culture forgot how to name.
A medicine woman.
A shepherd of life.
A steward of instinct.
And when enough women remember that, the whole culture changes.
Now here's the pitch. I was conditioned not to listen to my body, by men, doctors, culture and myself - I learned how to get back to my biological feild of inteligence and my feminine magnificents and I teach and mentor this process in a program called Oracle Body - you can learn more about it here.
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