I was listening to a podcast earlier in the week and it’s been on my mind since. It was an interview of Brene Brown and she was talking about feelings. She said to be careful what emotions you claim to be feeling. In the past she would exclaim that she was overwhelmed, but through the years, with her research, she found that what she was actually feeling was stress. She discovered that overwhelm causes people to shut down. When you’re overwhelmed you become a deer in headlights. However, when you’re stressed, you fanatically take action.
I’ve been muling this over all week because I have often felt like a deer in headlights. When I was 9 I started at a new school. I went from a small-town elementary school in Texas to a K-12 college prep school on the East coast. The reason we moved (something I didn’t want) was because my dad had a nervous breakdown. After the move my mom went back to school full-time. I became a latchkey kid and when my mom (or dad for that matter) was home she was busily trying to get finished with her responsibilities so she could go study (my dad was there walking around but he was on another planet).
I have been looking back to the fourth grade over the past year because it was when my inability to cope with responsibilities started. I did poorly in school and I developed a reputation as a ‘bad’ kid. Last night it dawned on me that I was overwhelmed by everything going on in my life and had shut down. In order to get me out of overwhelm, my parents and teachers used fear. They would scare me with threats of failing and ‘bad’ reports on my college transcript in order to get me to do school work. So, I would go from overwhelm to ‘fight or flight’ and it was too much for me to handle on my own. It’s no wonder it took me 10 years to get my undergraduate degree.
School work evolved into life work and I’ve never been able to reconcile my feelings about either. Ironically I went through a similar time period in early adulthood. When I was learning to work, live on my own, and pay bills, I went through a traumatic experience. Suddenly I went into overwhelm again and was unable to cope with responsibilities, thinking that in order to be responsible I had to live in a constant state of fight or flight.
Last night it dawned on me that I am still associating responsibility with numbness and terror. I’m numb and shut down and the only thing that will get me out of it is fear. That’s no way to live. Responsibility can be uncomfortable, but it doesn’t have to force you to live in a state of fight or flight. It’s not possible to live like that and be healthy.
Now that I’ve consciously made that connection in my brain I feel like my whole life has changed. My perspective of myself, of my life, has shifted. I have spent the past thirty years working on feeling safe and relaxed. Said another way, I have spent the past thirty years trying not to feel anxious and depressed, and I’ve done a good job. But I’ve always associated facing responsibilities with pain. It can be uncomfortable, yes, but not painful.