Sovereignty Became Legible — Then Died

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Sovereignty has been neatly gutted.

It is quite the fucking buzzword these days, which, honestly, tells me a lot. Anytime a word starts getting thrown around everywhere, especially in the spiritual, healing, coaching, and self-development spaces, I can feel it losing its charge. There it goes. Another word that once carried teeth, consequence, and lived initiation gets passed around until it starts sounding like a tagline. Off in the distance i can hear Freddy Mercury singing, “Another one bites the dust.”

Sigh.

I started writing about sovereignty in my journals around 2017, trying to understand what it meant, what it asked of me, how to live with it in an actual body and an actual life. I was not trying to make it a brand because genuine sovereignty can never be a brand. I was trying to make contact with something I could feel before I could fully articulate it.

By the end of 2019, sovereignty was no longer a word in my journal. It had become a legal document and a refusal to keep carrying a man’s name as the root of my belonging.

I composted my “maiden” name to belong to no man.

I underwent a three day death and rebirth ceremony and meant every bit of it. I thought the act itself was the reclamation, and in one sense, it was. But that is the thing about sovereignty. You can speak the vow, sign the paper, walk through the ritual with fire, and feel the old name and the old life start to burn away.

Then the vow turns around and asks for a body.

And life, in its endlessly feral sense of humor, was like: nah, bitch. You do not get to just claim this. Now you live it.

That is when the real apprenticeship began.

For almost a decade, this word has moved with me through decisions, ruptures, loss, repair, and the humbling humiliation of realizing I understood far less than I thought I did. And maybe that is part of what irritates me now, watching sovereignty get flattened into a declaration, because to me, sovereignty has never been something I arrived at and became.

It is something I am in practice with and in relationship with.

And when you are in relationship with something, the meaning has to keep moving. It meets you differently at different points in your life, and if you are honest, it will eventually show you where even your most cherished understanding has started to become another place to hide.

This is why I do not trust the sentence “I am sovereign” when it is spoken like an identity.

Are you? Or are you in practice with sovereignty? Are you letting it question you, rearrange you, confront you, implicate you?

I felt this with “holistic” too. In 2016, after three years of practicing psychotherapy, I started describing myself as a holistic psychotherapist. I did not choose that word because I saw other people using it. I chose it because it described what was already happening in the room. The word came after the practice.

By then, I could see that I was working with the body, psyche, soul, systems, environment, story, relationship, and the larger field around a person’s life. It was how I listened, how I tracked, and how the work moved through me.

That feels important to me because there is a difference between using language to name what has emerged through practice and using language to organize yourself around an identity you want to become. One comes from contact. The other becomes theater very quickly.

I was off social media for many years by this point, so I was not watching these words rise in real time. Then, eventually, I started hearing “holistic” everywhere. Holistic this, holistic that. Suddenly everyone was a holistic therapist, and the word no longer carried what I meant when I used it.

It felt dead to me. So I dropped it.

And this keeps happening.

Wild woman.

Decentering men.

Embodiment.

Liberation.

Sovereignty.

The internet finds a word with heat in it, drains it, flattens it, turns it into content, then everyone starts repeating the same shapes back to each other like a room full of spiritual parrots with Canva accounts.

Language moves. Cool. Love that. What I am talking about is the moment a word gets passed around so much that it becomes a corpse, then stops asking anything of anyone.

So much of what I see now feels like mimicry. People reaching for the word of the season because it signals depth, or power, or edge, or influence, or some new stage of evolution. And maybe sometimes it is real. Sometimes people are genuinely inside the inquiry. And a lot of the time, you can feel the hollowness. You can feel when the word is being worn instead of lived.

And I do think the hunger underneath the word is real.

That is the part I do not want to flatten. I do not think people are reaching for sovereignty simply because it sounds powerful or looks good in a bio. I think many of us are reaching for it because something in the body knows we have been severed from it. Under the white cisheteropatriarchy, so many people have been shaped away from the lived experience of belonging to themselves, especially those whose bodies have been feminized or whose lives have been organized under the political category of woman in some way. The training has so often been toward connection, but not actual connection. A deformed connection. The kind that asks for self-abandonment and then calls it love. Belonging starts to depend on how available you can be, how little friction you create, how well you can be needed without becoming inconvenient.

There is grief in that hunger too. Something in the self was never allowed to fully gather. The body learned to leave itself in order to remain attached. A whole life can get shaped around translating itself through someone else’s comfort before it ever gets to know what it wants.

But hunger does not mean the practice is intact.

That is where I think so much gets warped. A severed culture will reach for sovereignty through the very machinery that severed it. The feed will hand people a word for the longing and then immediately begin shaping the expression of it. Suddenly the thing that could have returned someone to their body becomes one more way to leave the body, a current to be swept into, a charge to organize around, a brief feeling of authority while the feed keeps moving them through outrage, old hurt, borrowed knowing, and the small narcotic hit of being recognized.

And this is where my spidey senses light up.

Because if the hunger for sovereignty is real, but the body is not actually in contact with itself, then the word can become a carcass of the ache. Freedom, clarity, and force can all be organized by fear when the body is still trying to protect itself from contact. The language may sound clean, but underneath it there can still be a wish to stay untouched by consequence.

And you better believe this matters, because actual sovereignty and actual connection have both been seriously distorted. Distorted connection says you have to disappear to belong. Distorted sovereignty says you have to become unreachable to be free. Neither one returns us to Life.

The practice, as I understand it, asks more of us than either version. It asks us to come back into the body, to stay with the self that learned to leave, and to notice how quickly our nervous systems can be organized from the outside by the feed, by fear, by belonging, by the training that taught us what we had to become in order to stay safe.

The moment we make an identity out of something, the psyche starts organizing around it. We become “a sovereign person,” and then we start making choices from the image of that identity instead of staying in live contact with what Life is actually asking of us. Deeper questions stopped being asked because the identity starts answering for us.

The identity starts supplying the answer before the body has a chance to tell the truth, and slowly, the inquiry gets replaced by self-maintenance.

Identity can be useful for locating ourselves in the practical world. It can name roles, histories, positions, protections, constraints, and lived realities. I am a psychotherapist because I have a license and I do therapy sometimes. That is real. It is not the whole of me or not the center from which my life is organized.

The trouble begins when the noun gets too comfortable.

We absolutely love nouns. We want to be the thing — the sovereign one, the healed one, the embodied one, the wild one, the intuitive one, the ethical one, the rebel, the guide, the expert, the one who knows.

Life keeps moving, which means we have to keep choosing, listening, repairing, refusing, grieving, changing, and staying accountable to what our movement creates.

Once someone has organized around the image of being sovereign, everything they do can get folded back into that image. Reaction becomes discernment. Avoidance becomes a boundary. Defensiveness becomes truth. The inability to receive feedback becomes evidence that other people cannot handle their power.

And just like that — poof — the old pattern has found a new vocabulary.

This is where sovereignty starts getting used to avoid the very responsibility it claims to represent. Because if the story is always “they harmed me, they were toxic, they were the problem, and my sovereignty was in leaving,” then we never have to look at our own participation.

And I want to be careful here, because I am not talking about blaming people for being harmed. I have no interest in that. Violence, abuse, and extraction are real. Families, friendships, intimate partnerships, workplaces, and systems can absolutely cost people their bodies, their mental well-being, and their aliveness, and leaving can be the choice that gives someone their life back.

And if sovereignty stops at leaving, it has not gone far enough.

The deeper work begins when there is enough space, safety, and support to tell the truth with more range: that relationship harmed me, and I still have to look at how I was organized inside it, what kept me there, what I learned to tolerate, what I mistook for love or loyalty or survival, and why some part of me remained available to something that was costing me.

And sovereignty without responsibility is just another imitation of power.

This is what I see so often online, people narrating their exits as proof of their sovereignty while still organizing the whole story around blame. The ex is the problem. The family is the problem. The friend group is the problem. The workplace is the problem. And sure, maybe they were. And if everyone else remains the whole explanation, then nothing in us has to become conscious.

We can leave the relationship and still remain organized around the pattern, mistaking the change in external shape for freedom while the deeper structure remains untouched.

To me, sovereignty has to be able to hold more complexity and nuance than that. It has to be able to tell the truth in several directions. This harmed me, and I participated in it. I was impacted, and I had choices. I was conditioned, and I am responsible for becoming more conscious. I was hurt, and I am still accountable for how I move with that hurt.

I have had to sit with this in my own life around overgiving.

I have a history of giving too much, too quickly, for too long in relationships, including friendships. And yes, people have taken advantage of that. There have been asymmetries where my care, labor, attention, and availability were received without real reciprocity.

And I was participating in the dynamic. That was the harder truth to sit with. Because when I got honest with myself, I could see that my overgiving was not always pure generosity. Sometimes it was an unconscious strategy for sustaining connection, a way to stay needed, close, useful, and harder to leave. I was not doing that on purpose, and it was still shaping my relationships.

I understand why I learned that. When your needs were not met early on, giving can become one of the ways you try to secure belonging.

That gives me context.

It does not remove my responsibility.

So the sovereignty practice is not “I do not give anymore.” I love giving. The practice is slowing down enough to ask what is moving underneath it. Am I giving freely, with no hidden contract attached? Or am I trying to stabilize a connection that does not feel stable? That answer changes moment to moment, relationship to relationship.

That is the difference between a blame story and a sovereign relationship with reality. Blame keeps the self innocent. Responsibility returns the self to agency. And agency is uncomfortable because it means we have to stop making everyone else the sole author of our lives.

People can claim sovereignty while still moving from defense, using the same old reactions, avoidances, innocence games, control strategies, contempt, and wound-protections and giving them cleaner names: choice, discernment, boundaries, clarity, self-trust.

That is where the language draws blood from everything except the pattern it is protecting.

Sovereignty shows up in how a person moves when their self-image is threatened: whether they can handle impact, meet consequence, stay curious through exposure, and tell the truth without turning the whole story into another altar to themselves.

You can watch the body of a person’s choices and feel what is organizing them underneath the language, because sovereignty can still be full of fear, freedom can still be image management, and power can still be collapse trying to sound authoritative. If your sovereignty cannot survive feedback, consequence, repair, or being seen clearly, it is probably another self-image asking to be defended.

And this brings me to the part of sovereignty I rarely hear people talk about with any real weight:

To me, sovereignty has everything to do with responsibility.

There are no good or bad choices in the clean, cosmic way people want there to be. There are choices, and there is how life organizes around those choices. That is it. The universe is not sitting there with gold stars, waiting for us to pick the correct doorway so it can reward us with alignment. The universe does not care in that sentimental way or give a shit what we choose. Clearly. Look at the world. Look at the dumpster fire governments, the wars, the genocides, the grief, the cruelty, the beauty, the awe, the indifference, the impossible brilliance of it all. Life is moving, responding, and unfolding. It is not arranging itself around our need to feel chosen by some higher plotline.

And if sovereignty means anything to me, it means being willing to sit with that. It means asking: if I make this choice, am I willing to live with the consequence? Am I willing to walk with what comes, welcome and unwelcome? Am I willing to carry what may never resolve?

Hate to say it — some choices never resolve. Some choices become part of the weight we carry for the rest of our lives. We might learn from them, or be changed by them, or even know, with our whole body, that the choice was necessary. And still, it may hurt. It may always hurt and always remain one of the things we walk with.

This is where a lot of the conversation gets thin for me.

People want sovereignty to mean they are finally making choices from their center, as though “the center” is some purified inner location untouched by fear, longing, conditioning, trauma, hunger, fantasy, projection, or old organization. And depending on how we are organized, we can make all kinds of choices from all kinds of places and call them centered afterward. We can totally convince ourselves of anything and call it truth.

That is why the question cannot simply be: Am I choosing from my center? The better questions are: what is actually moving me? What part of me is choosing right now? What am I protecting? What am I avoiding? What am I willing to carry? What consequence am I hoping will never arrive?

Anytime I sit with these questions, I come face to face with myself. And often, I do not like the answers. To me that is honest. And real.

Because sovereignty begins where the performance of choice ends: in the silence afterward, when the sentence about alignment is over and the life that forms around your decision starts asking to be lived. Even the word alignment infers there was a right choice to be made.

What gathers may be beautiful — relief, freedom, the body finally able to exhale after years of holding its breath.

And also what gathers may be longing or ruin or a consequence you never wanted, the kind of knowledge that changes the air in the room because you understand, all at once, that this choice belongs to you now and you may be walking with it for the rest of your life.

A spine does not mean you always make the clean choice, the noble choice, the healed choice, the spiritually impressive choice. That’s all performative bullshit. A spine means you can own what you choose. You can feel the impact and notice shame, guilt, and defensiveness as they rise, without letting them become the whole story or turning them into a theology that protects you from responsibility.

A spine means being able to say: this is mine, the choice and the consequence, the heartbreak and the mess, the life that formed around what I did, what I refused, what I left, what I stayed for, what I could not see, and what I saw clearly enough to choose anyway.

That is far more interesting to me than another half-ass declaration of sovereignty.

Sorry to burst the magical thinking bubble, but life is not tidy, and it never will be. It is brutal, devastating, inspiring, brilliant, thrilling, and often completely unresolved. Some choices leave us with grief, fallout, and haunting memories that do not soften into a lesson just because we found prettier language for them.

That does not mean we made the wrong choice. It means we are alive inside a life that responds to what we do.

This is the part so much spiritual culture cannot tolerate. It has a fucking obsession with making devastation useful, as though every wound needs to become content, every rupture needs to announce its lesson, every loss needs to justify itself as alignment, and every ending has to audition for a redemption arc.

Ugh.

And this is why sovereignty matters to me beyond the irritation of watching another word get bled dry.

If everyone is mimicking everyone else (which seems to be the case online), everyone becomes easier to control.

A person can call themselves sovereign all day long, but if they are still moving from their insecurities installed by the script, the system can read them just fine. It knows what will outrage them, what will flatter them, what wound to press, what identity to feed, what language to sell back, what posture will make them feel free while keeping them entirely predictable.

That is not sovereignty.

Actual sovereignty makes a person harder to command from the outside because it makes them harder to read. They are no longer only a reaction pattern, a market category, a trauma response with a shopping cart, a political trigger, a spiritual aesthetic, or a body waiting for the next hit.

And maybe this is why the current fixation with sovereignty irritates me so much. It often sounds like freedom without gravity, choice without the long walk afterward, power without the humility of being answerable to the web.

From all my years of apprenticing to this word, I have come to understand sovereignty as deeply relational. It is the self in contact with life: with other people, with the body, with the land, with the more-than-human world, with community, with the dead, with the future, with everything impacted by the way we move now.

Sever sovereignty from relationship, and it becomes domination. Sever power from responsibility, and it becomes exemption. Sever the self from the web, and it becomes another version of Empire dressed as liberation.

I have no interest in any of that.

Real sovereignty does not remove us from relationship. It changes how we participate. It asks us to stop abandoning ourselves while also refusing the delusion that our liberation exempts us from responsibility. It asks us to make contact with life, not keep ourselves outside its reach. It asks us to become more sober, more accountable, more available to reality.

The word itself matters far less than what follows it. Sovereignty has to show up in movement, in consequence, in the moment the performance has nowhere left to stand.

Because sovereignty is not a crown, a brand, an identity, a vibe, or another polished word for the internet to grind into dust.

Sovereignty is the practice of staying accountable to your own life and to the web of life.

It’s growing a goddamn spine.

Still apprenticing,

Alexandra Winteraven 🖤

That is where I’ll be bringing the reflection questions shaped from this piece, both for those who want to sit with them on their own and for those who want to gather with us in the post-essay Zoom salon. Information about salon will be posted there.

I’m keeping the public comments open here because I want this conversation to have room to move in the wider space.

I’ll be spending more of my time inside The Underground with the folks who want to take this work deeper, beyond the essay and into the body, and lived practice.

If that is what you are wanting too, I’d love to have you with us.

Writing note: I draft hella wide, then forge the final shape to dark, gritty underground techno. This piece came together to Danté’s set at Tresor in Berlin. Absolute fire 🔥 On repeat. Bass up. 🔊

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Alexandra Winteraven (they/them) is a queer, agender body-led deconstructionist, writer, teacher, and facilitator working at the intersection of inherited systems, structural analysis, cultural emergence, and tracking pattern at the level of the body.

With more than a decade of experience as a somatic depth psychotherapist, Alexandra brings a trained eye for body, relationship, and the deeper structures shaping human experience.

They are known for naming incongruence with clarity and care, and for working with people who are no longer able to live inside familiar shapes that no longer fit. Their approach is relational, no bullshit, and uninterested in performance or bypass. Alexandra’s work is about what actually changes when insight becomes embodied, relational, and lived. It is oriented toward honesty, responsibility, the cost of real change, and collective transformation.

Curious about working with Alexandra? Check out their current offerings here.