What does it mean to be in survival Mode?

If you've ever felt like you're living life on high alert, waiting for the next bad thing to happen, or feel like life is always stressful, there's never enough time, everyone needs something from you & you are struggling to keep everyone happy, be perfect or constantly overthinking everything... you are probably living in survival.

When we grow up in homes where there is chronic stress, our emotions are neglected, things feel unpredictable or we feel like we have to always be on our best behavior in order to keep the family happy, we more than likely grew up with our nervous system and our minds adapting to living in survival.

And we won't just magically come out of that as adults if we spent years living in it.

Instead of feeling safe, connected to our parents, and present in the moment, you may spend much of your life feeling different variations of these survival modes:

• Fight: irritability, anger, perfectionism, controlling, overworking
• Flight: anxiety, overthinking, staying busy, inability to rest, constant doing
• Freeze: exhaustion, brain fog, procrastination, numbness, feeling stuck or disconnected
• Fawn: people-pleasing, conflict avoidance, taking responsibility for everyone else's feelings

How Childhood Trauma Trains You to Stay in Survival Mode? 

When your needs weren't met as a child, when love wasn't consistent or safe, when you were punished for expressing your feelings or lived through abuse, poverty, family tragedy or any situation where you were forced to adapt to the situation, your nervous system learned to go into survival as a way to cope. It kept you safe. But that doesn't mean that it's going to serve you now. 

Most of us learn these "survival strategies" as children and then get stuck in them as adults. Over time, they wear us down & stop us from being able to have meaningful lives because instead of living and showing up as ourselves, we're busy scanning for danger & stuck feeling on edge all the time.

It wears us down mentally, physically and emotionally.

Signs you may be living in survival mode include: 

• Feeling "on edge" or hypervigilant
• Difficulty relaxing, even during downtime
• Constant overthinking or worry
• Feeling unsafe, even when you logically know you're safe
• Struggling to say no or set boundaries
• Chronic fatigue or burnout
• Brain fog or dissociation
• Feeling disconnected from yourself or others
• Harsh self-criticism
• Always anticipating what could go wrong
• Feeling responsible for everyone else's emotions
• Difficulty trusting people or accepting support

Getting out of Survival

You don't have to stay stuck here and it is possible to find a way out, heal your nervous system & also break the old patterns you picked up or were taught.

It looks like 2 things to heal:

1. You have to be willing to look at your emotions & the feelings that weren't safe enough to feel in the past. It won't happen all at once because not everything is safe to feel at the same time but recognizing your emotional patterns and the beliefs you created to survive is crucial. You have to know what you "believe" in order to start changing that narrative. This is where coaching is so important. You may know some of your patterns but even me (with 15 years personal experience healing) still has gets caught off guard by things I can't see.

2. You have to learn how to feel safe in your body & allow your nervous system to process what it couldn't process in the past. These are the things you couldn't process because it wasn't safe to, you were too young to handle it or you were so overwhelmed or afraid that your body went into freeze. This is where somatic work is vital. It's how you allow your body to process what your nervous system is holding onto in a way that's SAFE and builds CAPACITY for change.

These 2 things happen like a see-saw, we go back and forth. We look at the patterns, heal some, make some changes, then move to where the body is afraid or stuck in making the change, support it, allow things to feel easier and then back to emotions for example. 

Your emotional body works in tandem with your physical body so if you're healing childhood trauma, you're going to go back and forth between the two so they can integrate the healing in a way that you can sustain and feels "easy" versus constantly trying to make changes through the triggers your body says are unsafe.

If you're healing & ready for support, you can check out the options for working together so both of these parts of you are fully supported and able to heal alongside one another.

xxx

Aspen