Crossing the Desert

One thing they don't tell you about healing is that the coping mechanisms that lead you to suffering are also ones that keep you alive and when you're finally able to let go of them you don't necessarily have anything to replace them with. Rebuilding from the inside out is not for the faint hearted.

I used to feel depressed. I hated my work. Caring for children was an unbearable task. I collapsed in desperation daily. I had no capacity to self regulate or co-regulate, only to dissociate and disconnect. I was suicidal. I didn’t know myself. My relationships were entirely based on people-pleasing. I didn’t know what I wanted or needed and couldn’t uphold boundaries. I thought I was worthless, useless and not deserving to live. I had an extreme fear of abandonment and shaped every interaction to avoid rejection. Authenticity was impossible. Connection only happened through attachment and projection. I starved for external validation. I didn’t know how to grieve. I experienced splitting, identity collapse and extreme emotional pain on a regular basis. My body was falling apart: spondylolisthesis, stenosis, scoliosis, bulging discs, indigestion, fatigue, random pain, etc.

I could keep going but you get the picture. If you had asked me then, I would have denied most of it and just brushed it off as normal.

Now, I know that it was all childhood trauma.

Last 6 years have been a relentless marathon of healing. Crossing the desert. Going into the pain. Facing my anger, sadness, shame, fear. Repairing my body. Learning emotional regulation. Learning to be authentic with people. Learning to set boundaries. None of it was rewarding, on the contrary, I had to face divorce and my parents disowning me, I lost one job then another. It felt like there was no end to the grief.

When I left my last job in July, I knew I was done. I couldn’t go back to being that person. I was a single dad with two kids and had barely any savings. I felt more alone than ever. I had no solution. I went on disability. Hardly any of my friends or relatives offered any help, they mostly just watched from the sidelines if they paid any attention at all. I don’t resent them for their lack of capacity, I’m just stating a fact.

It's hard to heal relational wounding when your community is not there for you. I went from battling mental illness to normal people problems and I had to do it all alone. You could say I performed surgery on myself in the middle of a battle field and then went straight back to fighting. I really wanted it to get easier but I never expected it. I understand that my relationships used to be based on attachment and insecurity for so long that once I gave those patterns up, I no longer knew how to relate without them.

One could say I burned out. I just call it surrender. I would lie on my couch for hours every day. The body would become completely paralyzed, like in deep sleep but I was wide awake. I had no thoughts, there was no story. People call this a dorsal vagal shutdown or hypnagogia... I just call it my shavasana meditation. Underneath, a profound reorganization was happening. A hard reset on the nervous system. This continued for months and is still ongoing. All I did was take care of my kids, do my movement practice, meditate and write. And for the first time in my life, I was content.

It’s hard to explain this shift and the scale of this transformation. It’s like I reconnected to my center and everything else reorganized around it. It became clear to me who I am and what I need to do.

My mind no longer goes to the desperate places. I’m generally at peace and feel content. I have a confidence and optimism that will not break. I earned them through pain and practice.

The shock collar is still firing but now I can observe and regulate my emotions. I can connect to people from an authentic place. I can ask for what I need and set boundaries. My nervous system finally trusts that I’m on my side. I’m still capable of intensity but I’m more in control of it now, the urgency is disappearing.

I looked deep inside my shadow and what I found were the most benign of things: warmth, softness, ease, trust, care, love, beauty, curiosity, presence. Things I had no space for before. Things that make life feel like enough.

A nervous system that was once organized around trauma is now organized around coherence. I had to become what I needed and never had. I don’t need validation for this, I know how enormous it is. I accept my life with gratitude and awe.

At the end of last year, I enrolled in massage school and a life coaching program and I’ve continued my movement and stillness practices. I'm not planning to go back to my previous career of almost twenty years.

I healed the dysfunctions but I still have to learn how to live without them. My life got reduced to the core foundation: kids, presence, movement, writing and touch. These are the things that come most naturally to me without forcing. What I’m missing now is community. And I will build that next.

Thank you all who have been reading this Substack, your quiet attention meant the world to me.