Trauma has conditioned your system to stay in hyperdrive, causing hypersensitivity and hyper-reactivity to stress.

The pause button is hard to find because you are wired to survive. Each year, your mind and body become more exhausted.

Living in survival mode wreaks havoc on your wellbeing.

Effects are detectable on every level. Mental, Emotional, Social, Vocational, Spiritual, and Physical.

Literature shows that left unchecked, living in constant survival states results in physical illness.

Trauma encouraged you to avoid your thoughts, devalue your emotions, and ignore your intuition.

This makes going within a scary thing to do for many survivors.

“I don’t trust myself and I trust no one” you say, but your estranged relationships prove that you do trust, you just trust the wrong people, although you don’t realize this at the time.

You say, “I need no one.” but you secretly doubt your ability to care for yourself.

You fear ending up alone.

Ultimately, you are placed at the mercy of acceptance and approval from that which is outside of yourself.

Anything and everything that is outside of yourself.

You mistakenly view approval for true respect and appreciation, thinking you can do it all to make everybody happy.

Consider how this automatic filter might have affected you up until now.

There have also been times where you made changes to take better care of yourself regarding your sensitivities to stress.

Those wins are from using coping skills. You have many of them.

These skills should be identified and encouraged, as they are your way out of mental and emotional suffering.

With practice, inside your mind will no longer a scary place to be.

You realize you were there all along and want to do a better job of protecting yourself from the world without checking out of it, and without depending on it to soothe you.

You begin to understand that no one will ever be able to give you the security and safety you seek, that this job is yours and yours alone.

You just needed to go about it in a different way.

Eventually, you will stop doubting yourself.

You will stop hinging your decisions, your worth, your joy, on the opinions of others.

You will meet yourself in a new way and, for the first time, you won’t want to run, because inside your mind will become the most soothing place to be.

-MV