🫂 What I had to understand about survival mode to finally feel safer being myself
It took me longer than I would like to admit to understand this, but a lot of what I called “my personality” was actually protection, lemme explain: Few years back I thought I just needed more discipline, mindset work or self-awareness. So I journaled, reflected, and tried to think my way into becoming calmer, clearer, and more expressed. But in the moments that would "test" how much I've improved, in real life, I could still feel myself shrink. I would still overthink, hesitate, and go slightly away from myself just to not cause any friction or conflict (or just a side eye from someone else:D). 👉 What showed up to be truly helpful was realising that knowing better and feeling safe are not the same thing. And I think this is where we misunderstand ourselves all the time. We think we have low confidence, a communication problem, or a lack of discipline, when many times the body is simply reading the moment as threat. And when that happens, we don't become more ourselves. We become more protective. We people-please, delay, go blank. We read too much into small things. We can call it intuition, when often it is just survival mode trying to keep us in the familiar (otherwise amygdala in our brain would start to freak out because it would read the situation literally as a threat to our lives). That is why real change is not only about better thoughts. It is also about building enough safety in the system FIRST that we no longer have to abandon ourselves to get through the moment. Where have you noticed yourself getting smaller, even when nothing dangerous was actually happening? ✨