On feeling feelings.
On feeling feelings and nervous system resilience 
I spent the first two days of this week on the couch with my youngest. She came down with a fever Sunday night, no other symptoms, otherwise fine but needed me next to her to be ok. She needed me next to her to feel the discomfort of the fever and be ok.
The first day was fine, I worked from home, next to her. She felt ok with her discomfort because I was there and I had the comfort of still doing what I needed to get done. But, by the end of that day, I had run out of work I could do from home and she was still not ok without me next to her.
I made the calls, sent the emails and surrendered to a carers leave day, a day with her, doing nothing. A day sitting with her discomfort and as it turned out also some of mine. I noticed the feelings early but it wasn’t until a particularly emotional moment in the movie we were watching that I felt them build like a wave and come over me. I had to stand up from the couch and walk around the house a couple of times to regulate myself. To take the edge off the emotion so that I could stay with it to explore.
When I sat back down, less activated but still feeling it, I sat with my curiosity about where it might be coming from. I recognised a part of me that had felt the walls closing in like that in the past, felt it often and not had the capacity or resources to process it. A part of me that is still within, believing that sitting still and doing nothing is unsafe, that still wants to protect me from it because of what it knows and where we’ve been.
A part of me that learned to keep me safe by keeping me wound up and moving at all times at all cost.
I kept sitting, with that part, acknowledged it and where it started, where it still thinks I am. I thought about how much has changed since those times. How I’m well and truly out of that stage of life now where I based my worth on my productivity and constantly pushed myself past my limits in order to achieve. I’m also well and truly out of the stage where I was home alone with small children feeling the conflict of needing to stop and just be for them but never stop and constantly do, for me.
Only on a sick day am I in this space now…and only on a sick day does this part of me have the opportunity to come up. To be seen, heard, felt and moved. So I took the opportunity, to sit in the discomfort of feeling stuck, stir crazy, way too wound down for that part of me to feel safe. To feel it’s worry about me and it’s fear that I might not be able to get up. To be with the part of me that still fears that if I stop I might get stuck in stop and never be able to get going again because of another time in the past when I experienced exactly that. That part wanted and needed it’s worry and fear to be heard as well.
By then end of that day my daughter was up and about, I still felt sluggish and unmotivated, I was still wound down. The next day when she bounced off to school I went to work happily but still feeling pretty flat. I felt and heard that worried part still there, trying to get me out of it, trying to crank the energy up, trying to wind me up with worry, anxiety and stress.
Having seen and heard and felt it all I was able to step back from that urge, that offer of a fix and give myself time to slowly wind back up instead.
Because after years of work and recovery I know and trust that that is possible now. I know and trust that the cogs of my nervous system are well oiled now and that they don’t get jammed or stuck either wound up to the top or wound down to the very bottom anymore. I know they can move smoothly through the gears when I need them to and that my hand is on the handle now. I know and I was able to let those old, well meaning, protective parts of me know too. I was able to let them go and find safety in rest.
