Acceptance of who you are and where you are at in your healing journey

I spent decades trying to be someone else.

The truth is that I was just running away from pain. When we experience pain and danger in early life our window of tolerance shutdown and an artificial window of tolerance is formed. We create a false self, a surviving self, to cope with the pain. And this surviving self is always in freeze/shutdown.

When I say danger you are probably imagining something huge, like a parent overtly abusive or being born in war zone. These are also included in this category. But it’s important to realise that misattunement from a caregiver is received as a life threat to a small child’s nervous system.

The point here is not to blame parents, but to create awareness around why your reactions and sense of self might feel confusing to you at times.

One of the major shifts for me on my healing journey was acceptance of how my body and nervous system operates and reacts. After sometime doing the real deep inner healing “work”, I realised I didn’t really have much of a window of tolerance. This seems to be true for all people who has had early childhood adversities.

I then started realising that I needed to drop the pretence. Trying to be strong, achieving these huge goals. This was a blow to my ego.

But what a weight off my shoulders to finally stop fighting my physiology. In practical terms, it meant to finally stop the need to heal quickly, to get somewhere, to reach a finishing line. It was all basically an addiction to escaping the present moment. On the spiritual level it was a resistance to God.

The real work can be frustrating at times, as you think your have more capacity in your nervous system than you actually have. Your true window of tolerance is much narrower than you believe. It’s humbling to say the least.

We can either strive to feed our false sense of self, which will only invite more frustration and emptiness or we can finally drop the pretence and focus on true healing.

Honouring the body and everything it went through. Starting to meet our unmet needs. Focusing on building our true window of tolerance instead of strengthening the artificial window.