One of the brightest signs of a past traumatic experience is a survival mindset.
As someone who lived in extreme poverty all my childhood, when safety, emotional, physical, financial were not available for me, I was hooked by this idea that life is hard, that I need to survive. I would add more: addicted to this survival needle – because my whole identity was built of this.
When you grow up in such environment, each cell of your body learns:
– struggle is normal, there is no other way of living;
– if you want something beautiful in your life, you have to work hard, maybe till the degree of self – destruction;
– having money is bad, having pleasure, enjoying your life is evil and so on.
And one of my latest discoveries (yes, I have been doing my inner work for more than 6 years, and still these beliefs pop up- this is how deep all this shit sits within you): you can and shall endure this! This rude attitude, this pain, this toxic people – you can handle it all. Not the opposite: you can enjoy this communication, you can be nourished by this encounter, you can be inspired, etc., No – you have to endure! This was my unconscious standard of living.
How do you think it was affecting all areas of my life? Just a few examples:
– When I started working with a life coach some time ago (one of my first experiences), her strategy for me was the idea of a navy seal training. If you don’t know, these guys are trained as if they have no soul: they don’t sleep for days, don’t eat, unhuman physical training. So my coach found a book, the author was a former navy seal, which was called “the Hell week”. So we did with her this hell week. One of the days included a sleepless night. Yeah… I do not regret it, but to keep on going like this probably would not be a great idea long term.
– The choices I made in my personal life were also based on that belief “I shall endure”, so as a result I stayed with men who hurt me emotionally, who did not respect me, or choose me etc. As you can imagine, such romantic connections gave me excruciating emotional pain.
– My professional life is full of stories of toxic bosses, colleagues, situations when I was treated badly, humiliated. My recent experience was when I chose a person as my co-coach for my coaching education. It turned out she was a manipulative person. But I stayed, because we shall endure, correct? (hint – no, we shall not).
– All this stuff profoundly affects your body, your nervous system and even your posture. If your nervous system is on alert all the time, at some point of your life your body will be worn out by high levels of cortisol, you will have inflammation in your body that has various ways to show itself. In my case it was a stomach ache, and it was so severe that I could not walk. Doctors did not find anything special. But thanks to my self-awareness, I connected the dots: what was happening in my body was a reflection of this survival mindset.
– And a classic posture of a survival warrior is when the shoulders are always sort of protecting the chest, and it looks like a person carrying a heavy burden on themselves.
Because yeah, we shall endure, shall we not?…
Luckily as I slowly was becoming aware of such mindset, at some point life started debunking my beliefs about me needing to live in this survival mode. It started showing me that, for example, one does not need to work hard to earn good money. In fact, maybe in my case by bringing more lightness and pleasure in what I do will bring me bigger success. That in my personal relationships I can have pleasure – and not pain. And maybe not to settle where you do not feel valued, where you do not feel good about yourself is also an option.
Because guess what? To survive is not the goal, to bloom is! In all areas of your life!
P.S. Somewhere I read recently that we have only 80 summers in our lives, if we are lucky. It’s not that many. So it’s our duty to enjoy them – not to endure.