At the Heart of Why I've Felt like a Nobody

I'm taking you to therapy with me 🗣

It’s not been easy. Healing every major aspect of my life from my entire childhood, which has so many layers and facets, to the pain of going no contact with family members, to betrayal trauma and all the nuances of that, to ongoing relational healing work that’s been very hard, to meeting a biological parent for the first time in my life as an adult and all the emotions that came up with that….while just trying to build my adult life, start and build my business, make friends, figure out my purpose and path and experience just a shred of normalcy…it brings tears to my eyes how much I’ve gone through and when I lay it all out (knowing there’s like one million other things involved with this short paragraph) IT MAKES SENSE why I’d be vacillating between shut down and freeze…because that’s a SH*T TON! And without the proper rest and a safe environment to really receive the rest, cycling between the dysregulated states has been the only mode of survival for most of my life.

And maybe as you reflect on what you’ve gone through you feel similarly…like you haven’t really acknowledged yourself fully and deeply for all you’ve been through?

It makes me so sad that I’ve been so hard on myself throughout it all. I’ve definitely given myself a lot of permission along the way, but the sadness comes from the urgency I’ve placed on myself to figure it all out perfectly, throughly and without mistakes and, more so, I think the deeper sadness comes from the fact that I haven’t really allowed myself to make any of what I’ve gone through a big deal. I’ve not really fully seen or felt the magnitude of each thing I’ve gone through; almost like I just brushed it away into the abyss as if it were nothing (which has only perpetuated the exhaustion for me).

Partly because one of my trauma responses goes something like, “if the people around me aren’t noticing it or seeing it as a big deal, then I guess it’s not that big of a deal. I guess I’m not really doing anything that big or important if they don’t understand it, or see it as such.” And then I just keep moving forward.