108 – Things that happen as you leave survival mode

Hello loves.

Today I want to talk about the things that can happen when our nervous system comes out of survival mode. Our nervous system is absolutely brilliant. It’s intelligent, and it is intentional. It also keeps us in survival mode for far longer than we need to be just to ensure that we are safe and protected at all costs.

Our brain and our body is always on our side.

Sometimes it needs our help to understand when we are truly in a threatening situation and when we are not. Long gone are the days when we are likely to need to run away from lions and tigers to survive. But the stress that we can receive from being online on social media, around some of the people we work with, and since covid just even going outside sometimes can all cause stress responses in our body. And when we begin to regulate the stress response that we have in our body they healing can begin within our physical body, our mental health, the way we relate to our work, to our relationships, to our purpose.

So when we start to reassociate with our bodies, we can feel angry. 

If you’re the type who tends to lean towards the fawn response, or people pleasing tendencies, we have spent so many years shutting down our own needs, usually because we don’t know our own needs, and when we find ourselves in a space where we feel safe, it’s like we come back online. And we notice the irritability, the frustration, and the resentment and the anger all started to bubble up inside of us.

We can also grieve.

For all of the years we feel that we lost and the wounds that we now know we have for all the unmet needs, the resentments, the loss that we feel grieving is an essential chapter of our healing. It’s not linear, and it will come and go.

We feel exhausted.

It takes a lot of energy to live in a disassociated state to carry around things we are trying to pretend don’t exist. And as we start to heal, we begin to crave the slowness and the rest as the exhaustion creeps up on us. And we start to begin sleeping better at night.

We learn that it’s okay to take space from family and loved ones.

As we learn to see the patterns of ourselves and of our families we begin to understand the boundaries and we need and we start to put these in place. It’s normal to want space and time away from family, especially when family had been the ones to have caused some of these wounds in the first place.

We become more opinionated.

Which if you know me, does seem like an unachievable thing that I could actually be more opinionated, but part of our survival was to keep the peace to stay small and to stick in a particular role that we have always played. And once we start to feel ourselves re-associating and once we start to reconnect with ourselves, we no longer feel we need to stick with these roles. And it appears that we become more opinionated as we learn our own preferences and our beliefs and our desires and our needs. And our voice becomes more available to us.

And we can feel less symptomatic

Disassociation is a breeding ground for chronic illnesses. Potential anxiety, distress in the body. I was so hyper vigilant. I heard every single noise my neighbours make. I was constantly on the lookout the listen-out to keep myself safe as I start to heal and move into safety, the noises around me softening and shifting and quieten down and we can have much more capacity, capacity to be patient and present and compassionate with our loved ones. to tolerate stress more easily to manage the activation in our systems as it happens, to be able to choose to pause to repair the conflict, to navigate our challenges and to do life. And that’s really all we’re here. For. To do life and to be happy.

And as I always say to you, you are worth it. And you get to choose. Have a lovely day.