Times of peace

 

For years I have not understood this quote from Detoxify “…your heart does not always want what is good for it. It wants what is familiar, what once felt like home, even if that home was burning. 

I thought that this was just plain silly. Who would choose the hurt and pain and all the awful friends that those two bring along? Until something happened this week…

Life was coasting along kind of smoothly, but then suddenly it didn’t (the house saga went to a next level) and I went into survival mode. Too easily, I might add. I slipped into survival mode like a race car driver finally on the open road. I felt, in a way, that now I know what to do, now I know how to be. Yes, how to BE.

Then it struck me. I don’t know how to be when all is going well, because I am just waiting for the inevitable to strike. I don’t know me in Happy and Safe mode. I really struggle with being happy. This isn’t my easy space. Fighting for survival is. I know exactly who I am then, how much I can take and how to take it, I know how to be…in my talks with God, in my reading His Word. It all comes easy. We are in this fight for survival together. Wilderness all the way. 

I guess all trauma can be a bit similar to being in a war. Normal feels somehow wrong. You feel on edge. But as soon as a crisis arises you can act. You were in a way “trained” to so that you would, in fact, survive. In that space you know who you are.

But in happy, safe mode? Not so much. Trauma does that. And as I read that line I finally saw it. This was me to a T. I was coasting along and not really trusting the quiet, feeling on edge, not knowing how to handle this at the moment easier life, when out of the blue (!) my survival instincts kicked in. 

Hmm.. time to put a stop to this weirdness…

The quote goes one to say “That is why healing requires more than feeling. It requires choosing. Choosing to believe that peace is better than chaos, even when chaos is the only thing your heart has known.” 

And so I took my old-er self back to my younger self, threw my arms around her and helped her see that she would be ok. It’s safe to let go. It’s safe to move away. It’s time to get to know me as my non-survival self.  Time to learn who I am in times of peace.

xxB