Who you are makes sense
“That makes so much sense.”
I’m melting into the cushions of my therapist’s emerald green couch, losing myself in a pile of pillows as, for the first time, someone validates my coping techniques.
The lights are dim, my therapist directs my attention to a pile of blankets tucked into the corner, and we share this unspoken language that the vibe of a space is as important as creating nervous system safety as the dynamic between her and I.
I told her, when I first marched into her office, that I was really smart and knew my way around the work, which I would use as a way to avoid the work and I wanted her to call me on it. When it comes to healing the nervous system, and reconstructing an identity, there is work that can only be done in relationship. It doesn’t matter how smart, or well informed someone is, none of it erases the fact we are deeply relational beings.
And as we go back to square one of healing, even though I know all of this already, learning neural reprocessing and how the nervous system seeks safety, I find something else. We’re beginning to deconstruct the identity I made to survive.
The coping mechanisms I know so well, and can pinpoint as coping mechanisms and why I’ve chosen to inhabit them and I can map out the exact trail of what they’ve left behind, only this time I’m not just documenting them on paper but feeling where they live inside my skin. The validation of each survival strategy I’ve adopted over the years is a validation not only of how I survived but of the situations I had to.
It makes so much sense, She tells me, that thats how your brain responded. It makes so much sense that your body would be holding that story.
And for the first time, it feels like somebody is holding the line for me of my own identity. I’m understanding in a new way the therapeutic technique my supervisors drilled into my head. It’s why, as practitioners, we do multiple repetitions of a practice in our own bodies before we ever enter into it with another.
The first step, I’ve been learning in a nervous system chronic illness study intensive, is to note that something makes sense. Before we heal it, before we ask it to change, we must first come to a place where it deeply makes sense for this symptom or adaptation to have existed in the first place.
We do it for ourselves, and we do it for one another. So much so that the words are becoming second nature, that I can feel my body beginning to shift under quiet acceptance.
Who you are makes so much sense.
If you’re in a season of remembering your own sense making, my coaching offerings are a place where we can explore that together. You can learn more about that here.
