Are your survival skills keeping you stuck.
I am really good at seeing possibility in others … and our collective future.
But the further I traveled down the path toward burnout (and the corresponding mental and physical illness), the more impossible it seemed that I had the power to change my own circumstances. Not coincidentally, a sense of helplessness and futility is a symptom of burnout.
Even when it became crystal clear to me that SOMETHING HAD TO GIVE … even as I saw myself crumbling from the inside … I couldn’t fathom that there were any different options.
If you had asked me at the time, I would have told you that I had tried every available strategy.
At some point, I became resigned–perhaps from the sheer exhaustion of trying to will it to be different–to what seemed to be my unavoidable fate.
Maybe I couldn’t actually conquer every obstacle with mental acuity, determination, discipline and unwavering persistence.
I didn’t know then that the protective parts of my well-intentioned nervous system (highly effective in so many ways for so very long) was running the show … that the parts of me who learned to survive through a now outworn set of strategies were driving the bullet train that was taking me right off a cliff.
A nervous system in a stress response has blinders on. Our field of vision is narrowed.
Our capacities for contextual awareness, big picture thinking, regulation, creative problem solving and even communication are literally deprived of resources.
I thought I couldn’t afford to stop (turns out I couldn’t afford to keep going either).
I thought I couldn’t let other people down (turns out I did anyway).
I thought I had to honor certain commitments (even if it was crushing my soul).
I thought I was the dispensable part of the equation.
It took me coming to the brink of self-destruction for me to give myself permission to save myself (no matter what that saving required).
And when I first made this decision, I only did it because I was choosing not to harm my children by taking my own life. Not because I could see the possibility for a better future.
I see you …
If you are the passenger on a bullet train of your own conscious or unconscious creation and it is driving you off a cliff …
If you are propelled forward by forces you cannot see and you cannot find the brake(s) except when your body collapses on your behalf …
If you can dream of possibility for others but keep finding yourself stuck …
If you need to renegotiate how you are spending your time and energy but cannot seem to find or let the words come out of your body …
If you have dreams of a different future but the path seems elusive …
If you have a sneaking suspicion (or maybe you can no longer deny) that the strategies that got you “here” won’t get you “there” …
I see you. And I want you to know that a more nourished, supported, and expansive life is available to you.
You don’t have to know how. You don’t even have to 100% believe what I am saying right now. But if there is any part of you that sparks or aches as you read my words, consider it a seed.
The seed of possibility.
“what didn’t you do to bury me
but you forgot that I was a seed”
~Dinos Christianopoulous
Love,
Booth
p.s. Nourished Woman Virtual Boot(h)camp registration is OPEN! Join me for this 4-week experience. We begin February 14th at 11:00am EST. Recordings will be available if you cannot attend all of the sessions. Details are available here.