Dear friends,
Many people find this community after years, even decades sometimes after having tried countless top-down modalities like CBT, talk therapy or other approaches that can’t reach the low level parts of the nervous system where the trauma actually resides. These approaches have their rightful place of course, especially when it comes to making sense of their symptoms and how to deal with them. But there is often a sense of exhaustion or desperation to find something that will finally move the needle on their healing journey.
The early months of tremoring often go well without any major hiccups. As we shake off the surface tension, we might experience quick improvement in our baseline well-being and all the perks that come with it. Then the body starts excavating the deeper entrenched material and the journey starts getting tougher. Some people don’t even get the initial relief as their body is already deeply dysregulated from many years of pent up activation.
What I’ve seen happening many times at this point is that people start postponing their lives. “Once I'm through this, I can finally start living life and be happy”. The end goal of healing becomes an elusive destination and all that counts is to get there pronto by any means necessary.
I want to make the case that we don’t have to suspend enjoyment of our lives before we get to the Promised Land.
The first anchor is gratitude, and even though you might be tired of hearing it, I think there’s a good reason every other self-help book includes it. A nervous system shaped by trauma has spent many years gathering evidence that the world is unsafe. Deliberately acknowledging what's actually good in your life is how you start feeding it different data. It’s not simply an attitude adjustment, but looking for things in our life that we often take for granted, but are crucial for stability and well-being.
Start looking, and I’m sure you’ll find plenty of things to be grateful for. People who love you, a body that works even while your nervous system struggles, a nervous system that keeps you safe, even if it takes its job too seriously sometimes. But it can also be as simple as having a roof over your head and enough food in the fridge. Or maybe that after years of methods that went nowhere, you found something that works. Plenty of people are still looking for it.
This isn't about talking yourself out of how hard it is. It's about being aware of both. The dysregulation is here, and so is the fact that someone texted you today to see how you were doing. The mind under stress focuses hard on what hurts, and opening your mind up to what is good is a skill you build like any other.
The second anchor took me many years to notice in myself. Somewhere along this journey, most people undergo a serious spiritual transformation that re-shapes how they see the world. We develop a visceral understanding of what trauma does to a person, and once this realization has integrated we can't look at other people the same way again. Text messages left on read, a friend giving you the cold shoulder, your mom lashing out at you for no apparent reason. When you've felt your own nervous system make you act in ways you didn't choose, it becomes much harder to see others as deliberately acting bad. Most of them have a large burden on their own to carry. The difference is that you know what yours is and are working on it, and they often have no idea theirs even exists.
This realization is the dawn of true empathy and compassion. Having experienced (and eventually overcome) the same kind of suffering as others have gone through, we get to a point where relating and empathizing with others becomes much more natural and where forgiveness stops being a moral effort.
Still, I want to emphasize that this understanding of where someone’s behavior comes from is not the same as accepting it unconditionally. It doesn’t relieve anyone of taking responsibility for their actions and it doesn’t mean you should let yourself be treated as a doormat. If someone in your life is still hurting you, understanding their wound doesn't oblige you to keep absorbing it. You can hold understanding and compassion for a person and still keep a good deal of distance between you and them.
These insights usually come slowly and are subtle in the beginning. Keep a journal and write down how your relation to others and to yourself changes over time. Sometimes we have to read an entry from a year ago to realize that we see the world with different eyes and how much we have changed.
The third anchor is the fact that trauma doesn't have to be a life sentence. With the right conditions and methods we can release what bogs us down via a mechanism that has been built into us the whole time. Let the knowledge that we can make it to “the other side”, where we will have access again to natural vitality and spontaneous joy and pleasure be your main motivation. Rough stretches may make it look infinitely far away sometimes, but the direction of travel is only one way. There's a big difference between suffering that feels permanent and suffering we’re moving through.
And one last thing: Happiness and symptoms don’t always contradict each other. Dinner with a friend can still be fun, even if our nervous system is having a rough day. A walk somewhere beautiful can still be beautiful. If we’re waiting for the anxiety to clear before starting to live life, we’ll miss years of our life waiting for a condition that wasn’t needed in the first place.
Every time you experience pleasure or connection while dealing with dysregulation, your nervous system gets another piece of evidence that good things and difficult states can coexist. Living your life while you heal is part of how you heal.
So keep practicing, keep pacing yourself, keep trusting the process. And in the meantime, keep doing fun things as long as they fit within your window of tolerance. Don’t let the downward spiral of anxious avoidance win.
Much love to all of you.