I like to sit on my back deck, especially in the mornings when I’m drinking my coffee. The dogs (Chloe and Milly) run around the backyard while I sip and think and stare into the distance and – quite frankly – wake up.

Right now, I can feel the season changing from the heat of summer into the more gentle coolness of fall. I pay attention to the breeze on my skin. I listen to birds chirping and whirring and cawing, and I watch them fly around. There’s no drama or chaos or anything but me in the present moment.

Is this comfortable? No.

Am I learning to like it? Yes.

Why?

Healing happens in stillness.

Trauma Survivors Have Been Raised in Chaos

For many of us as trauma survivors, chaos has been our reference point for daily life.

This can feel like walking on eggshells, living in survival mode, and feeling constant fear and/or nervous system activation (fight-flight-freeze). Wanting to hide and isolate. Never knowing what is going to happen next. Feeling hyped or “manic” or the opposite, defeated or depressed.

Because our nervous systems have been trained in chaos, we are attracted to it. Not because we are dumb (we’re not), but because that’s what our nervous systems KNOW.

What is known is far more comfortable than what we don’t know. And if we have never known safety, how are we supposed to recognize it when we see or feel it?

Chaos keeps us in a cycle that’s comfortable, but detrimental. Unfortunately, so does our culture.

Our Culture Teaches Us to Distract

One of the biggest epiphanies of my life was realizing that our culture works against trauma and grief recovery.

Our culture teaches us to avoid and distract, to spin in the chaos. To fill the void with any of a variety of vices: food (this has historically been mine), alcohol, sex, drugs, shopping, and sleeping are some of them. These are also coping mechanisms that work…until they don’t work any more.

I say this not as a shameful thing, but as an observation about what we have learned in lives of unprocessed trauma and grief. As we use these coping mechanisms, our culture encourages us to KEEP using them long after they have become detrimental to our well-being.

One of the Most Popular Trauma Responses

One of the most popular trauma responses – keeping BUSY – grows out of both a toxic family system and our culture’s love of productivity.

For example, when I was a kid living in my abusive family, staying busy kept me safe. If I wasn’t moving or busy with something, I would get into trouble. I learned early on to keep myself under the radar, looking busy when I was at home or being busy with school and sports and work outside of the home.

This morphed into decades of BUSY. Moving-moving-moving until I was exhausted, and then crashing.

Workaholism is how it showed up for me. Even still, I find comfort in “being busy” and working a lot. It’s an old comfort and it’s not sustainable for long, but I still see it.

This chaos-busy-work pattern kept me disconnected from abusive people, and then, when I was safe, it kept me disconnected from those I loved. I found myself stuck in an infuriating cycle of working myself into exhaustion, feeling completely alone and taken for granted.

This cycle worked until it didn’t. But here’s the thing about trauma and grief – there comes a time when it needs to be processed.

We are not meant to live in survival mode.

We are meant to transition out of survival mode and into a more calm state in order to process what we’ve gone through and find some peace and healing.

How to Get Comfortable Healing in Stillness

So how do we do that? How do we move into a more calm state when our nervous systems, toxic family and group systems, and even our cultural systems are encouraging us NOT to?

There are many things in our lives and beings that we can NOT choose.

There’s far more in trauma and grief recovery that we CAN choose.

One of the ways to begin feeling more comfortable in a regulated state (inside) and calm surroundings (outside) is to PRACTICE.

Some of the choices we can make:

• To sit in stillness (however long – 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, 10 minutes – anything)
• Practice being in the present moment (use the five senses)
• Disengage from emotion spirals
• Recognize when our physical bodies and nervous systems react to something/become activated
• Regulate our nervous systems into a calm state
• Process emotions and feelings from the outside in

Is this easy? No, but not because of you.

We are taught the OPPOSITE of how to make these choices. This is partly what makes trauma and grief recovery so dang important.

Feel It to Heal It

One recent morning, I sat on my back deck with my coffee and felt…off.

Even with my knowledge of the Gottman Feeling Wheel, “OFF” was the best I could do.

As I sat and sipped my coffee, I allowed myself to be still.

I noticed the feelings bubble up – deep sadness and anger. I noticed that these feelings felt…older. When emotions and feelings feel older, this is typically – for me – grief-related.

I realized that this particular day was five years since I had separated from my ex. He and I had a conversation that afternoon, which was the day before we were to leave on our 23rd anniversary vacation, and he said, “You have been unhappy for a long time…perhaps we should separate.”

And then, the next day, we absolutely went on that trip to Niagara Falls. It was, after all, non-refundable.

So…yeah. I’ve got a lot of Big Feelings about that time in my life and the decisions that I made, and my body remembered. I spent time that morning and throughout the day in calm and quiet, feeling and grieving.

“Feel It to Heal It” has been coming up a lot lately, because it is necessary in the trauma and grief recovery work that we do together.

One of the reasons that I hold a safe container for myself and my clients is to allow us to FEEL whatever we need to feel. To PROCESS tough emotions and feelings, to grieve and mourn, and to INTEGRATE our experiences.

In other words, to make open wounds into scars. This healing process happens in stillness.

There’s nothing wrong with you. No shame in this game. If something in this post touched a nerve, I would love to chat in a Discovery Call.

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