Teaching My Nervous System to Rest

 There is so much written these days about the nervous system.

As I read and learn, I cannot help but feel sadness for all that mine has endured.

It has lived through fear.

Through hypervigilance.

Through grief.

Through loss.

Through years of believing that pushing harder was the answer.

I became so accustomed to overriding my body’s whispers that I rarely noticed when they became screams.

Some of it came from the perfectionist in me.

Some of it came from the part of me that believed multitasking was a measure of my worth.

Some of it came from simply believing this was how life was supposed to be lived.

Work harder. Do more. Push through.

There were choices I made that, had I known better, I would have made differently.

But there were also many things that were never within my control.

The little girl who learned to survive did not choose the world she was born into.

She simply learned how to adapt.

Today, I no longer judge her for the ways she survived.

And I no longer judge myself.

I cannot undo the years of asking my nervous system to carry more than it was ever designed to hold.

I cannot rewrite yesterday.

But I can choose a different way to live today.

I can speak to myself with kindness instead of criticism.

I can move with gentleness instead of urgency.

I can rest without earning it.

I can listen when my body whispers instead of waiting until it cries out in pain.

The pusher in me no longer gets to lead my life.

She helped me survive.

But she is ready to rest now, too.

These days, I return again and again to a simple reminder—

Easy does it.

Waiting for the Next Shoe to Drop

 I find myself wondering what life felt like inside my little girl’s heart when everything seemed calm.

Was I ever able to relax?

Or was I always waiting for the next shoe to drop?

Was I living on pins and needles, anticipating the next outburst, the next disappointment, the next reason to be afraid?

Most likely, the answer is yes.

Fear was more familiar to me than peace.

At home, I learned to expect that safety could disappear without warning. Even during the quiet moments, perhaps my little nervous system never truly believed the calm would last.

Children who grow up this way don’t simply experience fear.

They begin to expect it.

Yet there was another world.

When I stayed with my grandparents, something inside me softened. I felt safe. I felt protected. I could lose myself in play for hours without worrying about what might happen next. My body knew the difference, even if I couldn’t have explained it at the time.

Looking back now, I think my sensitive little girl lived in far more fear than I ever realized.

That realization helps me understand so much about the woman I became.

I have always wanted life to go well.

I have always hoped for good things.

But underneath that hope has lived another voice, quietly preparing for disappointment.

A part of me expected life to take away whatever I loved.

A part of me believed that peace was temporary.

Fear had taught me that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t count on life to stay safe.

Perhaps that is one of childhood trauma’s greatest losses.

It doesn’t only steal a child’s sense of safety.

It quietly steals her expectation that life can be good—and that she is capable of meeting it with confidence.

Today, I see that little girl with new compassion.

She wasn’t expecting the worst because she lacked faith.

She was expecting what she had already learned.

I will gently continue to teach her that the future does not have to repeat the past.

A Lifetime of Distractions

 The little girl I am sitting with today is not new.

She has been with me my entire life.

Although I began doing inner child work more than thirty years ago, I never reached this hidden place inside of me. I found many wounded parts. I uncovered layers of grief and loss. I learned compassion for the child I had been.

But this part remained tucked away, patiently waiting.

Looking back, I can see something about myself with remarkable clarity.

I became a master of distraction.

Relationships.

Raising my children.

Building a career.

Helping others heal.

Always another responsibility.

Always another purpose.

Always another reason to keep moving.

I wasn’t consciously running from my pain.

I didn’t even know what I was avoiding.

The distractions were not intentional. They were simply how I survived.

It wasn’t until about eight years ago that I began to witness the deeper trauma that had quietly shaped my life. Little by little, the walls that had protected me began to soften.

Since then, life has invited me into a different kind of surrender.

One by one, I have let go of the distractions.

The attachments.

The identities.

The beliefs.

Everything that stood between me and the truth.

What once felt like loss, I now understand as an invitation.

Today there are very few places left to hide.

There are no distractions loud enough to drown out her voice.

There is only the two of us.

She carries the fear.

I bring the willingness to stay.

It is not comfortable.

Some days it feels unbearable.

Every instinct still whispers to look away, to become busy, to find something—anything—that will carry me somewhere else.

But I know now that healing does not live in distraction.

It lives in presence.

The only way I can free this little girl is not by running from her pain, but by sitting beside her until she knows she is no longer alone.

I cannot heal by going around the wound.

I can only heal by walking gently through it.

The Truth Still Lives

 Today the pain is loud.

It reaches beyond my body and touches places that have been waiting a lifetime to be seen. Physical pain has a way of opening doors I didn’t even know were still locked. Behind them lives a little girl who learned far too early that her body was not entirely her own.

As I sit with the pain, memories do not always arrive as photographs. Sometimes they arrive as sensations, as fear, as a story written in my nervous system rather than in my mind.

My rights as a child were violated.

I was not allowed to have a voice. I was not allowed to have needs. Feelings were dangerous. Even tears could invite punishment. Fear became my first language, and silence became the safest place I knew.

I believe something happened to me when I was very young. I cannot point to a memory or prove it with certainty. What I know is what my body has carried for decades—the fear, the shame, the feeling of being disconnected from my own body. Those sensations have spoken long before words ever could.

For years I wondered why I felt ashamed of something I could not name.

Now I understand that children often carry emotions that never belonged to them.

I also spent much of my life believing I had failed my sister.

I carried guilt that was never mine to carry. Yet when I look back with gentler eyes, I can see that my trust was broken. She lied to get me into trouble. She took things that belonged to me. She often positioned herself as the victim, and somehow I accepted the role of the one who had failed.

That burden followed me into adulthood.

It is only now that I am beginning to lay it down.

My brother never left me with that same confusion. I never knew him to intentionally cause harm to me or to anyone else. His presence reminds me that not every relationship was built on fear.

I also remember believing I was selfish because that was the message I absorbed from my mother.

But how can a child be selfish when she never asks for anything?

The contradictions have taken years to untangle.

Slowly, patiently, the scattered pieces of my life are finding one another. The picture is becoming clearer, even when it hurts to see.

The deepest truth is not that I was broken.

The deepest truth is that I adapted in order to survive.

I grew to love my sister.

I grew to love my parents.

In time, I forgave them all.

But love does not rewrite history.

Forgiveness does not ask me to deny what happened.

The truth still lives.

And finally…

So do I.