Growing up in a dysfunctional or abusive household can condition us to live in survival mode, which means we are doing what we feel pressured or need to do in order to survive or maintain a certain image to others. Even growing up with less-than-nurturing parents or those that were too busy or living in survival mode themselves can train us to be busy all the time trying to achieve “all the things”. This hamster wheel of hustling for our worth while trying to please all of those around us can lead to disconnection with ourselves. This lack of connection and presence with ourselves and our own needs, wants, and desires has some major ripple effects. And honestly, we are all so used to doing what we need to do to survive that we don’t even notice how disconnected we’ve become until we start to feel anxiety or depression creeping up on us. And then we say to ourselves something like: “I don’t understand why I’m anxious (or depressed, or insert here other annoyingly frustrating issue), I’m doing well in my career, I have people around me that care about me, yet I’m still unhappy and feeling stuck but I don’t know why”.
When we’ve had unprocessed traumatic situations in the past (which we may not even realize was something traumatic), we can over-react about things or get super upset and not even understand why. This can be SO confusing and frustrating, and we can feel crazy and out of control. This can be scary, but also so exhausting!!
Ultimately, you may have developed certain strategies in your childhood or early adulthood to help you get through some really challenging times, these strategies may not serve you anymore or may be complicating your life even more than you realized. We want you to feel like you have some different choices and options that maybe didn’t seem possible before, and those will be easier to “see” and grab a hold of when we’ve done good therapeutic work. Once we’ve addressed the trauma and chronic stress in the nervous system AND in the brain, the barriers that were put in place because of less-than-ideal circumstances will just slip away.