While my spirit hasn't been broken, my body has

If I told you how many doctors I have seen, how many diagnoses I've been given, how many prescriptions I've tried, how many confused healthcare professionals I have faced, you'd be shocked. I am sure of it. Right now, at my age, I'm dealing with chronic pain, mostly in my joints, and tendons that are so frayed that they can snap, and have snapped, causing pain I absolutely cannot describe to you.

I didn't realize until I read the book "The Body Keeps The Score" that the reason why so many healthcare workers have thrown their hands in the air, not able to provide an accurate diagnosis to these problems, is because my problem stems from the chronic emotional abuse I have experienced in my life. When it came to fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, I have always chosen fight. Always. Even though my mind knows now that I am safe, that there's no danger, my nervous system will not let go of the need to protect me, thus I'm stuck in fight mode and have been for more than 40 years. Do you know how much that sucks?

I've been educating myself lately on methods to get out of this mode, but it's tricky given that my body will be difficult to shift out of survival mode because that is all it has known. For most of my life my body understood that safety was unpredictable, so it responded by tightening, bracing, and was always ready for a threat. Even now, my lymphocytes, which are responsible for driving our immune systems, remain elevated on every blood test I've had for years. That means my immune system is constantly on "high alert".

What's more, it sucks to just FEEL like I'm always alert. Now that I am more aware of what has happened to my body, I try to stay in tune with it and notice when things are tense, like my hands, my feet, shoulders, back, etc. Then I have to consciously focus on relaxing them. My massage therapist, Tammy, in Kingsport, TN, wonders how I have functioned with muscles as tight as mine are. She said my butt is like concrete... of course, having a "tight" backside might be seen as something you'd love to have, but for me, it just means that those muscles are affecting all of the nerves around them, contributing to back and nerve problems.

What I'm doing now is continuing to educate myself the best I can by understanding trauma's affect on the body. Awareness is the first step. Then, I'm working on what to do about reversing it. There's a resource called the "Self-Healer's Circle" (there's a small membership fee) that I've joined and they have a bunch of classes to teach me how to deal with these things. I have resources on Somatic Therapy, which are body movements that help the vagus nerve (look into that... it regulates all kinds of things), and I'm also learning how to meditate and, essentially, calm the F down because even though I look calm on the outside, my insides are preparing for war.