(of the heart)
Mental Health Awareness Month Series: The Benefits of Your Existence
Excavation
There comes a point in adulthood where the performance collapses. The coping mechanisms stop feeling like protection and start feeling like prisons, and, suddenly, you are no longer reacting to the world around you—you are reacting to what lives unresolved inside of you.
Most of us don’t realize this immediately. Some of us never realize this at all.
We think we’re reacting to a relationship. A disagreement. A betrayal. A disappointment. But often, what is being activated in us is much older than the present moment. Much older than the person standing in front of us. Sometimes, what erupts in adulthood is the accumulation of years spent emotionally surviving instead of emotionally processing.
This is the root.
The root is not just memory. It is a stored emotional experience. It is the nervous system remembering what the mind tried so hard to bury. It is hypervigilance disguised as preparedness. Possibly, emotional suppression disguised as strength, and avoidance disguised as peace. The body keeps score long after the moment has passed, and many of us are walking around carrying unresolved attachment wounds, chronic fear responses, and emotional conditioning that began in childhood. And the more we grow up, the more we realize how much of our adulthood has been shaped by what we never confronted.
In our adult partnerships, we discover that some people become emotionally unavailable because vulnerability once endangered them. Some become controlling because chaos once controlled them. Some become people-pleasers because rejection once felt emotionally catastrophic. Others withdraw completely, dissociate, overwork, overperform, overspend, overgive—anything to avoid sitting quietly with what hurts beneath the surface.
This is why healing is uncomfortable.
Because healing requires us to interrupt the survival patterns that once protected us. It asks us to stop romanticizing our coping mechanisms and start examining them. To ask ourselves difficult questions:
- Why does silence make me anxious?
- Why do I fear abandonment but struggle with intimacy?
- Why do I keep choosing what drains me?
- Why does rest feel unsafe?
- Why do I confuse survival with living?
The truth is, many of us have spent years functioning in a state of emotional dysregulation without realizing it. Smiling while depleted. Performing while disconnected. Calling ourselves “strong” while emotionally exhausted. We became so accustomed to surviving that peace itself began to feel unfamiliar. And unfamiliarity can feel threatening to a nervous system trained by trauma.
The root begins to sit here.
At this junction, we sit still long enough to recognize what is actually happening inside of us. And what is happening is our decision to give up the performance, to stop pretending we’re okay because the world rewards productivity over honesty. Before healing can change your life, it must first change your awareness.
Gutting Our Insides Out
Healing, in its rawest form, is a kind of emotional gutting.
It is the slow and often uncomfortable process of pulling old wounds, distorted beliefs, defense mechanisms, suppressed grief, and survival responses out into the open and finally asking them why they exist. Most people want transformation, but very few people are prepared for the dismantling that often comes before it.
Do not get confused. Recovery is not always soft lighting, affirmations, yoga mats, and inspirational quotes. Sometimes it is cognitive dissonance or grieving the version of yourself that was built entirely around survival. Sometimes it looks like the hyper-independence you once celebrated that was actually a trauma response rooted in abandonment, emotional neglect, or chronic disappointment. It can be confronting the reality that emotional avoidance has cost you intimacy, accountability, honesty, and connection.
Many of us learned to disassociate before we learned to communicate, and how to suppress before regulating. We endured before learning how to feel safe in our own skin. And so, we carry these unresolved emotional injuries into adulthood and into marriages, then wonder why our relationships feel unstable, why rest feels foreign, why vulnerability feels threatening, why our nervous systems remain in a constant state of hypervigilance even when danger is no longer present.
This is why so many people numb themselves through overworking, isolation, substances, overconsumption, emotional detachment, or perpetual distractions, including infidelity. Because sitting with yourself—truly sitting with yourself—requires a level of radical honesty that many people spend their entire lives avoiding. But the more we grow up, the more we realize that healing is not about becoming unrecognizable. It’s about becoming emotionally honest enough to stop abandoning ourselves in the places where we once needed protection the most. Because when we abandon ourselves, we abandon others in the mix.
And during the gutting, some wounds won’t leave quietly; they will tear through the body on their way out!
The Comfort Zone is Often a Trauma Response
News Flash!!! Spiritual glow-ups don’t come with filters. And healing isn’t aesthetic; it’s awkward. You need to tear the shit down to build it back up.
Uh oh….Time to get UNCOMFORTABLE!
Most people think the comfort zone is a place of peace. Sometimes, it is. Most times it is not. The comfort zone brings familiarity, with the safety MASK. Your nervous system is now choosing predictable pain over unfamiliar healing because survival conditioning has convinced the body that what is known—even if harmful—is safer than change.
This is why so many people remain emotionally attached to what drains them. Why they stay in toxic relationships, unhealthy environments, self-sabotaging cycles, dead-end patterns, and versions of themselves they’ve long outgrown. Trauma has a way of making dysfunction feel normal. The mind adapts. The body follows. The spirit joins the bandwagon. And eventually, people begin mistaking emotional survival for emotional stability.
Psychologically, this is often connected to repetition compulsion, trauma bonding, fear-based attachment, learned helplessness, and chronic emotional conditioning. Many people are not afraid of suffering; they are afraid of the unfamiliar. They are afraid of what happens when there is no chaos left to manage, no dysfunction left to fix, no crisis left to emotionally organize themselves around. Because when your identity has been shaped by survival for years, healing can feel disorienting.
Ask me; I know.
Peace can feel suspicious. Rest can feel unproductive. Love can feel unsafe. And growth requires grief. At this junction of my journey, I fully understand that real growth asks us to mourn the identities, relationships, behaviors, and coping mechanisms that once kept us emotionally alive. Comfort is not always safety, and familiarity is certainly not always alignment. Sometimes, the hardest thing you may ever do is leave behind what no longer nurtures you, simply because it once felt like home.
But you don’t live there anymore. Your address has changed!
And maybe that is the real work of healing: learning how to stop forwarding your “address” back to places that no longer deserve access to you.
Sitting in the Root (of the heart)
Healing says, “Game Over, it ends here.”
It’s time to sit in the root of everything and become honest about what is living underneath your skin, underneath the performance. The fear beneath the anger. The abandonment beneath the overachievement. The grief beneath the control. The shame beneath perfectionism. It means understanding that your triggers are not your identity, your trauma is not your personality, and your pain does not have to become someone else’s inheritance.
Healing is not about erasing the past. It’s about learning how to sit with ourselves long enough to understand why we hurt, who we hurt, why we react, why we sabotage, why we abandon ourselves before others get the chance. Recovery requires emotional tolerance. Radical self-awareness. Accountability. Stillness. It requires us to stay present long enough to hear what our body, mind, and spirit have been trying to say beneath all the noise.
And when we cannot sit still, the unresolved pain continues to echo. It leaks into relationships, friendships, parenting, and intimacy. It controls how we speak, love, trust, apologize, avoid, control, and connect. And if we never sit at the root of what shaped us, we will continue bleeding on people who never cut us.
And perhaps that is one of the greatest benefits of your existence—not that you survived what tried to break you, but that you became self-aware enough to stop passing that brokenness forward.
Tuesday Morning Love, healing the heart one word at a time
Mental Health Awareness Month 2025:
