Finding Home Within: A Personal Journey to Self-Discovery Through Nervous System Awareness
Do you know the singer songwriter, Missy Higgins?
She writes and sings in a way that lands in the heart and hits close to home.
There is a particular lyric in her song ‘Scar’ that goes “ A triangle, tryna squeeze through a circle, she tried to blunt me so i’d fit”.
For the longest time, I felt like a triangle tryna squeeze through a circle. I always wondered how the world worked to make it seem so difficult to fit in or belong.
As a kid, I was sporty and used sport as a way to “fit in”. I did it all. Swimming, cross country, netball, T-ball, and was determined to become an Olympian. I excelled at swimming and dreamt of being on the elite stage, even professing at grade 6 graduation that “I want to be an Olympic athlete”.
At this time, I had no idea how sport would shape my life. I loved it. But I also found out how easy it was to hide away in sport, from all my internal & external conflict. As I grew and understood interpersonal relationships, I learned that it was best to push through emotions and be a good girl. Don’t show any signs of weakness, keep quiet, don’t cry, and keep improving, no matter what.
So I did…I pushed past the gut-wrenching pain of anxiety, fear of failure, and innability to express any personal needs.
They say intimate relationships are the best place to highlight adaptive behaviours, emotional repression, reactivities, and beliefs. I can certainly say this was true for me.
I remember having a boyfriend at 20 years old. He was the guy everyone loved in the surf club. Charismatic, good looking, a great athlete, and got along with everyone. “Why would he pick me to be his girlfriend” I often thought. I did however have a premonition when we first became friends, that at some point I would be his girlfriend.
This particular relationship highlighted my inability to be emotionally expressive. When faced with challenge I would shut down, hear all my thoughts loud and clear, but be frozen in a state of overwhelm and I could not speak. It was like the outside noise muffled and all I could hear were my thoughts, which I had no skills to express effectively.
I would fall in a heap and cry for days, think the worst about myself, binge eat, over train, and do my best to come out the other side and put on a brave face, to make life look ok.
That relationship was the first of many where I felt debilitated with an overwhelming sense of being frozen. I would gather myself and have preemepting conversations about “what I wanted to say” but each time an opportunity arose, I would get stuck. At the time, I had a lot going on in the background of life, all of which contributed to what I know now as my nervous system responding and moving me into a state of freeze.
My childhood was relatively ‘normal’. There weren’t any adverse events that occurred to me, my sister, or my brother. But the conflict within my family dynamics and the lack of conflict resolution between all the adults meant what I saw modelled in front of me, became the way I expressed myself. Yell and scream, shutdown, and freeze.
Over the years I learned I would also flee if things became too much. In many situations, I would imagine myself running away as fast as I could or jumping off my bike or a cliff to avoid conflict.
I slowly learned that running away wasn’t helpful. But it took me a long time to figure this out and to have the skills and sense of safety to stay and express myself effectively. This took a lot of therapy, introspection, learning about my nervous system, and building my own resources for safety.
Over the years I saw psychologists who at one point wanted to medicate me for an experience I had with depression. At 24, I remember coming home from pursuing my dream of being an elite surf ironwoman in QLD, depressed and in a state of shutdown. My parents interveined after me feeling hollow, helpless, and very ashamed of who I felt I had become, and what I had “not yet” achieved. I was medicated for a while, but something inside of me didn’t want to be on medication. I wanted to figure out why I felt this way, and how I could feel better, safer, and more purposeful.
Every psychologist I saw, was helpful. They helped me understand my thoughts and beliefs, they also helped me understand the attachments I developed in childhood, the conditioning handed down through the generations, the world view, and the view of myself in the world that I had formed based on all of my experiences.
I still, after years of therapy had inner conflict and dysregulation in relationships, especially with men. I would please and appease. I would give myself up and feel deep shame and regret. I felt used, misunderstood, and again like a “triangle tryna squeeze into a circle” for so many years.
It was one psychologist who started to guide me into meditation that really helped me gain more insight into my internal world. From this point on, I was hooked on mindfulness meditation. This practice has been instrumental in learning to “be with” my inner parts, internal landscape, and my somatic body.
As life was moving, I continued my athletic dreams. I pursued more high-level sports and continued to unlearn a lot of what I had learned as coping strategies. I was met time and time again with inner conflict and this gave me insight into my adaptive behaviours, those being training more to avoid suffering and dating more to be seen. The shame cycle continued and it took me getting quite unwell, landing in hospital at 33 to really take stock and go inward even more than I ever knew was possible.
I always knew I had a nervous system. The nervous system is what keeps us alive. It’s your brain and spinal cord, your body, your soul, and it’s how you live, laugh, love, and move.
Since 2003, I have studied the body in multiple modalities. But it wasn’t until I started taking stock of myself and covid-19 pandemic hit, that I had 2 options, either I don’t or I do pay more attention to my mind-body connection and my somatic experience when facing challenges, to break the cycle.
When I started studying the nervous system to befriend it and relate to it more intimately, I was blown away by how much I resonated with it. Everything I was learning was applicable and I could explore my own stories, that had kept me stuck, small, and cycling through pain. I was able to apply the nervous system knowledge to my own life and slowly see my life change, move forward, shake off unhelpful patterns, behaviours, and beliefs.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not perfect and I am always learning. But the conditioning that kept me suffering for 20 years, was renegotiated and rewired, so I finally believed I had autonomy and choice.
As I continued to study and apply this knowledge into my work, I witnessed huge amounts of change, and transformation. This work is intelligent, evolutionary, empowering, and a gift.
The gift of connection is something we could all learn to relate to. We are often of the belief, that when things happen, we fragment. We believe, act, and hold ourselves in ways that replicate this sense of fragmentation. This is supported by traditional psychology and medicine in the western world, idolising top-down approaches and not considering the nervous system in health care.
I am a believer in medicine, as long as it has the client’s autonomy and best interest at heart. If it is to keep someone on the hampster wheel, and lose dignity, autonomy, and choice, I am against it.
Learning about your nervous system is a way home to yourself. To make sense of the past, and move on from it. To rebuild the most integral relationship you’ll ever have; which is with yourself, and lead the life you want, on purpose, making an impact in a way that helps you feel fulfilled.
There is nothing more rewarding to me than seeing someone smile with gratitude for their intelligent, and wise body. It is a gift to live in a body with a nervous system, that can teach us to slow down, be more present, relate more sincerely, set boundaries from the heart, take care, and serve others with intention.
If learning about your nervous system sparks curiosity, and you no longer want to “feel like a "triangle tryna squeeze into a circle”, let’s connect. You won’t regret gaining more insight into the wisdom of your body and learning to trust it to feel empowered.
Kate x