When is the last time you felt connected to your body? Or the last time you allowed yourself to actually feel your emotions? How about the last time you put your needs first? Can you even picture what that looks like?

For many of us, the core of our struggles rests in our inability to be present, due to past trauma and the resulting nervous system dysregulation. This energy is looking for completion, and once we have acknowledged and integrated these experiences and adaptations, we no longer need to hide from them.

Many of us were mishandled or mistreated when we were young through abuse and neglect or being raised in emotionally unstable families and chaotic environments. These circumstances were especially harsh on our sensitive little souls, leading to struggles with perfectionism, people pleasing, and assuming the role of caregiver for everyone but ourselves.

When our emotional needs are consistently left unmet by our caregivers, we learn to adapt to what their version of love looked like. Not only does this form a distorted view of relationships, it also reinforces our deeply held core beliefs that were created by unhealed and emotionally unsafe adults and do not reflect reality.

As we go through life, we suppress our authentic self and personal needs over and over again to continue playing the role of support solely for others, to the detriment of our own health and wellbeing. This systemic suppression of self creates stores of unprocessed emotions and traumas that live in our bodies and dysregulate our nervous system.

After a long enough time, we may start to see this repression develop into symptoms of chronic pain, autoimmune disease, depression, anxiety, functional freeze, dissociation, insomnia, and addictive and other relief-seeking behaviors.

You may have already done a lot of research and work on your healing journey. Self-help and self-improvement can be very attractive methods to use to understand and unlearn these harmful scripts. They can also sometimes lead us into a self-perpetuating cycle of the idea that ‘there is something wrong with me and I need to fix it.’ Not only is this greatly lacking in self-compassion, our brains will also continually find new problems that need solutions, and the cycle will never end.

Instead, it can be helpful to shift this mindset to a process of integrating these traumatic energies and becoming whole. When we learn how to face the strong emotions we have been avoiding, we grow in our capacity to be with ourselves and others. This heals the root causes of our presenting issues and can greatly reduce our distress.