Healing differently…
What does that mean?
I hope these words from my reflection stick with you all and I would love for you to share what you take from this.
When I think about healing for myself I have to really address and face the nervous system baseline of functioning that I have been living in for much of my life. That baseline has been in a chronic state of fear/worry. When you’re in a state of chronic fear, you have to truly be honest with yourself and name, that you have not been in regulation. So the concept of healing is not about finally becoming calm enough that nothing bothers me. Absolutely not that would be madness we’re human, and we will have an emotional response to external stimuli in our environment. The focus point is to really tend to the internal response and the shifts that occur within the body before the response becomes something external other people can see.
There’s so much talk about healing, as if healing involves reaching some evolved place where we never get activated again. Healing also doesn’t mean getting far enough away from the people who hurt us so that we can finally breathe. Think about it, what are you reinforcing your body and mind to internalize through constant repetition of avoidance— whether that is from moving across state lines, suppressing, or simply avoiding any acknowledgment of what needs to be discussed. Some of us believe being in isolation is a form of healing. I see it as isolating ourselves from anything that activates or triggers us. So that closes the window on the amount of exposure training we have to practice regulation strategies. As someone who use to think being single meant I was healing. That became a rude awakening as soon as I got into my marriage and as we face transitions and challenges. We both have blindspots that the marriage revealed needed tending to. Self-awareness is one thing but having and knowing what you’re aware of and facing it head is a very different exposure assignment.
I think healing happens somewhere underneath all of that. Healing happens when the fear beneath our defenses begins to get corrected— more like brought to the surface for deep cleaning. Think about it for a second, every single one of us has defense mechanisms that we have used to protect ourselves from a perceived threat — keyword here — Perception. How do we know something as a perceived threat? Where did we learn that__ is dangerous or equals danger? I asked this because we live in a society today that thinks if someone disagrees with us that disagreement is a form of danger that is a threat to our safety. This is why I challenge so much of our perception in my work. Some of us think a safe love is a threat, and that threat response comes from the perception of feeling suspicious around safety because it feels like betrayal to the baseline for functioning.
So if my baseline for functioning has lived at a 8 (the higher the number 0-10 the more activation, hypervigilenace, and inability to access rest and digest level functioning) being part of relationships even friendships that are in a 3 zone. Those will be less stimulating to the nervous system, causing boredom, and resulting us in unconsciously sabotaging or instigating chaos as a means to feel some sort of familiarity. So going back to our defense mechanisms— those protective strategies. We have to get real clear on the way we were operating as a form of functioning. When the thing organizing the way we see ourselves, other people, love, conflict, safety, abandonment, closeness, control and uncertainty is no longer fear.
That sounds beautiful until you actually have to do it.
Fear does not usually walk into the room introducing itself as fear. Fear comes dressed as discernment. Protection. Intuition. Control. Judgment. Withdrawal. Clinging. Possession. Hyper-independence. Attack and even avoidance. “I’m just being realistic.” “I already know how this ends.” “I need you to understand me.” “I need you to reassure me.” “I need you to change so I can finally feel safe.” It can even show up as psychological language. I know their attachment style. I know what their mother did to them. I know they are avoidant. I know they are a narcissist. I know exactly what this behavior means. Maybe sometimes we do know. I’m not here to deny that at all if you haven’t caught the heart behind my work. A lot of what I say online whether in written or video form is me talking to myself and I’m just allowing witnesses to that conversation. Ya girl has learned a lot about fear and how I believed it served as a means to protect me from future harm.
But:
Fearful interpretation is not the only level in which we can understand what is happening.
That sentence has been sitting with me. Heavily.
A Course in Miracles gave me language for something I have been trying to explain psychologically for years. It calls it level confusion. The easiest way I know how to understand it is this:
The mind is the level of perception, meaning and choice. The body and the external world are the level of experience, form and effect. Level confusion happens when we give the second level the power that belongs to the first.
An example of this is: My body feels anxious, therefore something terrible must be happening.
My partner has not reassured me, therefore I am unsafe.
My body looks different, therefore I am unattractive.
This person withdrew, therefore I am unlovable.
My heart is racing, therefore my marriage is about to end.
They misunderstood me, therefore I am in danger.
Now let’s talk about something real quick. The sensation is real. Don’t think for one second I am minimizing the impact of what that physiological sensation in the body provides us in exacerbated levels of fear and panic. Trust me I’m learning this as well. I am so fed up of living in a nervous system that is constantly firing and wiring in a state of panic even if I logically know there’s nothing to be afraid of. I think that’s one of the hardest parts about this work. Let me give you an example because it happened just now.
Example: I’m sitting outside voice-dictating this essay.
I hear a dog yelp somewhere in the distance, and it sounds like Charles.
Immediately, I have an automatic thought—more like an ANT (automatic negative thought). The thought is that the yelp means something happened, and my brain immediately categorizes that “something” as something happening to Charles. The data my brain starts pulling together is: He’s on a walk with my husband right now. Maybe he got into a fight with another dog.
Then a fleet of other thoughts comes in and attacks my brain too: I’m going to get a call. It’s going to be an emergency.
All of that story happened within seconds of hearing one random dog yelp in the distance. And I don’t even know if it wasCharles. The amygdala—which, as I like to say, doesn’t have eyes—hasn’t confirmed shit. It just heard a sound, recognized something potentially threatening, and my brain started building the rest of the story because Charles happens to be on a walk right now.
That is the part I find fascinating: there was a cue, and then there was everything my brain did with the cue.
The body—meaning my body—didn’t suddenly feel something in my chest and start sending these electric-shock sensations throughout me simply because I heard a dog yelp in the distance that sounded like Charles. It wasn’t just the sound. My ears heard the sound, and then my mind drove it toward a conclusion and started building the story.
My mind basically went, Hey, yo, this is happening.
And my body was like, Oh shit. Do we gotta get ready?
Then the brain goes, Wait, let me get more information.
Here’s where it gets interesting. If my brain had started gathering more information while my body was already activated, what kind of information would I have been looking for? Probably confirmation-bias information. Tainted information. Evidence that matched the story my mind had already started telling me. Because now my body is activated, and I’m no longer necessarily looking through a clear lens at what is actually happening. I’m looking for information from inside the story I’ve already created. Think about it: if I hadn’t had that physical sensation in my body, I could have heard that dog yelp the same way I hear a bunch of dogs out here every day. It would have disappeared into the background with all the other barks echoing around the neighborhood. It would have meant nothing.
So why did my mind automatically go there?
It recognized something that sounded familiar and then created an entire story based on the data it already had: Charles isn’t in the house right now. He’s on a walk. That sounded like him. So it could be him. He could be in danger. Something could be wrong. I might get an emergency call.
Look at how quickly we got there.
One sound.
And within seconds, my brain had damn near produced, directed, and released an entire emergency movie.
I laugh here because doesn’t that sound exhausting? Some of us are living in states like this regularly. Sometimes hourly. Rotating through narratives our minds have created, our bodies have responded to, and then searching the environment for evidence that confirms the very story that activated us in the first place.
The circumstance may also be real. But the meaning is still being supplied somewhere.
The body experiences. The mind interprets.
A nervous system sensation cannot decide that you are being abandoned. Your heart rate cannot announce that your relationship is doomed. Tightness in your chest doesn’t get to determine that someone hates you. Your body can communicate that something is happening, but it can’t independently decide what that something means. Meaning gets filtered through the mind. I think of the mind like a filtration system. Everything passes through it before it reaches our conscious interpretation. But if the filter is already saturated with old fear, old humiliation, old betrayal, abandonment, rejection, unpredictability, criticism or shame, everything entering the system gets colored by what was already trapped inside.
Whats upsetting is we humans then call the filtered water we drink life through reality.
This is why forgiveness has started to mean something entirely different to me.
We always hear, “Forgiveness is for you, not the other person,” and it can sound like one of those empty inspirational quotes people throw at you when they want you to hurry up and stop being angry. But forgiveness really is for us because forgiveness eventually allows perception to change.
Forgiveness does not mean what happened was acceptable.
It does not mean reconciliation.
It does not mean trusting someone again.
It does not mean abandoning boundaries.
It does not mean deciding that something harmful was secretly okay.
It means I no longer want what happened to become the filtration system through which I interpret everything that happens next. If I can’t forgive what happened before, I am not just carrying the memory. I may be carrying the perception it created and that perception can walk directly into my next relationship with me.
I did this in my marriage. My husband did it to me too.
We both entered union carrying realities we had learned somewhere else, and then we unconsciously asked the other person to live inside them. That is what makes relationships such brutal classrooms for development. Truly, it is. The body is a learning device. Relationships of many kinds become a classroom, and conflict serves as tests that are taken in that classroom. Just like fear and intimacy feel like cumulative final exams in relationship classrooms. There are things we can go our entire lives without seeing in ourselves until another person gets close enough to touch them. Which is why proximity has a way of exposing what solitude allows us to never encounter.
You can feel completely healed living alone.
Then somebody you love takes too long to respond.
Somebody misunderstands you.
Somebody pulls away.
Somebody criticizes something you were already ashamed of.
Somebody’s family enters the relationship and suddenly you are negotiating belonging, loyalty, boundaries, identity and culture.
Somebody makes a financial decision that changes your sense of safety.
Now the classroom is open.
And our reactions reveal what we believe, not necessarily what is true.
What we believe.
There is also a form level, and I don’t want to erase it in the name of spirituality or self-reflection.
Was the person self-centered?
Were they controlling?
Did they want everything done their way?
Were promises repeatedly broken?
Did they omit important truths?
Were they emotionally unavailable?
Did they criticize you until you started shrinking?
Did you overfunction?
Did you accommodate things you were uncomfortable with because you were afraid of losing the relationship?
Did you abandon your own boundaries?
Did you keep hoping the person would become someone they had never actually demonstrated the capacity to be?
That data matters.
Collect it.
I am increasingly interested in becoming a data collector instead of immediately becoming a prosecutor. Which today with all this pattern recognition content, it’s starting to become a baseline for functioning to constantly be in as state of recognizing the patterns. Because right now we are being trained to skip observation and move straight into diagnosis.
Narcissist.
Avoidant.
Toxic.
Abusive.
Manipulative.
Gaslighter.
Sometimes those descriptions are accurate and naming abuse can be necessary, clarifying and even lifesaving. I am not interested in minimizing extremes or telling somebody to psychologically analyze themselves while they are in danger. Safety is safety. Now, I also think we have reached a place where the label sometimes becomes the end of the work. Or where we think the work ends. If I can establish that you were the narcissist, then perhaps I no longer have to ask what happened inside me.
Not, “What did I do to cause someone to abuse me?”
That is not the question. I REPEAT , THAT IS NOT THE QUESTION!!
Someone else’s abusive behavior belongs to them.
The question I am wanting to explore is, “What did this relationship teach me about what I tolerate, what I normalize, what I override, what I do when my intuition and my attachment disagree, what I believe love requires from me, and how long I will abandon myself while waiting for somebody else to become safe?”
That is not victim blaming.
That is stewardship, thats the difference.
Self-accountability is not the same thing as accepting responsibility for another adult’s behavior, and if I leave the entire experience believing that the only information available is “they were the problem,” then I may leave with exactly the same filtration system I entered with.
Different person.
Same classroom.
Same fear.
Same lesson.
Same ache.
We all contain narcissistic defenses. We all have moments of selfishness. We all project. We all protect an image. We all have places where shame makes us defensive. That does not mean everyone has Narcissistic Personality Disorder, just like someone withdrawing during conflict does not automatically make them an “avoidant.”
Sometimes the more interesting question is shame.
What happens when someone cannot metabolize shame?
What happens when admitting “I hurt you” collapses into “I am a horrible person”?
What happens when being wrong feels like annihilation?
What happens when someone’s entire identity is attached to being competent, providing, being the strong one, being the responsible one, being the good daughter, being the successful husband, being the person who has everything under control?
You can show someone the pattern perfectly and still terrify them.
Because you may not simply be showing them a behavior.
You may be threatening an identity.
Imagine telling someone whose entire survival system says:
I must control everything or I will die
to simply release control.
You call it freedom, but their body experiences annihilation. Imagine telling someone whose entire sense of worth has been built around providing:
“You don’t have to provide everything to be worthy of love”
That sounds compassionate.
But underneath it may be:
Then who the f*ck am I?
This is one of the hardest things I have had to learn both personally and professionally:
Just because you can see it does not mean somebody has the capacity to see it also.
Insight is not integration.
Information is not capacity. Truth delivered without attunement can become flooding and I have had to sit with my own shame when I reflect on unconsciously flooding other people I cared for due to the patterns I could see that were causing flooding in me.
I have used truth that way before.
I did not mean to overwhelm anyone. I was not intentionally trying to terrorize another person into consciousness. Usually I was trying desperately to create connection.
Do you see it?
Do you see what is happening?
Do you see the pattern?
Do you see how this connects to that?
Do you see why this keeps happening? What I have had to learn and face is if the person on the receiving end can’t metabolize what I am giving them, communication has failed regardless of how accurate the observation might be. That is difficult for me to own because another part of me immediately says, “but nobody cared what was within my capacity!!”
And that may also be true.
There were experiences in my marriage that exceeded my capacity. There were relational and family dynamics I was expected to adapt to long before I had developed the safety or foundation required to hold them. There were things that overwhelmed me. My ego wants to use that as permission: “Then why should I have to care about overwhelming somebody else?”
Because I don’t want the thing that wounded me to become my communication style.
That is where forgiveness becomes a practice rather than a sentimental idea.
I release what happened enough to stop reenacting it.
That does not require me to deny it.
It means what overwhelmed me does not earn the right to turn me into someone who overwhelms others. This is where I want to ring the crisis bell because what I see in society today is a number of hurt people using what hurt them as a justification for why they hurt others.
acknowledging this for me also does not mean dumbing myself down.
Attunement is not shrinking. I am not interested in becoming more digestible by amputating the parts of me that see/feel deeply, but I am interested in learning how to communicate at the level another human being can actually receive.
There is a difference between:
“You’re emotionally avoidant because your mother neglected your emotional world and you are reenacting your entire attachment system with me.”
and:
“When conversations get intense, I notice you disappear from them. Can you help me understand what happens inside you?”
There is a difference between disappearing for three days and saying:
“I am overloaded and I need time to process. Can you give me until tomorrow evening? I will come back to this conversation.”
And then actually returning.
That return matters.
The miracle is not simply that somebody pauses, the miracle is that a new perception allows a new behavior. This is where I think the body becomes fascinating, because the mind can use the body for avoidance.
Attack.
Control.
Withdrawal.
Possession.
Connection.
Comfort.
Communication.
Sexual intimacy.
Violence.
Care.
The body expresses.
But who is teaching the mind?
That question matters to me more and more because we are living in a time when the algorithm has become an external teacher of fear. The algorithm can take your deepest wounds and build you an entire worldview around it.
You feel discarded?
Here are six hundred videos about avoidant partners.
You were hurt by somebody self-centered?
Here are four hundred signs you dated a narcissist.
You’re angry?
Here is an endless stream of content validating why your anger proves you were right.
You are suspicious?
Here is your confirmation.
And now the mind has a teacher.
Fear.
The algorithm does not necessarily care whether you heal because a healed nervous system is probably less profitable than an activated one. The wound keeps scrolling.
And the algorithm keeps feeding it.
I think about Stranger Things when I try to explain this.
Fear is Vecna.
We are living in the Upside Down, but because we have lived there for so long, we start calling it home.
Control feels like safety.
Attack feels like defense.
Judgment feels like discernment.
Withdrawal feels like power.
Possession feels like love.
Hypervigilance feels like intuition.
Clinging feels like loyalty.
Then actual love arrives and terrifies us because love requires us to release some of the defenses keeping the Upside Down intact. What happens when someone actually treats you gently after your entire system has been trained to anticipate abandonment?
You question it.
What happens when someone communicates clearly after years of decoding silence?
You look for the hidden meaning.
What happens when someone doesn’t require you to earn their affection?
You wait for the bill.
What happens when someone gives you freedom after you’ve learned that love comes with control?
Freedom can feel like they don’t care.
A person’s worldview can become so organized around fear that a radically different experience is intolerable. This is what I think it means to be prematurely exposed to a miracle. Not that a magical event suddenly happens and you are ungrateful for it.
The miracle is the new perception, the shift in the way you think, respond, and perceive the world around you. Sometimes the new perception itself is frightening. I think about Pirates of the Caribbean, when the ship has to flip completely upside down to get into Davy Jones’ Locker. The upside down becomes the right side up.
That is what healing can feel like.
The belief that kept you alive suddenly has to die.
The defense you thought was keeping you safe becomes the thing trapping you.
The identity you built around “I don’t need anyone” gets turned upside down.
The belief that love means being chosen gets turned upside down.
The belief that safety means knowing the future gets turned upside down.
The belief that forgiveness means letting someone get away with something gets turned upside down.
The miracle isn’t always getting what you wanted.
Sometimes the miracle is finally becoming able to receive something different by realizing that in order to go right side up. You have to let go of that ways in which you operated from the upside down. often time, before we can even access that new perception, we need support.
A Course in Miracles calls certain external remedies “non-creative agents.” I don’t take that to mean medication or medical care are bad, nor do I believe illness should be reduced to “you were afraid and your mind made you sick.” Bodies are biological. Illness has biological, environmental, genetic and physiological causes. I am interested in the psychological principle underneath the language. Sometimes we need something outside of us to reduce fear enough that deeper work becomes possible.
Medication can be a leg up.
Sleep can be a leg up.
Food can be a leg up.
Movement can be a leg up.
Therapy can be a leg up.
Physical distance can be a leg up.
Structure can be a leg up.
Crisis stabilization can be a leg up.
They may not change the meaning-making machine by themselves, but they can reduce enough pressure that you can finally access the part of yourself capable of doing something with the fear. Medication might quiet panic enough that you can participate in therapy. Physical distance might reduce activation enough that you can actually meditate again, be able to clear your head and make a confident decision.
Sleep might stabilize you enough that everything no longer feels catastrophic.
Prayer may become accessible again.
Forgiveness work may become accessible.
Reflection becomes possible.
You finally have enough space to ask:
What am I actually afraid of?
I think we dramatically underestimate the importance of these practices because they do not always look impressive.
Meditation.
Prayer.
Forgiveness.
Silence.
Breathing.
Walking.
Sitting with yourself without reaching for immediate confirmation.
I have gone through seasons where I could not meditate. I could barely access myself because my entire internal world was occupied by uncertainty and fear. Then I would shame myself because I “should” be able to regulate. Sometimes the first healing intervention is simply reducing the amount of fear in the room.
Not solving your entire life.
Reducing fear enough to see.
That is also why I have become interested in what I call mind power, but not in the manifestation-influencer meaning of the phrase. The mind’s power is that it assigns meaning.
It chooses perception.
It chooses which teacher it will follow.
It can interpret someone else’s discomfort as rejection.
It can interpret disagreement as danger.
It can turn a memory into a prophecy.
It can turn a physiological sensation into a default truth.
And it can also learn another interpretation.
This is why perception matters so much.
Allow your perception to be corrected so you no longer require circumstances to become exactly what you want before peace becomes possible.
That line feels like the center of everything for me right now, and this is because so much of suffering becomes:
I cannot be okay until they understand.
I cannot heal until they apologize.
I cannot move forward until everybody knows my version.
I cannot feel safe until I know whether this relationship will work.
I cannot have peace until the outcome arrives.
That gives the external world enormous power. I have spent so much of my life trying to control the perception other people have of me. If I tell somebody I became reactive in a relationship, my mind immediately wants to make sure they understand exactly what my reactivity looked like because their filtration system might take the word reactive and create an image that has nothing to do with me.
Maybe they dated someone who screamed, smashed things and chased them through the house. Now I say “I became reactive,” and their brain paints their experience over my sentence.
We are not the same person.
My mind wants to explain.
Qualify.
Contextualize.
Control.
But something recently came to me:
Yes, people may project their experiences onto my story.
Some people absolutely will, but not everybody has the capacity—or frankly even the interest—to construct the elaborate interpretation I am terrified they are constructing. Sometimes my fear of being misunderstood creates an audience more psychologically sophisticated than the audience that actually exists. So even when someone does misunderstand me, I am learning that misunderstanding is survivable.
I can clarify once.
I do not have to crawl into another person’s mind and redecorate it.
That is healing too.
This is where I think forgiveness eventually leads us.
Not into blindness.
Into clearer sight.
When I am no longer organizing my perception around the wound, I can see things sooner. I can notice incompatibility without needing someone to become the villian in my story. I can notice control without spending three years proving that the person is abusive enough to justify my discomfort.
I can notice emotional unavailability without diagnosing someone.
I can notice that I am shrinking.
I can notice that I am overfunctioning.
I can notice that I keep accommodating.
I can notice that I am clinging to potential.
I can notice that I am trying to force insight.
I can notice that I am waiting for someone to become the person I imagined instead of responding to the person who is actually standing in front of me.
Forgiveness removes some of the distortion.
Then we can make informed decisions based on what we actually see.
That is why the goal is not denying the physical world. If a relationship is harming me, I need to know that. If behavior is controlling, I need to know that. If someone repeatedly lies, I need to know that. If something is abusive in nature, naming it may be important, but naming the form does not complete the healing.
The next question becomes:
What perception in me must be reborn regardless of what happens to the relationship’s form?
That question has been sitting with me because this is the only mind I actually have responsibility for.
I cannot control what another person says about me.
I cannot control what version of the story they tell.
I cannot make someone become self-aware.
I cannot make someone metabolize shame.
I cannot force somebody into emotional availability.
I cannot make somebody choose me.
I cannot heal someone’s relationship with themselves by loving them harder.
What I can do though—thats the winning focus shift. I can ask what fear has been teaching me. I can decide whether fear continues to be in the role of teacher. In this season of my life, the teacher directing the action has to become love because I have lived too long being taught by fear. And love does not necessarily mean staying, it also doesn’t necessarily mean leaving either.
Love does not automatically mean reconciling.
Love does not automatically mean forgiving and giving someone access to you again.
Love can look like truth.
Boundaries.
Distance.
Repair.
Compassion.
Accountability.
Grief.
A goodbye.
A return.
An apology.
A different conversation.
The action is not what makes it love. The teacher underneath the action does. I still have the part of me that wants to say, “but they did this first.” I still have the part that says, “why should I apologize when nobody apologized to me?” I still have the part that wants the world to understand that the way I became was shaped by what I survived.
That part deserves compassion, but it does not get to drive anymore. The goal isn’t to become the person who wins the case. The goal is to become the person who no longer needs fear to prosecute it. As I type this and reflect, I ask myself: maybe healing is not forgetting what happened. Maybe it is remembering without allowing the memory to become prophecy or ore importantly certainty.
Maybe forgiveness isn’t absolving somebody else.
Maybe it is taking your perception back.
Maybe the miracle is not that the circumstance changes.
Maybe the miracle is that fear is no longer the only interpretation available.
And maybe that is what allows us to finally see clearly enough to choose differently, and maybe we can practice this long enough to explore the fear that lives under our defenses.
Till next time data collectors.
Thank you for sharing!
Sav! This was such a gift. Thank you!