Why You Can’t Relax (Even When You Want To)

How early survival strategies train your adult nervous system to distrust ease —
and what to do about it now.  

Unsplash image, Unknown artist

 Have you ever noticed how your stuff is stuff, whereas other people’s stuff is crap in your way? Their stuff is crap that needs to be put away, and stay put away, while your stuff and projects look appealing to you and affirm you.

Believe me, they feel the same about your stuff. Some people truly don’t register any of it — they move through life un-present, not noticing anything, and some people simply don’t think that way.

This is true for other stuff, stuff that shows its presence, but not in discrete molecules necessarily.

When you’re in crisis, some people genuinely can’t see what the big deal is. If you are panicking about a big, surprise bill that needs paying, or how to get shoes for the kids, or food, there are people you encounter that simply wouldn’t get it.

They dismiss other people’s emotions — but justify their own. However, when their house is on fire, when their finances are on the line, when their loved ones are in danger, when they are experiencing threat of any kind, they absolutely will display emotions.

If you aren’t matching their emotional urgency, they’ll either lecture you or freeze you out.

It goes even further.

When your security is threatened by their not understanding, or doing things the same old way, or avoiding it all altogether, you get angry and frustrated. Why can’t they see how their behavior impacts you?

Maybe if you’re kind enough, helpful enough, pleasing enough — if you pretzel yourself ENOUGH, surely they will finally see and stop doing what it is that is so threatening to your security.

This strategy was brilliant for the circumstances of a small child that came up with and acted on it. It probably worked well then.

But the strategies that our brilliant little 4-year-old came up with really do not work when you’re an adult. And as an adult, contorting yourself to keep others stable is painful.

In fact, reinforcing the idea that you cannot get your needs met without convincing someone else to take care of your security for you is painful because it shows that there is a part of you still frozen back then, when you could not take care of yourself. Frozen in fear and powerlessness, ready to be thawed with loving attention – from you – and brought into present time. This is how you rescue you now, for a retroactive and future healing; all in present time.

See, it was brilliant in childhood because it was appropriate to the terrain. Kids are dependent on adults for quite a while. It’s a genius strategy, for then.

But if you aren’t doing the parts work, the shadow work, the loving reparenting work, it will never feel like you can do things for yourself now, because the 4-year-old you is hanging on too tight, in too much fear, to allow the nervous system, cortisol, peptide cascades to stop.

The 4-year-old has never experienced feeling safe, and by extension, being safe.

One of body’s jobs is to keep us in status, the most often state the body has experienced. So if you grew up under constant threat, constant uncertainty, never knowing if the safe adult will show up or the crazy one, your little body will be calibrated to constant threat.

That means that your body-energy-nervous system will identify relaxed, rest-and-digest as threatening, unsafe, to be avoided and not trusted in any way.

This biochemical, bio-electrical system is not in your conscious awareness. It is your autonomic system.

So no matter the amount of mental, talk therapy you think your way through, if these deeper energetics are not addressed, you will never really relax, feel safe, let go into rest and digest, the restorative state bodies are built to live in.

I’ve seen estimates that say most 60–90% of people’s days are spent in some version of vigilance, internal bracing, tension loops, emotional monitoring of others, mentally and psychically scanning for threat, failure, rejection, sudden attack, overstimulation of all kinds, including high doses of electronic and techno overload and misinformation, and unprocessed micro-stressors.

Even when people think they are fine, they are unaware of how shallow their breathing is, how “On” they always are, how low-grade numb they are to “block it out,” so they can just get through the day.

Most people, when they first experience their true parasympathetic baseline, where we are organically meant to live, they don’t trust it, and it’s not comfortable, and can feel like a threat.

Children are fed the message, knowingly or not, that they are the problem, and no matter how far removed whatever is going on from the child, the child will interpret all the tension and upset as having to do with themselves.

Now it is time to become aware of what you are doing, and what age you are thinking/being, in any given moment.

By bringing yourself into Present Time more and more often, the more these things can begin to unwind, unfurl, and release.

The more you are living in Present Time, the more you see that you are an adult and not a 4-year-old, and that you have tools and resources that your little one did not have, and that now you can do for yourself what the little one could not.

That will help your inner little one(s) feel increasingly safe over time, because they experience how adult you is now listening, and taking care of things, in Present Time.