Survival Mode Armor Vs. Steadiness

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:

• Chronic emotional unpredictability
• Having to prove your goodness or worth
• Being misunderstood without repair
• Chronic invalidation

-That’s not weakness, that’s biology.

So ask yourself;

• What conditions allow my system to exhale?
• What am I tolerating that requires me to stay vigilant?
• Do I feel emotionally safe enough to soften right now? Even if those feelings include anger?

Choose environments, conversations, inner stances that don’t require armor.
Stillness isn’t something you force. It’s what returns when you stop living where armor is required.
​
XOXOXOX
Sandy