Are You Addicted to Suffering and Struggle?

A Letter from One Survivor to Another

Let me take you on a journey through my own cycle of pain, one that might mirror your own.

For over 24 years, I stayed stuck in a cycle of pain. Not only because I didn’t know how to escape, but also because I had no idea that part of me had become used to it. That pain was my comfort zone; I needed it. That is not easy to admit, but maybe that is precisely what you need to hear.

I was addicted to pain and suffering. And maybe you are too.

Consider if your life feels like a constant storm, with relationships that break rather than build you, where chaos feels more familiar than peace.

Then I want you to consider that you might be emotionally addicted to your struggle. In the same way, someone is addicted to alcohol, cigarettes, or drugs.

You don’t choose to be this way on purpose, but you can choose to stop feeding it.

How Does Someone Get Addicted to Suffering?

It might seem strange, but when survival mode becomes your norm, your body adapts to a constant state of fear, anger, and panic, as if these emotions are essential for survival. The body doesn’t know good adrenaline from bad. It just feels familiar. So if pain becomes what you’re used to, your brain will start chasing it like a drug.

I’ll be honest with you: After I left my abusive husband, I thought I’d be free. But instead, I felt lost, restless, and empty. And one day I caught myself missing the drama, missing the feeling of being needed, even if it came with cruelty.

That’s when I realized I wasn’t just healing from abuse. I was detoxing from it.

Understanding the Chemistry of Emotion

Here’s what’s really going on under the surface. Every emotion you feel, love, sadness, rage, guilt, and fear, comes with a chemical mix your body gets used to. When you feel anger or shame over and over, your body floods itself with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline.

And your nervous system thinks,

“Ah, yes. This is normal. Let’s keep doing that.”

It doesn’t care if it’s killing you emotionally. It only cares that it’s predictable. That’s why breaking the cycle is more than leaving them. It’s also about rewiring your system and healing your brain. You have to teach your body that peace isn’t dull, it’s safe.

Why You Keep Ending Up With the Same Kind of Person

If you’ve ever escaped one toxic relationship only to fall into another… and another…

You’re not weak or broken. You’re still addicted to the feelings that chaos brings.

And your brain will unconsciously lead you straight to people who can give you the fix.

It’s not because you want to be hurt, but it’s because deep down, you don’t yet believe you deserve anything else.

The Good News: You Can Break Free

I won’t lie to you. Healing is hard, but so is staying stuck. The difference is that one of them leads somewhere beautiful.

Here’s how I started the process, and you can too:

1. Tell yourself the truth.

Not the story you’ve been told or the lie that “this is just who you are.”

Say the truth, you are addicted to survival mode, and you were made for so much more.

2. Decide that it ends with you.

Not tomorrow, not when it gets easier. Right now.

You don’t need to hit another rock bottom to be done.

3. Catch yourself.

When the negative self-talk kicks in or when you feel that familiar urge to sabotage yourself, tell yourself, “I deserve better.

Then, breathe, even if you don’t believe it yet.

4. Let peace feel weird for a while.

Because it will, trust me. Quiet will feel loud, and safety will feel foreign.

That’s okay. Stay there anyway. Let yourself get used to calm.

5. Give it time. Give yourself grace.

This isn’t about perfection; it’s about persistence.

You’re teaching your nervous system a new language. That love doesn’t hurt, and peace doesn’t mean danger.

One More Thing,

You’re not broken. You’re not stupid for staying too long. You were surviving.

And now? You’re waking up.

Your addiction to struggle isn’t your fault, but healing is your responsibility.

You deserve a life that doesn’t hurt. And it’s waiting for you, whenever you’re ready.

Parenting Both Sides of Sibling Sexual Abuse

A Message From The Hummingbird

I am the mom on both sides of a complicated story. Loving one child who was sexually abused and loving the one who caused the harm.

There is no road map for navigating something like this. No clean language. No version of the path forward that does not cost something deep and painful. Some days it feels like my entire role is simply to remain standing when I feel like falling and to stay present when everything in me wants to hide. Functioning while absorbing this kind of shock is a challenge in itself.

And yet, here I am. Learning how to love without chasing, how to hold boundaries without disappearing. How to remain myself even when relationships have changed form in ways I would have never imagined.

Lately, I have been thinking about the hummingbird.

A hummingbird migrates thousands of miles relative to its size. It burns enormous energy simply to stay alive. Even hovering in place takes constant effort. It does not rest the way other birds do. It must keep moving its wings just to remain where it is.

That feels familiar.

As parents and humans navigating trauma, we expend energy just to stay standing and emotionally present. We hover. We show up. We pay attention even when everything in us wants to give up. We absorb pain and strain quietly and keep going. Like the hummingbird, we need nourishment, spiritual and emotional, because the work of staying present is exhausting.

The hummingbird symbolizes resilience after hardship. It represents the return of joy and lightness, not because things become easy, but because survival itself requires strength. It reminds us that connection does not require possession, love does not require obligation, and presence does not require control.

We can love deeply and still protect ourselves. We can hold grief and hope at the same time. We can remain connected without losing who we are, and we can stay in place without collapsing.

If you are hovering right now, barely holding yourself together, that is worth remembering! Your quiet strength counts! The energy you put into staying present matters!

Even in the most challenging seasons, strength can exist. You are not failing, you are surviving. And sometimes that is the bravest thing any of us can do.

The Trap of Thinking You Have No Say

For anyone tired of believing they do not have a choice

Have you stopped trying because you don’t think your choices matter?
Somewhere along the way, you’ve convinced yourself that nothing you do changes anything. Maybe it was the years of fighting for peace that never came. Perhaps it was the abuse that taught you your voice did not matter. Maybe it was the exhaustion that made you numb. So you shut down and coast, letting life hit you.

You tell yourself, “This is just how things are.”

But that belief does not come from truth; it comes from survival. Survival mode does not tell the whole story.

Does staying stuck feel easier than facing yourself?
It is easier to let life drag you down than to stand up and change directions. Change requires you to look at what you tolerate, avoid, and why you keep choosing things that hurt you. This exposes the gap between the life you have and the life you want.

You might pretend you have no control, acting like the script is already written.

Why?

Because if you are powerless, you don’t have to take responsibility; you protect the pain rather than yourself.

You can take the pen back!
Life is not happening to you; you are participating in it.. Even when you are silent and afraid.

You can decide what you will and will not allow. You get to choose one small action step that moves you out of the old patterns.

You can stop reliving the same chapter and start writing something new. It does not have to be dramatic or perfect; it just has to be yours. That is the moment you’re able to take your life back, rewrite your storyline, and make it yours.

Why Gratitude Feels So Hard When You Are Hurting

And why the practice of gratitude cuts deeper for survivors

Gratitude feels impossible when you are still bleeding inside.
People tell you to practice gratitude as if it were a magic cure. They do not understand that when you have lived with someone who tore you down, gratitude is not a natural instinct. Survival is because you learned to scan for danger, not beauty. You learned to brace for the next blow instead of celebrating the wins.

So when someone says, “What are you grateful for?” your mind goes silent. You think you have nothing because, for so long, everything good has come with a price. Gratitude does not bloom in a war zone.

· Misery becomes familiar, even when it hurts.
There is a strange comfort in what you already know, even if it’s toxic. Misery becomes a routine; you wake up with it every day. You sleep with it, you breathe it in, and it becomes the lens through which you see. Anything that contradicts your story feels wrong.

When people ask you to be grateful, it feels like they are asking you to betray your own truth.

For someone who lives in abuse, admitting there is still good in the world feels contradictory. It feels like letting your guard down.

· Gratitude exposes the grief you have been avoiding
Finding even one small thing to be grateful for forces you to slow down, breathe, and feel. And feeling is terrifying when you’ve spent years shutting down your own emotions just to survive.

Gratitude is not fake; it’s risky. The moment you acknowledge something good, it feels like you’re ignoring everything you lost, everything you tolerated, and everything that broke you. Gratitude brings the grief to the surface, and most days, you are already carrying more than anyone sees.

· But the smallest piece of gratitude can crack the prison walls
You do not have to write a list, and you do not have to be grateful for your trauma, the lessons, or the strength it gave you.

Forget all that.

Begin with one tiny thing, one moment where you felt safe or seen. Maybe a time you felt free to breathe. Was it a quiet morning? Or is it the fact that you left?. Maybe it is the way you no longer flinch at sudden movements.

Gratitude is not about pretending everything is fine. It is about recognizing the small signs that you are no longer living under someone else’s control.

One point of light in the dark, just one thing that reminds you that you survived. Something that proves your life is not finished, and once you find that one thing, even if it is small, you are no longer stuck in the same old story.

It Is What It Is

“It is what it is.”

I told my assistant, after spilling everything about why I had been absent,

“Hey, that’s a dismissive statement. You can’t dismiss this. It is not your fault.” He said.

Yesterday I stopped by my parents’ house to help Mom with her Facebook. After about an hour of scrolling through her activity history, and Dad complaining about how three of their specialist doctors were leaving our town for a bigger one, they ended with,

“She owes us an apology.”

I shook my head no.
They didn’t like that.

They insisted they had been wrongly accused. They brushed past the fact that they are still, even after everything, keeping contact with her abuser. Instead, they turned the extra pictures on Facebook into their own story. A story where they were the victims. A story where she had attacked them.

Dad with his angry, silent face.
Mom had her lip pulled in, as if she were bracing for battle.

“Yes, she does,” they sneered.
“Wouldn’t you want an apology if you were accused of something you didn’t do?”

I let out one of those airy laughs. The kind you do when you remember something painful. In my case, it was Dad’s accusatory text. I brushed it off again by saying,

“You have to understand how scared she is.”
And then the conversation was over.

I left feeling like I had failed her and myself.

I have never been good at ‘thinking on my toes’ when I get backed into a corner. And for some reason, my parents have always had the power to back me in that corner. Even as an adult. Even after therapy. Even after years of growth.

I think I have been dismissive of them for years without realizing it. Not because I didn’t care, but because I didn’t want to face the fear I carried of them. A fear I only recently learned to name.

Therapy has helped me draw cleaner lines. It showed me that my anxieties did not begin with my ex-husband. He added to the damage, but he did not build the foundation. My parents did. Their dismissiveness shaped me long before adulthood, long before marriage, long before the trauma that came later.

My dad does not know how to love without control. His love has limits, and those limits end where his control ends.
My mom has always believed the world is against her. So it makes sense she sees her own granddaughter as just one more person out to hurt her.

And for years, I’ve repeated the exact phrase like a mantra.

“It is what it is.”

But now I know that phrase was never peace. It was resignation.
It was the sound of folding into silence.
It was the armor I wore when I didn’t yet have the language to name the wounds.

But I do now.

So no, it’s not “what it is.”

It’s what it was.

When Doing the Right Thing Still Makes You Feel Like the Villain

A story about family, guilt, and the cost of choosing someone’s peace and safety

This year, I set a boundary with my parents.

We didn’t go to their house for Thanksgiving. We had it at ours instead. That might sound small to someone outside the situation, but it wasn’t. It carried years of pain, silence, and choices that should never have been mine to carry.

It wasn’t even about me this time. It was about my daughter.

There’s a story I’m not going into here, but I’ll say this much. My daughter was violated by a family member, their grandson, my son. He’s in prison now for what he did to her. But my parents still choose to stay in contact with him.

She was the one who said she didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to sit in a place that still protects the person who hurt her. And I decided to support her, choose her, and stand on her side.

It was the right thing. I know that. But it didn’t stop the fallout.

My mom didn’t speak to me for a whole week. My dad turned on the guilt, the blame, and the disappointment. Like I was the one punishing them. All I did was protect my daughter from the people who made her feel betrayed.

And still, I spiraled. I second-guessed myself. I wondered if I was being dramatic, if I had taken it too far, if I was being cruel by drawing a line.

That’s how deep the conditioning goes. That’s how beating yourself up becomes your favorite hobby.

You protect your child. You do what you know is right. And then you punish yourself for it.

Here’s how that cycle works. Here’s how the guilt gets under your skin and stays there, even when it shouldn’t.

1. You confuse guilt with being good.
You grew up thinking that if it hurts, it must mean you care. If you carry the guilt long enough, maybe it proves you’re the better person. Perhaps it means you’re nothing like the ones who hurt you. So you hold it. You nurse it. You call it empathy, but it’s not. It’s grief. It’s fear. It’s survival mode, you never got the chance to grow out of.

2. You turn on yourself before anyone else can.
It’s safer that way. You blame yourself first. You get ahead of the punishment. You run the worst-case scenario before it even happens. That way, if someone does get mad, you’re already halfway into self-destruction. You don’t have to be blindsided. You’re already bleeding. You call it control, but it’s fear disguised as preparation.

3. You were trained to carry the weight for everyone.
Keeping the peace was your job. Making things easier and smoothing things over. So when you finally make a decision that protects someone else, someone innocent, someone hurt, it still feels like betrayal. It feels like you’re letting everyone down, even when you’re the only one standing up for what’s right.

4. You think beating yourself up makes you accountable.
You think that if you suffer enough, it proves you’re not careless. That you’re not cold. That you understand the impact. But accountability is not self-punishment. It’s not turning your own heart into a punching bag. Accountability means standing in your truth and owning your choices, even when they hurt, even when you’re alone in them.

You can know something is right and still feel crushed by the guilt of doing it. That’s the part people don’t talk about.

The pain of healing is that it often makes you look like the villain to the people who benefited from your silence. And the reflex to beat yourself up is strong. It feels like the only way to keep the peace with yourself when everyone else is pulling away. But beating yourself up is not the same as being good. It’s just the story they taught you to believe. And you don’t have to keep telling it.

DON’T TAKE IT PERSONAL

Why You Take Everything Personally (And What No One Told You About It)

Let’s be real. You don’t just “hear” what someone says—you absorb it.
A sigh? You feel it like a slap.
A short text? Your stomach drops.
If they are quiet? You spiral.

Taking things personally isn’t a flaw—it’s a reaction to what you’ve been through…

Someone trained you to feel this way.

Maybe you were in a relationship like mine—one where your partner, or parents, made sure you were never really safe. Where you had to study their mood the way a sailor studies the sky.
Because one wrong word, one wrong look, could start a storm.

I know what that feels like.
To live in a home that felt more like a test.
To love someone who used your love against you.
To be blamed for everything—their anger, their silence, their outbursts, their boredom.

When you’re with an abuser, especially for years, you don’t just fear them—you become them in your own head.
You start criticizing yourself before they can.
You start shrinking your needs because it’s safer that way.
You start interpreting everything around you as a threat.

That’s why you take things personally.
Because you were trained to see danger in the subtlest shifts.

You were taught that mistakes mean punishment.
That emotions are weapons.
That love means walking on eggshells while setting yourself on fire to keep someone else warm.

So now, when someone gives you feedback, you feel attacked.
When someone pulls away, you assume it’s your fault.
When someone’s upset, you blame yourself.

But here’s the part you need to hear:
It’s not your fault.

You were conditioned to believe that your survival depended on reading people perfectly.
You weren’t being sensitive—you were being smart.
You were protecting yourself.
But now?
Now you don’t have to live like that anymore.

That voice in your head telling you “you messed up,” “they hate you,” “you ruined everything”—
That’s not your voice.
That’s theirs.
That’s the voice of the person who broke you down, not the one who gets to build you back up.

And you’re allowed to question it.
You’re allowed to replace it.
You’re allowed to heal—even if they never apologize.

So if you’re sitting there wondering why you take things so personally, let me say this:

You’re not crazy.
You’re not broken.
You’re carrying a survival instinct that once kept you safe—but it doesn’t have to run your life anymore.

You can learn to breathe again.
To trust again.
To love without fear.
To hear someone’s words without turning them into wounds.

You’re allowed to take your power back.

One truth at a time.

How to Recover After Someone Humiliates You

If something happened that left you shaky, ashamed, exposed, or suddenly doubting yourself, I want you to know this:

What you’re feeling is real. And it makes sense.

Most people have no idea what humiliation actually does to a person. They think it’s “just embarrassment.” They think you should shrug it off. But humiliation is a psychological wound. It hits the same part of your brain that reacts to physical pain. It knocks your confidence, your voice, and sometimes your sense of self out from under you.

And if no one ever taught you how to deal with this kind of emotional blow, you might be blaming yourself for a wound you never deserved.

Let’s walk through this slowly, in a way that makes space for your pain and gives you a way forward.

—

1. Something painful happened — you didn’t imagine it

Someone cut you down.
Someone used their words, tone, or power to make you feel small.
Someone spoke to you in a way that pierced straight through your dignity.

You weren’t “overreacting.”
You weren’t “too sensitive.”

You were caught off guard by a moment that should not have happened.

Humiliation exposes the person who delivered it — not the person who received it.

—

> “A painful moment happened to me. It does not define me.”

—

2. Your body responded because humiliation is a body-level injury

Most people don’t talk about this part, but humiliation hits the body first:

Your throat closes.
Your stomach flips.
Your face gets hot.
Your mind blanks out.
Your chest tightens.

This is your nervous system trying to protect you.

It doesn’t mean you’re weak.
It means you’re human.

Before you try to make sense of anything, let your body settle.

Try this:

Drop your shoulders

Loosen your jaw

Place your hand on your chest

Slow your exhale

Whisper, “I’m safe enough right now.”

You cannot think clearly in a body that feels attacked.

—

3. The wound came from the story your mind created afterward

There’s the event itself…
and then there’s the meaning your mind wrapped around it.

Humiliation tries to whisper things like:

“Everyone saw.”

“You looked foolish.”

“You should’ve known better.”

“They were right about you.”

But those thoughts aren’t truth.
They’re the bruise talking.

Say this gently: “The story I told myself was…”

Name it so it stops running the show in the dark.

—

4. Humiliation makes you want to hide — but hiding keeps the wound open

After you’re hurt like this, the instinct to disappear is strong.
You avoid eye contact, replay the moment, pull your energy inward.
You shrink as if shrinking will protect you.

But hiding is exactly what keeps the wound tender.

You don’t have to tell the whole story.
Just start with one simple sentence:

“Something happened that made me feel small.”

Speaking it breaks the isolation humiliation depends on.

—

5. Reclaim your authority over what the moment meant

When someone cuts you down, their voice can become louder in your head than your own.

But your dignity is still yours.

Say: “I get to decide what this means.”

Not them.
Not the moment.
Not the fear that followed.

You.

Every time you say it, something inside you stands a little straighter.

—

6. Give yourself what you needed in that moment

Ask yourself: “What did I need right then?”

Respect?
Understanding?
Protection?
Someone to step in?
Someone to say, “That wasn’t okay”?

Now ask: “How can I give even a small piece of that to myself now?”

This is what begins to repair the psychological wound.

—

Here’s the truth I want you to carry with you

You are not the smallness someone tried to put on you.
You are not the version of yourself their words tried to create.
You are not the moment that knocked your voice out of your chest.

You were wounded.
And wounded people don’t need shame — they need understanding, space, and a way back to themselves.

This is that way back.

👉 Download the Humiliation Recovery Guide

Why Happiness Makes You Nervous

For the girl who thinks the tightness in her chest is normal

Good times make you nervous, don’t they?

You don’t call it fear—you call it “being cautious,” or “not getting your hopes up.” But the truth is quieter: you’re not used to peace. For so long, love has felt like tension, panic, apologizing, overthinking, and walking around someone else’s moods like they’re landmines.

So when something finally goes right… Your whole body glitches.

You look around, waiting for the explosion.
You wait for the tone in his voice to shift.
You wait for the moment he decides you’re “too sensitive,” “too emotional,” or “too much.”

And if nothing happens right away, your brain fills the silence with dread: Is this the part where it all turns again?
You don’t trust happiness—not because you’re broken, but because you’ve survived too long without it.

Girls like us learn early that peace feels like a trap.
A setup.
A calm before the next storm.

No one told you that real love isn’t supposed to feel like bracing for impact.
No one told you that safety isn’t the same thing as “keeping the peace.”
No one told you that if your body relaxes only when he isn’t home… that’s not comfort. That’s survival.

Listen, sweetheart—if happiness feels foreign, it’s not because you’re incapable of it.
It’s because someone taught you to expect pain.

And here’s the part I wish someone had whispered to me sooner:
You don’t have to keep living in the story where fear feels like love. You don’t have to keep shrinking yourself just to fit into a relationship that was never safe to begin with.

Real peace doesn’t make you nervous.
Real love doesn’t make you flinch.
And real happiness doesn’t feel like a setup—it feels like finally coming home to yourself.

You deserve that kind of happiness.
And I promise… it won’t explode.

When someone ties despair to God Himself, it buries you in a deeper kind of fear. You stop dreaming. You stop believing in the better. And every time life gets quiet, you brace yourself, because you know the calm never lasts.

I remember once, after one of our rare calm seasons, we tried to dream again. We made a little vision board together — nothing extravagant, just things a normal couple would hope for. A peaceful home. A reliable car. A future that didn’t feel like walking through broken glass.

But his face went dark, the way it always did when anything felt too good.

He looked at me and said,

“God hates me. We will never get any of this.”

And just like that, the air changed.
The hope drained out of the room.
My body learned — again — that peace wasn’t safe, and happiness wasn’t to be trusted.

My Gut Reaction: Living with Public Anxiety, IBS, and a Submarine Emergency

A funny, honest essay about navigating IBS, hidden anxiety, and one unforgettable moment in a submarine that led to personal healing.

I never considered myself an anxious person — but the swooshing in my gut, the bubbles, the ache — it happens too often to ignore. And it only ever happens in public places, which made me start to wonder: maybe this is anxiety.

We were on a little weekend getaway and decided to go to the Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum before heading home. The USS Razorback (SS 394) submarine is harbored on the Arkansas River. The tour starts in the visitor center, where I went to the restroom one last time — just to be safe.

Walking across the plank, I looked out at the foggy river, thinking, I love Arkansas; it’s so beautiful here. It was bizarre but amazing — a real submarine in the middle of the Arkansas River. It made me wonder if there were others.

Our tour guide opened the hatch door and pointed to the 14-foot ladder leading down into the vessel, instructing us to climb down. I was cursing my choice in shoes that morning. I wore wooden-heeled pumps, not knowing we were going on this spontaneous side adventure after breakfast.

I chose to be the last to go down. Each step made me tremble with fear.

She talked, leading us down narrow pathways, stepping through doorways. There was so much machinery, equipment, and living necessities squeezed into this tiny space. It was warm and damp, and you could still get the faintest waft of sweaty sailors.

I usually welcome warmth, but this day my belly was giving me a different type of heat. I knew I shouldn’t have eaten the eggs when we were not close to home. Eating eggs was always like playing roulette. I might have explosive diarrhea, I might not. We would wait and see. Of course, if I had known we were going on a side trip before heading home, I would have ordered something safer.

Every time we go out, I calculate the distance from the restaurant to home because these bathroom emergencies, we like to call them, had become a part of my life. When we go to shows or concerts, we always choose aisle seats so I don’t have to walk in front of a bunch of people, clenching my butt, praying I don’t pass gas in someone’s face.

But here we were in this submarine — tight and suffocating, with recycled air that clung to your skin. Not even a quarter of the way through our tour, I couldn’t hear what she was saying. All my focus was on the swooshing and bubbles in my intestines, calculating how long or how much time I had to climb up that dreaded ladder and get to the bathroom.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if we had been the only people on the tour. But there were others. And I was about to have to interrupt and explain my situation.

I crossed my arms across the top of my bloated belly as if to say, “No. I refuse to let you do this to me,” but honestly, I was praying I could just make it through the tour.

Then I felt it.

The drop — when my stomach contents fall into the next chamber like a trap door has opened. That’s the signal: time is running out. Once that happens, the rest of my system tends to follow suit in a panic. Maybe that’s why they call it “taking a dump” — because once it starts, it’s all downhill from there.

I raised my hand like a shy elementary student asking the teacher to go to the bathroom — but in a whisper, so no one close by could hear me, so they wouldn’t laugh and make fun of me.

I said quietly, “I think I’m going to throw up.”

I learned that if you tell them you’re about to toss your cookies, they are more sympathetic and quicker to get you out of there because no one wants to deal with vomit. This happened to me on a cave tour in Colorado. They stopped the entire group, handed me a barf bag I knew I wouldn’t need, while everyone waited for someone to rescue me and take me back above ground.

She led me to the porthole, climbed up to open the hatch, and stood there watching as I clumsily made my way up the ladder in my wooden-heeled shoes.

Once outside, I walked as fast as I possibly could to the bathroom, feeling it crowning like a baby fixing to be born. I don’t know about your bladder and other systems, but as soon as I see the bathroom, my systems think it’s time to release — steadfast, I keep my gaze on the ground, not wanting to make “eye contact” with the bathroom door.

I barely had time to pull my pants down before the rest of my digestive tract let go. It was a speedy, high-volume exit.

And that was it.

I breathed a sigh of relief, wiped the sweat off my forehead, and — being too embarrassed to return to the tour or wait for the next one — we drove on home.

That experience prompted me to reflect.

My stomach doesn’t betray me — as long as I don’t leave the comfort of my home. Conveniently, I work just down the driveway, so even work feels safe. But as soon as I round the corner to head toward town, leaving the comforts of our rural home, my gut will start doing its thing.

There have been times when I was driving that I felt I would pass out. It happened so often that I started keeping a closer eye on my glucose and blood pressure, thinking it could be a physical cause. But my vitals always came back normal.

Then I read something about how, when we’ve been through traumatic events, we often create an environment for ourselves that’s so comfortable we don’t want to leave it — and become afraid to.

And it dawned on me.

I have it really good at home. From the deck, we have a view of the mountains, surrounded by trees, and it’s just a short walk to a creek — everything I ever dreamed of and more. It even makes searching for vacation homes difficult, because not many places can beat the one I live in.

But leaving this wonderful, comfortable place gave me anxiety. And that anxiety was taking control of my life.

So I decided to start therapy.

When she asked why I was there, I told her I think I have anxiety — and how my gut liked to let loose in response. Little by little, she helped me peel back the layers to understand why it was happening.

That was two years ago. Now, I can safely go places — tours, car rides, even crowded events. The gut thing has only popped its ugly head up once recently, after getting bad news from two of my adult children — separate events in their lives, but both deeply upsetting.

I’m learning to live with a gut that feels everything — and to finally listen to what it’s been trying to tell me.

Yoli's Write To Sanity

Just Breathe And Write

Category: Domestic violence