I thought everything would be different when I got out of my business. I thought I would suddenly have the success I wanted, bring in the money, make the friends, have the miracle life that we dream of having when we’re daring to take a leap into something new, something better than what we’ve lived through for years, maybe even decades. My life didn’t go that way, in fact, things got progressively more unstable and erratic because my body was finally free of the immediate trauma, but my mind and my heart were still carrying decades of it. This phase known as recovery mode wasn’t so great it turns out. But I’d been there before, in recovery mode. When my life led me through to process of unlearning everything that I’d been taught about my body, sexual experiences, and relationships my mind shut the fuck down. My idea of physical contact with another human at that moment was none.
I wanted no part of my body to be touched by anyone, even me and the idea of pleasure felt beyond terrifying. Enraging if you will. My body was a no-touch zone, but my mind needed the time, support, and love to release what was taking place with my body.
This is the recovery phase and when we’ve moved out of direct trauma it’s the space where all the traumas can be met with reflection, time, and of course support when we seek it out. Many of us don’t do that though, we try just moving right along into the next phase of life because “yay, we’re out of the shitshow”. But that’s when the memories creep in, when the voices within us say “NO, we’re not doing anything anymore!!!” My body went right into that after my fiancé and I split because I was finally free of the toxic relationships, narcissistic partners who matched the energy of my narcissistic mom. This was the place where my wounded parts decided no one was ever gonna touch us, “love us”, get near us ever again and we certainly weren’t available for any type of sexual contact even from my own hand.
I tried jumping into a program to help reconnect with my body because part of me wanted to know what it’d be like to love myself, my body, and my pleasure from an empowered place. But that program was done in the most non-trauma-informed way for someone like me. so, I had to step outside of it, to take the pieces of it that worked for me and leave what didn’t while I navigated my connection to my body. I thought at one point on my journey that I’d just never ever feel desire in my body again but slowly, eventually, she came back online. My body opened, she received, and it felt like something old and familiar was met with something new and expansive. I was introduced and reintroduced to my sensual body as this spiritually aligned being.
But then came the end of my business, my other business where so much trauma had occurred, and no matter what mistakes I made to try and fix it my body rejected it, quite literally. I broke my body because my mind was screaming “NO MORE!!!” My mind was rejecting every solution or band-aid I put on it to try and pick it up and put it back together again when I knew deep in my soul, I didn’t want it anymore. I didn’t want it for years, but I kept trying for the people I felt beholden to, the beautiful souls who trusted me, and put their faith in me but sadly didn’t make up for the ones ripping me in half and making me replay the relationship with my mother more times than I care to admit.
My heart felt broken and fractured as I walked away from the pieces of a life I never wanted for myself but felt like that was the only thing available to me. My body was fractured into pieces with parts of me feeling free to do whatever I wanted now matched by pieces begging me to stop, shut down, and be done with it all. For a moment I considered that maybe I didn’t want to work at all like I was just done trying to be a member of the global society. But that’s not what was happening. My body was shutting down because my mind and soul weren’t being given time to process to recalibrate to my new world, my new life.
I know so much about how we process trauma and move it through our bodies, but I was still a slave to the impulses of my freeze. They just disguised themselves behind the idea that what I needed was just to be free and do nothing but bring pleasure to my life for the rest of my life. No offense to the pleasure seekers of the world but pleasure isn’t always the end all be all especially when you don’t have the resources, strategies, and bank accounts to be in pleasure 24/7. That’s not a reality for many of us and for those of us that spent so much of our lives in trauma, those of us who became hyper-motivated and fixated on living in trauma because the trauma was what we experienced from day one. For us, pleasure becomes the shutdown response, pleasure is a mask for the freeze and fear of going back into the trauma because we’re afraid of ever going back there again to be hyper-productive little trauma bunnies. The pleasure opposite trauma can make a nasty cocktail of making us believe we’re wrong for thinking we need any type of structure and sparkly enough to succeed when maybe, just maybe what’s really going on is we’ve shut the fuck down and have no idea how to be productive in our businesses in a healthy, happy way that matches us to our desires for a life with more pleasure. We’re not meant to live within extremes but instead have a healthy, harmonious flow between the parts that crave freedom and the parts that need structure and support. My body knows what it feels like to dance between the two but I needed to permit it to process what I’d been through so I could realize where I’d been resisting the flow because my trauma masked what healthy flow looked like.
Now that I can recognize when I’m in healthy flow my body, my mind, and my soul work together to give me the freedom and the structure to achieve that freedom I truly desire. No magical program, hiring of support, or trying a million different techniques to be in pleasure will get you there when you haven’t dealt with why you’re not aligned with your success, business, sex life, body, relationships, or anything else you desire.
