Why Your Pelvic Floor Can't Relax - And What It Has to Do With Feeling Safe
There's a question I hear often, usually said with a kind of tired frustration:
"I've been doing the exercises. Why isn't anything changing?"
And the honest answer - the one that changes everything once women actually hear it - is this: your pelvic floor might not need more strengthening. It might need permission to let go.
That's a different problem entirely. And it requires a different kind of attention.
A Muscle That Listens
Here's something most people were never told about the pelvic floor: it is one of the most nervous-system-connected structures in the human body.
It doesn't just hold things up. It doesn't just contract and release on command. It responds - constantly, automatically, often beneath the level of conscious awareness - to signals from your environment, your history, your sense of threat, and your sense of safety.
Think about the last time you were startled. Or the last time you were in a room where you felt genuinely uncomfortable. Or the last time you had an interaction that left you braced and unsettled for the rest of the day.
Your pelvic floor felt all of that. It gripped. It guarded. It did exactly what it was designed to do when safety felt uncertain.
The problem isn't that it did that. The problem is when it never gets the signal that it's okay to stop.
What Holding Actually Looks Like
A chronically braced pelvic floor doesn't always announce itself loudly. It can look like:
Pelvic pain or pressure that doesn't seem to have a clear cause
Pain with sex, penetration, or internal exams - sometimes described as hitting a wall
Bladder urgency, or feeling like you never quite empty fully
A low, persistent ache in the hips, tailbone, or lower back
Difficulty with bowel movements, or a sense of incomplete release
Numbness or disconnection in that region of the body
None of these are character flaws. None of them mean you're "too stressed" or "too in your head." They are physiological responses - your nervous system doing its job, protecting you the only way it knows how.
The issue is that the nervous system doesn't always update its threat assessment as quickly as circumstances change. It holds patterns long after the original reason for holding has passed.
The Body Keeps Score - Even When You've Moved On
You might read a list like the one above and think: but my life is fine now. That was years ago.
And I believe you. I also know that the body doesn't experience time the way the mind does.
A difficult birth. A surgery. A relationship that required you to be very small, very controlled, very careful. A childhood that wasn't safe in ways you may or may not have words for. Chronic stress. Chronic pain. A procedure that happened without adequate explanation or consent.
None of these experiences need to be dramatic or identifiable as trauma for the body to have stored them. The pelvic floor, in particular, tends to hold what we couldn't fully process at the time - not as memory exactly, but as posture. As a default setting of braced.
And kegels - as well-intentioned as they are - do not address that. You cannot strengthen your way out of a guarding response. In fact, adding more contraction to a structure that is already holding too much tends to make things worse, not better.
Safety Is Not Just a Feeling
This is the part I want you to really land in, because it's where the work actually begins to shift:
Safety is not just psychological. It is physiological.
Your nervous system is always running an assessment - am I safe? - and the answer it arrives at determines what your body does next. Whether your breath drops into your belly or stays shallow in your chest. Whether your jaw unclenches at the end of the day or stays tight through sleep. Whether your pelvic floor softens between demands or remains quietly braced, waiting.
This is not a failure of willpower or self-awareness. It is the autonomic nervous system doing exactly what it evolved to do.
The question in healing, then, is not just what exercises should I do. It's what does this tissue need in order to feel safe enough to change?
That's a much more interesting question. And the answers tend to be slower, gentler, and more whole-person than most of us were led to expect.
What This Means in Practice
In my work, the pelvic floor is never the only thing I'm looking at - because it was never operating in isolation to begin with.
I'm paying attention to breath, because breath and pelvic floor function are inseparable. I'm paying attention to the scar tissue that might be pulling things off-center and creating a constant low-grade guarding response. I'm paying attention to what the tissue feels like under my hands - whether it's armored, or bracing, or whether it has the quality of something that's simply exhausted.
And I'm paying attention to what happens in the room. Whether someone is holding their breath while I work. Whether they flinch and then pretend they didn't. Whether they're doing that thing so many women do - monitoring themselves for the right reactions, trying to be an easy patient.
All of that is information. All of it is connected.
Healing the pelvic floor, in my experience, often has less to do with targeting the muscle and more to do with helping the whole system feel safe enough to reorganize. And that requires something medicine doesn't always make room for: time, presence, and an honest curiosity about what's actually happening - not just what the symptom looks like on paper.
You Are Not Too Sensitive for This
I want to name something before I close, because I know it's in the room.
Some of you reading this will recognize yourselves in these descriptions and immediately wonder if you're overcomplicating it. If you're being dramatic. If a proper person would just do their exercises and move on.
You're not overcomplicating it. You have a nervous system. It is doing its job. The fact that healing requires more than a handout of exercises is not a sign that something is deeply wrong with you - it's a sign that you're human, and that your body has been trying to protect you all along.
The invitation here isn't to pathologize your tension. It's to get genuinely curious about it. To ask what it might be guarding. To approach your own body with the kind of patience you'd extend to someone you love who was afraid.
That's where things start to move.
Lacey Nedjelski is a women's wellness practitioner with over 17 years of experience in birth, postpartum and recently shifted towards holistic pelvic care, abdominal bodywork, and somatic work rooted in the connection between the body and the autonomic nervous system. She works from a consent-centered, trauma-informed framework at Rise Within in Saskatoon.
If this resonates and you're ready to explore what's underneath the symptom, reach out - I'd love to hear where you're at.
