 Coming out the other side of a hard life season… if you've ever done it, you probably know, you don't immediately start feeling joyful.
This was actually kind of a surprise to me. I thought all through the difficult period, if I could just shed this panic, if I could just come up for air, life would all line up again. What it feels like is perhaps best described as… a bit flat. A large part of this hard season revolved around a relationship that activated nearly every attachment wound and trauma button I had. The relationship was technically optional, but to my nervous system it felt anything but optional. Some part of me was determined to finally get the story "right." This got nearly all my attention for several years. Then, things got harder. An additional challenge came along and I additionally found myself trying to bridge a values gap that wasn't bridgeable in another deeply important area of my life. I often felt like I was drowning. And periodically, the person with whom I was trapped in a cycle of hope, disappointment, blame, and repair would be there. I never knew if I was about to be pulled toward safety or pushed under again. Most often… pushed under. So, in an attempt to save my sanity, I left the place where I was trying to bridge the values gap. But, then, on the heels of this massive choice, a deeply heartbreaking friendship discard now made the scene of my life. I thought I was taking action to lessen my struggle, and their discard sucked me under harder than ever. Then, in an odd twist, the cruelty… quieted. The circumstances didn’t magically resolve. The people involved were still themselves. But somewhere along the way, my nervous system began learning that the emergency was over. For the first time in years, someone else’s discomfort stopped feeling like my assignment. My head got above water, for the longest time in a very long stretch. I always perceived that when I finally came up for air, that it would feel amazing. It was all is dreamed of, to have the hurt stop, the fear and panic subside. Joy hasn't arrived just yet. There is an empty, mostly flat feeling. I find myself wondering some new questions… •After over-functioning in relationships for most of my life, have I flipped to being an under-functioner? •If I stop being the one who generates the energy, curiosity, repair, and momentum in my relationships, and they go flat, what does that reveal about the relationships—and what does it reveal about me?" Or even: •How do I distinguish between a relationship that lacks vitality and a nervous system that has become accustomed to intensity? • Do I still matter when I stop carrying the relationships? What if the flatness is not evidence that something is wrong? What if I've simply been emotionally drowning so long and so much more than anyone would ever realize about me, that just breathing is the peace I need right now? Truth #1: None of these people or situations created all of my suffering. Truth #2: They dramatically amplified it. So, standing on the shore, looking back at it, that was a long, hard swim. I take some time to integrate the lessons, ask myself some questions and then keep on swimming. What surprises me most is that I get to put much of this down while the people involved are still alive and in some cases, still part of my life. I always imagined relief would come through an ending—a death, a departure, a final chapter. Instead, relief arrived through a gradual realization that I no longer have to carry everyone. The story isn’t over. But the drowning appears to be. (Deep breath) XOXOXOXO Sandy
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 For years, my emotional life felt like living beside a tornado.
Not every day was destruction. Sometimes there were blue skies. Sometimes there was warmth, laughter, connection, hope. But I never stopped tracking the weather. I learned to monitor shifts in tone, facial expressions, distance, silence, tension, unpredictability. I became highly skilled at anticipating storms before they hit. I could feel atmospheric pressure changes before most people even noticed clouds forming. And somewhere along the way, I stopped asking myself what kind of life I actually wanted and started organizing my entire world around emotional survival. So I built a storm shelter, between me and the tornadic activity. The shelter was stability. Predictability. Continuity. Safety. Something solid to run to when the sky turned dark again. And for a very long time, that made sense. Because when someone repeatedly wounds you emotionally — then pulls you close again, then pushes you away again, then blames you for bleeding — your nervous system adapts. It becomes less focused on freedom and more focused on minimizing damage. You stop asking: “What brings me alive?” And start asking: “What helps me survive this?” The hard part is that survival strategies are often incredibly functional. People from the outside may look at complicated relationship structures and ask: “Why don’t you just choose to keep your distance?” But human beings do choose. We choose constantly. The problem is that many of us are not choosing from freedom. We are choosing from adaptation. We choose around fear. Around instability. Around attachment wounds. Around the need to preserve connection. Around the terror of emotional abandonment. And often, we don’t even realize we’re doing it. I didn’t. I thought I was making conscious relationship decisions. But recently, something shifted. The tornado stopped spinning for more than a moment. Not forever. Not enough to erase a decade of emotional damage. Not enough to suddenly create trust where trust has been broken repeatedly. But long enough for my nervous system to unclench. Long enough for me to stop bracing. Long enough for me to look around and think: “Wait… if the tornado stopped… why am I still huddled in the storm shelter?” That realization hit me harder than the storm itself. Because suddenly, I could see that so much of my life had been built around managing emotional weather. Mostly that wx of other people. The shelter wasn’t fake. The safety wasn’t fake. The love wasn’t fake. But fear had become part of the architecture. And once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it. The strange thing about leaving survival mode is that clarity doesn’t arrive all at once. At first, there’s mostly disorientation. You realize you no longer want to live in constant hypervigilance, but you also don’t fully know who you are without it. You question everything. What is love when it isn’t fused with fear? What is safety when it doesn’t require shrinking yourself? What is loyalty when it’s no longer driven by survival? What choices would I make if I weren’t emotionally organizing around the possibility of another storm? Those are terrifying questions. Especially for people who learned early in life to adapt themselves in order to maintain connection. And here’s the nuance I’m trying hardest to hold: The absence of active harm is not the same thing as genuine safety. Relief can feel intoxicating after chronic pain. The nervous system can mistake the temporary absence of chaos for transformation. So no, this is not a story about suddenly believing the tornado is safe now. It’s about realizing how deeply survival can shape a life without us fully recognizing it. It’s about recognizing that adaptation is not the same thing as freedom. And maybe most of all, it’s about understanding that some relationships become organized around managing fear instead of expressing truth. I don’t have neat conclusions yet. I don’t have a clean ending. I don’t have certainty. I’m not writing this from the mountaintop. I’m writing it from the strange, quiet space that exists after the sirens stop blaring. The space where the nervous system slowly begins to ask different questions. Not: “Who will hurt me least?” Not: “Who will stay?” Not: “How do I keep the peace?” Not: “How do I prevent abandonment?” But: “What is actually true for me when I stop organizing my life around emotional survival?” I think that may be the real beginning. Not the end of the storm. The beginning of finally learning how to live outside of it. XOXOXOXO Sandy  Attachment trauma. Now that is powerful wiring.
And what really sets those circuits blaring like a siren? Having someone in your life whose coping mechanism, when upset or triggered, is the exact behavior your trauma was wired around. That’s the perfect match. Joe Hudson talks about something called The Golden Algorithm. The idea is simple and brutal: we often create the very conditions that produce the emotions we most want to avoid. Here’s my personal example. I carry some old, deep wounds around abandonment. Because of that, I’ve learned to over-function. I twist myself into emotional pretzels. I shape-shift my needs into what I think someone else wants. I work overtime trying to prevent being left. I know this pattern in myself now. And I can find it at work in me, but only about every damn day. But that pattern has often led me straight into the very thing I fear most. I give my heart to people whose default coping strategy is to leave when things get hard. They withdraw. They discard. They shut down. At times, they even blame me for their leaving. And then my internal alarms go off: Danger. Danger. We are not safe if they leave. Fix this. Hurry. So I rush to repair—even when I wasn’t the one who walked away. I take responsibility for pain I didn’t create. For years, my strategy with that terrified part of me was to silence her. Calm down. Stop overreacting. Be rational. Get over it. But traumatized parts don’t respond well to exile. They respond like a small child tugging at your pant leg—more urgently each time you ignore them. So I’m trying something that feels completely backward. Instead of fixing that part of me, I’m trying to love her. I tell her:
Because I finally realized something painful: I was abandoning myself in order to keep other people from abandoning me. I gave up my needs. My feelings. My truth. All to preserve connection. And in doing that, I recreated the very dynamic I was trying to escape. The urgency I feel when someone I love discards me can be overwhelming. It’s visceral. All-consuming. A million gut punches on repeat. I continue to function, most wouldn't notice that I'm barely able. But alarms are going off inside me that are powerful. In those moments, I’m not just feeling today. I’m feeling wounds from 50 years ago. So now I’m trying not to let that scared part drive the car. She cares only about the outcome: Get them back. Fix it now. Make this stop. My job is to let my adult self take the wheel. Not to throw her out of the car. Not to shame her for panicking. Just to listen to her, comfort her, and gently remind her: You don’t have to drive anymore. I’ve got this. Someone I’ve have cared deeply about for a long time has a discarding pattern that fits perfectly into the groove of my abandonment wounds. It has taken a toll. But they didn’t create the wound. They simply activated it. And that matters, because it means my healing cannot depend on changing them. I cannot control someone else’s coping strategy. People do not change because we ache hard enough. The only thing I can change is my own part in the dance. So that’s what I’m learning now: How to step differently. How to stay compassionate without self-abandonment. How to love without losing myself. How to heal without blame. Honestly? It may be the hardest work I’ve ever done. XOXOXOXO Sandy  I've experienced a lot of loss in my life. I don't say that as a victim stance, simply as a fact. Born later in the lives of my parents, some of that is simply to be expected. My brother and sister were school classmates with the parents of MY classmates! Nieces and nephews who were and are basically the same age as me. 38 aunts and uncles, grandparents, parents, a brother, a nephew who was Iike a brother, a mentor, friends, just lots of goodbyes.
I keep a running list in my phone's notes app for God's sake! What year people and pets left my life. Much of this type of loss, while expected, was very difficult. Then the losses you don't see coming, like estrangement by close friends which leaves you feeling confused, shame, wondering why - with no way to get closure. A disorienting swirl that won't leave you alone even in your sleep and leaves you asking on repeat… “ Was ANY of that relationship real?” Last week my oldest dog, Taz, named after a beloved mentor of mine, had reached the point that he was struggling at age fourteen and a half. Taz was my tenth dog in this lifetime. He was the last remaining member of a pack of four dogs that represented a big time of my journey. Saying goodbye to him felt like loss of a connection to a whole era of my life. I've held on too long when the struggle time comes. I look for work-arounds, ways to help. For Taz, the house was carpeted in yoga mats to help prevent slipping and his doing the splits. Places he liked to hang out were made into soft, cushy nests with therapeutic mats, blankets, beds. He visited the veterinarian chiropractor regularly as proactive help for his long corgi spine. Ate the best food with supplements from an elevated bowl so he could sit down while he ate. Got him a puppy to keep him engaged (both a stuffed one in the pic and a real one named Zoe). You name it, I tried it in this past year especially. And still, the second guessing of “was this the right time?” “Did I do right by Taz in the timing of helping him say good bye?” comes for a long while. The hardest part afterward within the grief is the wonkiness of the routine without the missing person or pet. The things you did seemingly automatically are not there. The checking to see if he's doing okay. The energy of mealtime excitement. The extra attention and care you were giving, is now an empty space. What do I do with that love and attending I was giving every day at this time? “If I stop pouring love into something… where does that energy go?” And, what happens when your identity is no longer organized around caring for something/someone? That empty space is scary. Who am I if I'm not in that role? This is where you either sit with it and go all the way in and meet it, or fill it with distractions. Crying, it's exhausting. Period. No wonder I avoid it most of the time. And, here is what I also notice, the “list of loss” is not the whole story. Notice what remains. The love is still there, both what you gave and what you received. It never dies. The love is eternal and in a different form after you say goodbye. So perhaps "The List" in my notes app is not of loss, but of love. If this is the case, I switch from being abandoned and alone to surrounded and supported by all those who've I've lived a part of my life with and loved. Nothing was taken. It was all given—and it’s still mine. The list didn’t shrink my life. It’ s a record of how much of it I’ve lived so far. XOXOXOX Sandy  It has been a difficult thing for me to come to terms with the idea that not everyone has the same emotional capacity for repair. I guess I figure if I can expand my own emotional capacity, others can as well. But not everyone wants to expand.
As counter intuitive as it is to me, some people manage difficult feelings by cutting people off instead of repairing. Cutting off feels powerful. Repair requires vulnerability. My way of dealing with difficult feelings is to go into them, have the hard conversation. In my experience, that builds the relationship, not the opposite. Yet, like anything, while it seems like a strength, this can be my weakness when taken to too high a volume. I can tend to stay with it too long, over explain. I try to repair even when the other person won’t. In a way, the withdrawal of the other person reflects back to me my negotiating with it. Their withdrawal only works because I stay at the table negotiating with it. The lesson isn’t to become better at repair. The lesson is to stop negotiating with withdrawal. My deepest wounds live inside this dynamic. The withdrawal of the other person. My chasing repair. But repair requires two willing participants. If one person withdraws and refuses repair, what exactly are you repairing? You’re negotiating with absence. A ghost. You’re trying to repair unilaterally. And unilateral repair isn’t repair. It’s pursuit. What if I stop doing 150% of the relational labor? I’m simply respecting their withdrawal and radically accepting their limited emotional capacity. Why they withdraw isn’t the point. The impact on you is. You can spend years trying to solve the mystery. Or you can choose to live from your own center again. -That choice is the real turning point. So what if you could simply say to yourself: “She has a withdrawal pattern. I don’t thrive in that.” End. No villain. No diagnosis. No courtroom. Just mismatch. And mismatch doesn’t require prosecution. This doesn't mean it won't hurt like hell. It might lessen the amount of self-prosecution you do in trying to figure it out though. Chasing to be chosen by someone whose primary conflict strategy is withdrawal is how you abandon yourself. You are not required to be the exception in their life. XOXOXOX Sandy  I have a complicated relationship with the word deserve.
It can carry a whiff of entitlement or victimhood. Like 'I don't have it and I am powerless to get it'. And yet—here’s the truth we often try to outrun: we all need love, care, and emotional safety. Where things go sideways is where we go looking for it. The pattern we can fall into unwittingly is asking for that love from those who do not have the capacity to give it to us. You try to get someone who isn't emotionally fit to meet you, to meet you. I've done it. I kept giving more. I kept trying more. I kept fixing it again and again. I kept doing more, stayed longer than felt healthy for me. But trying to get love from somebody else by abandoning yourself will never bring what you are really reaching for – connection to yourself. Over-functioning in the hope that someone will love you for it—especially when they’re operating in their own survival mode—often creates the very distance you’re trying to avoid and attracts people who can’t meet you emotionally. Pretending you don't have needs or feelings in an attempt to get love & to be valued by those who have limited capacity to give us this – is like voluntarily giving away your cake and then being mad at them for you doing it. Making people “wrong”, cutting them out of your life, won't get you what you seek either. It will only deny you of your own capacity to love fully. This isn’t about tolerating harm or staying where you’re diminished. It’s about not outsourcing your self-worth to either their approval or their rejection. I can love you and I have to tend to what I need. I can't tolerate over compensating and not being met as a means of my surviving emotionally. When you stop over-functioning, those who benefitted from you doing so will show you their actual capacity for relationship and connection. Some will leave, and this will break. your. heart. Let their disappointing behavior remind you of who you are and how you’ve grown—of what you would never do to someone else. For me I've had to become aware of my over-giving over-functioning and putting myself and my needs on the line to try and earn love from those who can't meet me emotionally and then be confused and resentful when they, of course, can't or won't. That's asking someone who's not emotionally fit to give you what you're not giving yourself. When I stopped trying to earn love from those who couldn’t meet me, I had to finally meet myself. XOXOXOXO Sandy  Oooofff. This subject is the motherload for me. I could go into a long outline of how fear of abandonment has been a long-term survival strategy in my life. It actually makes total sense that my nervous system would come to connect being alone or left with overwhelming fear. Yet, that's not the most interesting part of the story.
While I love a good paradox, my nervous system devised a strategy to deal with this fear that is so paradoxical it's almost imperceptible... Pre-emptively abandon MYSELF, that way the bond might hold with the other person. My nervous system learned: •make my needs negotiable •my truth - optional •my aliveness is dangerous •preserve the bond thru self-suppression Shut off of parts of myself in the belief that it's in service to the relationship. But, it's not. Those parts are still there and like a toddler tugging at your hem asking for attention, & they don't stop tugging, they get louder. Shut off the parts long enough and all your feelings end up being switched off. You can barely connect with what your own needs or wants are any more. Self-abandonment does not prevent others from abandoning you. It just guarantees that you're alone either way. You can do everything in your power to be there, contribute to, support another person while setting your own fears and needs aside, and they may still leave you. So you were alone in the relationship in your efforts, and still alone when they withdrew. It's this crazy-making deal, you seem to create what you defend against. You were twisting yourself into uncomfortable shapes to prevent them from leaving you, and that strategy backfires. Ironically, this strategy can still lead to disconnection. Not only from the other person, but most of all, from yourself. Ugh. So, my deep, abiding fear of abandonment kind of ran unnoticed in the background and as long as I stayed focused on my efforts to be liked, valued, and prevent the loss of the connection, I didn't have to look at how I was running on fear. I don’t have this figured out by any means yet. I’m trying to stay aware of my pattern of leaving myself to avoid disappointment in another person. I don’t need more confidence or better communication skills. I need more capacity—the capacity to tolerate someone else’s disappointment, withdrawal, or disapproval without disappearing from myself. I’m not conflict-averse. I’m afraid of losing the bond by showing all of me. Survival skills are developed for a good reason. They just outlived their usefulness and need to be retired. I'll let you know what I find on this path up ahead. I don’t know yet what it looks like to stay with myself when the bond feels threatened. But I know now that leaving myself is no longer the solution. XOXOXO Sandy  When there are rough feelings in a relationship, a dynamic, or a situation, my training—and my personality—push me toward the hard conversation. To name the thing. To be honest. To get it on the table. That part of me isn’t wrong. Courage and clarity matter. But what I’m coming to understand is that honesty isn’t the only driver here. My nervous system is. For me, repair—fixing what feels off—brings relief. A sense of safety. A settling in my body. When things are named and smoothed, my system calms. That works well when both people move toward connection the same way. But what happens when the other person’s path to relief is the opposite of yours? What if their way of regulating is to pull away, shut down, or break the connection? And what if they can’t—or won’t—tell you why? Ambiguity is control for some people. And it is hell for a fixer. When someone withholds clarity, the power imbalance isn't accidental. When Fixing Stops Working When the connection breaks, the only real option is to sit with what’s left. The grief. The heartbreak. The confusion. The guilt. And the long list of uncomfortable feelings we would all rather bypass. For an overthinker, sitting still is brutal. My mind immediately goes to why. Why would someone do this? What did I miss? What would make it make sense? Because if I could understand them, maybe I could repair it. That strategy makes sense. We tell ourselves that clarity will protect us—that if we can just figure it out, we won’t end up here again. But clarity isn’t what protects you going forward. Boundaries are. The Wrong Question Rather than looping on, “Why would they discard me like that?” a more useful set of questions emerges:
They do something harder. They put the focus back where it belongs. Fixing as an Addiction Fixing, repairing, chasing that feeling of relief inside a connection can become addictive. The nervous system gets hooked. There’s a hit of calm after the repair. A sense of closeness. A feeling of okay, we’re safe again. Until the next rupture. And then the cycle repeats. At some point, often quietly, self-respect shows up. Not dramatically. Not angrily. More like Forrest Gump mid-run—when you suddenly realize you’re done running. Done chasing repair. Done contorting yourself for relief that never lasts. What It Actually Costs Sitting with the discomfort isn’t noble or pretty. It will churn up worthiness questions. It may wake you up in the middle of the night. It may follow you into your dreams. This is the part where fixing used to rescue you. But if you stay—if you don’t abandon yourself this time—something else happens. You gain integrity. You gain peace that isn’t dependent on who stays or who goes. Your nervous system begins to rewire. Slowly. Imperfectly. But for real. You stop outsourcing your sense of safety to someone else’s ability to stay connected. And that changes everything. The Real Repair The deepest repair isn’t fixing the connection. It’s refusing to disappear from yourself in order to keep one. It’s learning that relief can come from standing still. From letting the feelings move through without chasing an explanation. From choosing boundaries over certainty. And from realizing that you don’t need to understand why someone couldn’t stay—in order to decide that you will. With yourself. XOXOXOXO Sandy  Winter in Iowa. Weather gets talked about a LOT. It gets our attention.
Each of us also walks around with our own internal weather systems via our emotional state. This too gets our attention. And when "bad weather" rolls in, internally, we can give this too much of our attention in ourselves and in others. We can find ourselves outsourcing our own internal wx to other people's mood. Ugh. Guilty. My discomfort with someone else's emotional weather has equaled "assignment" in my own nervous system, maybe most of my life. This can be positive in some ways. It means I'm not afraid to have a hard conversation, to lead, to negotiate. The down side - some people can't metabolize this kind of approach. They may be locked into bitterness, or contempt, or judgement and my attempt to talk with them about how their internal weather systems is impacting me, or their own life, will simply give them an added grievance. So, what to do? Internal boundaries around energy and attention. This means: •Don't contort myself in the presence of contempt. •Don't personalize their energy. •Remain kind, and unhooked. Being in proximity to the energy of contempt is rough. Their "feels like temperature" is painful to be around. Relationship research (like the Gottmans’ work) shows contempt to be the most corrosive emotional climate. You don’t need to diagnose it to know when you’re standing in it. While we cannot know anyone's internal state for sure, we can know it's impact on us. Other people's internal weather can impact us just like the weather in nature. If we are going to be in the presence of a cold, rough emotional system, put on your "coat" with internal boundaries. Bottom line: You don't have to reject people to protect yourself from their internal weather. You don’t have to diagnose it, fix it, or confront it. But you do have to stop outsourcing your sense of steadiness to it. Other people’s moods are not data about you. They are information about them. Decentering is not withdrawal. It’s stewardship. And choosing where your attention lives may be one of the most self-respecting, self-leadership moves you ever make. XOXOXO Sandy  If you have spent any considerable amount of time around a dysregulated system or an emotionally dysregulated person, you know what happens. You wind up in survival mode. You become hypervigilant. You track tone, facial cues, mojo. You read subtext. You chase clarity, reassurance, resolution, – often around things that, in a regulated system or person, wouldn’t even be issues. You start responding to nonsense as if it’s urgent, because in that environment, it often is. YOUR nervous system gets hijacked. Not because you are weak. Because you’re human. In fact, your strength is often what causes you to stay way past the expiration date. You keep trying to get things calmed down. And if you stay long enough, you may start to believe what will really lock you in – you start to believe the problem is you. Then, if you are lucky – or brave – or finally exhausted enough – something shifts. You step back. You regain your consciousness. You realize you weren’t failing or “bad” or the whole problem. You were functioning inside a system that required constant self-abandonment to survive. A continual feed of chaos that kept you on your back foot and trying to explain, over and over and over again. You’ve been living on alert. Your thoughts loop. You’ve spent so much energy trying to keep it all going while appearing to have a handle on things. Stepping out of survival mode doesn’t feel immediately better. You’ve been investing 95% of your energy into managing what wasn’t yours to manage and when it goes quiet, it feels pretty empty. Kind of scary in fact. Because chaos, for a long time, was the organizing principle. And, it’s the beginning of leadership – of yourself. Self-leadership. Sovereignty. Because the work isn’t fixing the unpredictable person or system. It’s retraining your own nervous system to trust steadiness again. To stop chasing what never did or ever will stabilize. Regulated people, regulate the environment around them. Dysregulated people and systems do too. You can feel when people are emotionally stable or not in the room, on the other end of the phone, in the text you’re reading from them. Steadiness is actually medicine. For those around you and for yourself. I heard Cory Muscara say in his podcast Practicing Human today: “(steadiness) helps others access parts of themselves that are otherwise offline when stress takes over.” And it also helps us to access these parts in ourselves when we can take ourselves there. This steadiness can’t be an avoidance of discomfort. That’s calm, but not leadership. It’s being present WITH discomfort and holding steady. When your nervous system gets hijacked, your steadiness goes offline when you go into survival mode. No one, not even a Zen master can stay in steadiness when they are under chronic threat with a dysregulated person or system. That’s not a character flaw – you’re simply in an environment that is impossible to feel steady. Your steadiness cannot coexist in:
So ask yourself;
Stillness isn’t something you force. It’s what returns when you stop living where armor is required. XOXOXOX Sandy |
Sandy Edie HansenI use this space to "Chat" about things I am working through and learning in my life currently. Join me! Archives
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