"Stop Chronically Trying to Protect Yourself"

With gratitude for break downs (opens) and for the light that is and will always be Andrea Gibson.

Hello Beautifuls,

I am humbled and thrilled by the community gathering here. Thank you for your kindness, your vulnerability and your presence.

What readers are experiencing:

• “You make the ordinary feel holy.”

• “You land straight in the center of it and don’t drift.”

• “Your words go deep into the interior of my heart, and act as a salve.”

Me in Costa Rica at a friend’s birthday party, circa 2008? 2009? I remember feeling especially vigilant at that point, trying to hold it all together. I left Costa Rica a year or two later.

Hello Beautifuls,

Last week I wrote about feeling so overwhelmed by the process of selling our house I found myself seeking control through patterns and distractions I thought I'd left behind after a decade-plus of healing. Reader and lovely writer Danni Levy (

How To Live This Life with Danni Levy

) commented on that post and brought up something so true I've been thinking about it ever since.

We take ourselves wherever we go.

Two and a half decades ago, when I left for Costa Rica, as I camped through the beaches of Mexico, dived in Honduras, wondered at ruins in Guatemala, witnessed remains of war in Nicaragua, stood at the base of volcanoes and under wild rain forest canopies in Costa Rica, I wanted to swallow those places whole, let their colors and smells and history replace my own.

Let me tell you, that did not work. Travel can be a distraction. Moving can be a distraction. Sex. Drinking. Eating. Not eating. TV. Social media. Shopping. Dating. Exercise. They can all be distractions and ways of clawing at control when we feel like we have lost the gravitational pull holding us in place, keeping us tethered to the earth and to ourselves.

I wrote last week, "Distraction is a blindfold on the present."

As it turns out, I ran to Costa Rica and began digging trenches of distraction, denial and self medicating by running, controlling my intake of food, drinking.

During stages of denial, while the trauma is still active, before healing is even an idea, survivors often seek out situations that recreate the feelings of danger or excitement or numbing, and the feelings of shame that come after.

This isn't a solid healing plan. It is, however, a coping strategy when healing isn't yet accessible.

My sister sent me an Instagram post from Andrea Gibson yesterday, where they shared five counterintuitive mental health tips. The one that hit me hardest was, "If you want to feel less fear, if you want less anxiety, stop trying to keep yourself safe, stop chronically trying to protect yourself.”

Stop chronically trying to protect yourself.

They spoke truth to the way it is to live from a wound, from a place of hypervigilance and fear. What people without severe trauma don't and can't know (I am so happy for these people) is the constant, subconscious, exhausting chronicity of trying to protect ourselves. It is an operating system running underneath everything else. It is in our muscle memory, our bones, our hearts, our minds. It is a record whose needle cannot be lifted, until we decide it's time.

But the lifting requires an unwinding, a going backwards and then a going towards. It requires us to see ourselves in our most broken, our most unkempt, our most wounded places. It requires witnessing our own suffering, our own strength, and accepting both.

And let me be clear here: Our entire selves are not broken, wounded, unkept. Those of us who suffered through (and suffer from) the lasting effects of trauma are already whole.

This is something nobody tells us.

This is something we don't tell ourselves.

We focus so hard on moving on, moving forward, getting better, ignoring, denying, protecting, deflecting, distracting, because we think we are broken, full stop. We think we are wounded, full stop.

But if you take nothing else from this, please take this offering of love: Even the most traumatized of us are still WHOLE.

Our trauma does not render us less than.

Let me repeat that. Survivors of trauma are not less than.

So my counterintuitive mental health tip is this. If you suffer from the after-effects of trauma and feel like you are crazy, insane, falling apart, unable to hold yourself together, let go.

Stop holding on so tight. The thing you fear most, falling apart, might happen, but you will survive and you will discover you are already, and still, whole.

Note on the writing:

I had a rough day yesterday, where all the anxiety and fear that has been trying to surface during the process of selling our house became uncontainable. I’ve been working very hard, since the sign went in the ground two-plus weeks ago, to cope with a triggered mind. I knew I needed extra help, so I booked an appointment with my therapist, who I haven’t felt the need to see in over two years. But the appointment isn’t until this afternoon. I am unclear exactly which wound has been uncovered, why it is my emotional bucket feels so full I am continuously on the cusp over overflowing. Maybe I will have more clarity after our session. But the clarity I most needed came yesterday, when my husband and I thought we had missed a deadline to get the contract’s amendment signed, our realtor wasn’t returning our calls or our texts, and I, for lack of a more eloquent way to put it, lost my shit. I cried, I screamed, I couldn’t think. I was completely overtaken by my mind’s need to shut down and my body’s need to purge. This went on for probably 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes where I had no control over what was happening in my body, or what might happen with our house selling or not selling. Fifteen minutes where I relented, where I, as Andrea Gibson put it, stopped for a moment, chronically trying to protect myself. Fifteen minutes where I lost control. Where I felt all the fear, all the anger, all the desperation I’d been holding at bay for over two weeks.

And then, do you know what happened? Nothing. I was exhausted. My husband was concerned. But I was still breathing. I didn’t lose my mind. I lost the illusion that I needed to control something in order to be okay. In order to be whole.

That’s what this entire post is about. That break and the recognition that sometimes holding it together is not what we need.

I hope in sharing this, I help someone else feel seen or heard or not so alone in the journey of trauma survival and healing.

With so much love,

J

p.s. This is the kind of note that will soon become for paid subscribers only. I want to create a space of intentionality, where everyone who is there feels safe to share in the most vulnerable places of being human.

And after all of that, a bit of brevity:

In an earlier draft of this post, as I was writing about leaving the country as a way to leave my trauma behind, I pictured a scene from the Road Runner where the car is driving down the desert road and keeps losing parts. I tried to find a clip (who knows, maybe it wasn’t the Road Runner) and did not succeed, but I found this instead. For anyone who enjoyed the Road Runner as a kid, here you go. For anyone not familiar, this is a slice of Gen X early childhood.

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My Loves,

If you’ve been reading along, you may have noticed I’m talking more about paid subscriptions. I’ve been writing Hello Beautifuls for two years and four months now and I feel ready to start offering more vulnerability to those who want to share in it. More coming on that in the next few weeks.

xo,

j