The quiet ways CPTSD can change the way you live

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Your nervous system is designed to respond to changing circumstances. Ongoing emotional, physiological, and sometimes trauma-related demands can overwhelm the system, and don’t give it enough opportunity to fully recover.

You keep going.

Because you have to.

Eventually, surviving stops feeling like an emergency response and starts to feel more like your default way of living.

Eventually, the body can begin saying:

“I can’t keep doing this.”

This is where dissociation can become interesting–and confusing.

Dissociation is frequently depicted as something dramatic, but it can be subtle. It can be the experience of sitting across from someone you love and realizing you’re not really there. Or driving somewhere and barely remembering the journey, or like your body goes one way and the car goes the other. But somehow you make it around the bend.

Many describe it as moving through your day on autopilot and being detached from your body. Or spending hours inside your thoughts while your body quietly carries on underneath you. Sometimes disconnection becomes a way of managing too much connection with an experience that previously felt impossible to tolerate.

The system learned:

If I can’t escape what is happening, perhaps I can escape my experience of it.

That strategy can be protective, but what once protected you can now be holding you back and your life in suspension. This is one of the most important things I want people to understand.

Your nervous system does not follow a calendar.

It doesn’t necessarily know:

“That happened twenty years ago, so we’re done with that now.”

It learns via predictions that become patterns.

Through repetition.

Through expectation.

Through what has happened before.

If your system learned that rest was followed by danger, rest may feel uncomfortable.

If it learned that saying no caused conflict, no may feel dangerous. Or that other people’s moods determined your safety…

You may continue scanning faces long after you have left that environment.

If it learned that your body couldn’t be trusted, every unusual sensation might become a reason to worry.

This is why simply telling someone:

“You’re safe now” does not always make you feel safe!

The body needs experiences of safety.

Without force.

This is why I think the word “regulation” can sometimes feel too limited. I don’t want trauma recovery to become another project where we try to get ourselves into the “right” nervous system state.

Because life isn’t one state.

Sometimes you need activation or rest, and the goal isn’t permanent calm.

It’s flexibility.

It is the ability to move through different feelings without getting completely lost in them.

And perhaps even more importantly, staying connected to yourself during those times.

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The question becomes: what helps you stay?

With your body when it is uncomfortable?

With yourself when someone is disappointed in you?

What helps you stay present when uncertainty arrives?

What helps you stay as you notice fear without immediately becoming its story?

What helps you stay with anger so that you can speak for it rather than from it?

What helps you stay with the feeling of sadness without deciding that you are broken?

What helps you stay in a restful state without having to earn it first?

What helps you stay with receiving without immediately giving something back?

What helps you stay with your needs and ask for help before you’re completely depleted?

These are not simply psychological skills. They are strongly supported by the practice of embodiment, which helps build those capacities to stay with yourself.

And in truth, it takes practice.

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Recovery isn’t about becoming the person you would have been without trauma

I really think this is worth saying. I know I personally fell into the trap of thinking that I needed to erase my history, to rip all the layers off before I could move on. I have since grown a lot, and believe that healing is a living experience.

Recovery can be much simpler than that.

It can look like noticing you’re tired before you’re exhausted.

Leaving before you’re overwhelmed.

Eating before you’re starving.

Saying no before resentment arrives.

Asking for help before you collapse.

Feeling your feet while you’re having a difficult conversation.

Noticing that you’ve disappeared into your thoughts…

and gently coming back.

It can mean learning that your body is not your enemy.

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This is where nurturance becomes more important than control

There is a lot of nervous system work that begins with:

How do I regulate this?

Sometimes I think we need another question first, like how I relate to myself.

and

“Can I stay with myself while I learn what this sensation is telling me?” It’s important that your body does not become another battle. We can prevent this by building a different relationship with it.

Our bodies are always trying to help us heal, and a trusting relationship can be built slowly through contact.

Attuned Attention.

Subtle movement that invites you to feel more connected to this moment.

Boundaries are super important, and I go a step further by saying, “Become the embodied boundary.”

As I shared with my LinkedIn following recently

You cannot have inner peace without boundaries, and over the years, I’ve come to realize something that changed the way I understand healing.

You have to become the embodied boundary.

Most people think boundaries begin with words.
“No.”
“That doesn’t work for me.”
“I need space.”

But long before a boundary is spoken, your body has already spoken.
It contracts.
It tightens.
It knows.
And you’re either shrinking, flinching, or noticing as you gather yourself and the information … that your body is constantly gathering anyway.

If you’re disconnected from your body, you’re disconnected from the very intelligence that knows what your needs are to maintain your sovereignty.

I see and teach boundaries as acts of embodiment with far more powerful communication signals than just … words you hope will work …

Here is my potent addition and conviction to embodied healing
➛ if you don’t claim the intelligence of your whole body, your soul has nothing to live through.

Without embodiment, you lose more than the ability to say “no.”
You lose your precious time and place.
Your beautiful energy and vitality slowly wilt; cloudy clarity becomes convincing; intuition is tricked by your fear, and your physical health counts the toll as you lose your sense of home within yourself.

Your body is here to protect what is sacred, which is you and your life and what you bring to this world without an imbalanced physical, emotional, energetic expense account… that is the personal accountability of upholding your boundaries …

Become the embodied boundary, and don’t leave yourself outside your own home…

Everything else has the potential to grow very soundly from there.

• Sensory awareness.
• Connection.
• Appropriate challenge.
• Recovery.

And sometimes medical care, therapeutic support, or other professional help.

This is the heart of what I mean by CoreNeuroCare®.

Not simply teaching someone how to calm down.

But helping them understand the layers beneath the experience, and the ways accumulated stress can alter how we recover and return to some semblance of what we define as life, living, and feeling alive again.

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Maybe this short reflective practice can shift something within you today

Instead of asking:

“What’s wrong with me?”

You can begin asking:

“What happened?”

“What have I been carrying?”

“What did my body learn?”

“What is it still attempting to protect me from?”

And then…

perhaps the gentlest question of all:

“What does my body need from me now?”

Not forever.

Not for the rest of your life.

Just now.

• Maybe it needs rest.
• Maybe it needs movement.
• Maybe it needs food.
• Maybe it needs a boundary.
• Maybe it needs another trusted person.
• Maybe it needs medical attention.
• Maybe it needs to cry or laugh.

Maybe it needs to feel the ground, and if all else fails, healing feels really confusing or maybe even disappointing. Always prioritize grounding as a first port of call; it will help to orient your body and reduce the stress of trying to work things out from a disembodied state.

As a final note: your body has always been trying to do its best to help you, and it’s doing so with the information it has at the time. Survival does not have to remain the only way you know how to live.

There can be another chapter.

One built not around forcing yourself forward…

But around learning how to remain connected, centered, and present while seven worlds collide and life is actually happening.

I believe this is where the real work lives and truly begins.

Thanks for stopping by to read, and I’d love to hear how you would define embodiment in the comments.

For it’s a deep feeling that my soul is finally relaxing into this lifetime.

Photo Credit: Unsplash

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