The One Thing You Absolutely Need Before Any Change Can Happen

There are many factors to healing from complex trauma - by nature it is complex.  But there's one element that is an absolute must, and it has to be in place before any kind of healing and transformation can occur.

Complex trauma is the challenging after effect that's left from a past overwhelming situation or relationship.  It's how your current relationships are effected, when you've had to protect yourself in other unhealthy relationships in the past. 

It's especially tough when you had to protect yourself within the relationships that were supposed to provide you with care and protection that you couldn't provide for yourself - such as when you were a baby, child or young adult.  

Your nervous system is designed to protect you from potential harm.  And to do that, it creates a databank of every single harmful experience you've ever had, and compares each moment against that extensive databank. 

All the times you've had to protect yourself in unhealthy, scary, frightening, deeply sad and lonely relationships in the past are most certainly logged into your nervous system's memory databank, and the very early childhood experiences of self protection hold the most weight.  

Anytime there's an iota of familiarity between what's going on in your current relationships - I mean in the moment it's unfolding - that appears even remotely similar to any painful situation that's happened in the past, your nervous system kicks into self-protective mode.

The self protective response is:

• Automatic (meaning it happens without your initiation)
• Subconscious (meaning it happens without your awareness)
• Helpful in nature (it's designed to help take care of you)

There's a whole lot more to say about a complex trauma response and how it can be unwound and healed, but the most important piece of all is that a self-protective nervous system needs to feel safe enough to make any change at all. 

Safe Enough

When your nervous system feels safe enough in any given moment, your self protective mode is turned off.  

When your self protective mode is turned off, and you feel safe enough in your environment and relationships, then it becomes possible to unwind the automatic, subconscious responses that are in place to help keep you safe in unsafe situations. 

That unwinding process doesn't need to happen all at once, be forced or overwhelming.  It can happen slowly, gently, bit by bit, and sometimes it's easier to do that in the company of someone else who really helps you continue to feel safe. 

But the unwinding can ONLY happen when you feel safe enough.  And I mean authentically, legitimately, really safe.  You can't force yourself or will yourself to feel safe, because your nervous system is smarter than that.  It picks up on things you're not even aware of, and if you're feeling even the tinniest bit unsafe, your nervous system knows. By the time you're aware that you're feeling unsafe - even the tinniest bit - your nervous system is likely already at work in your body, carrying out body and brain based processes of self-protection.

So feeling safe is the first step in the process of healing.  Everything else is built on top of that felt sense of safety.  And trying to push through other steps of healing without first feeling safe can be very, very challenging, if not futile. 

Finding a felt sense of safety is no easy feat. If you have unwound experiences in which you felt unsafe, this process of automatic self-protection is likely at play in your life. 

It's so important to find others whose company you can feel safe enough within, to slowly and gently begin exploring what safety actually FEELS like for you.  

Upon that foundation so much lovely healing and growth can be built!