What they don't tell you when you get into a healthy relationship...

The part no one talks about when a healthy relationship comes into your life when you finally feel that safety with someone (particularly after having complex trauma experiences)...

The part no one talks about when a healthy relationship comes into your life.

This came up again in talking with a client yesterday. She has two kids and is married, her husband is soo supportive and secure! Yet there’s still this notion for her of I’ve never been in a relationship like this before and it can be hard to fully receive.

And in my current relationship, I’ve felt this too. So intensely at times!

When you finally feel that safety with someone (particularly after having complex trauma experiences) and that deep resonance and openness in your heart, that safety your nervous system feels can surface layers in your body you haven’t been able to feel yet.

Your nervous system can finally unwind. It can breathe out. Instead of holding, clenching, guarding, so that you don’t have to feel everything. Because if you’re in an insecure situation, feeling all of it would be too much! There’s no solid container for it to be held.

So when a man comes into your life who is so loving, adoring, patient, and supportive, your body can finally relax… right?

Sometimes it doesn’t quite feel that way! And I want to normalize it because I know that mind loop that can come up of - why is he choosing me, I’m broken, there’s something wrong with me, why can’t I just open, why am I afraid to lean in or running away from him…

Picture this, sitting at the table with someone you care so deeply for, feeling so grateful your heart is cracking open and tears begin to flow.

And then it unearths this seemingly unending and painful well of grief.

In all the beauty, it’s met with this polarity of grief for all you’ve had to go through to get to this moment.

This safety and resonance can allow you to tap into deeper levels of pain and grief and fear, and maybe at times even has you feel like running away.

Things like - is it safe to open here? If I lean in, Will they lean out? Can arise. Maybe even some seemingly “irrational” fears like if I if I lean into this will my body be physically safe (this was a deep one for me after my last pregnancy had me close to dying).

We get to more deeply see our own attachment styles and how we’ve learned to protect ourselves. Even if that protection has kept us from truly aligning with love in the past.

I will say, my work is in trauma, intimacy, somatics, and nervous system approaches for a reason. Because there have been times where mine has been totally shot, where my trauma was so overwhelming, where the pain was so deep, where I felt so cut off from intimacy or scared to open… and I will say, in this love that is so nurturing there have been some times where that’s come up again. And it can bring up a lot! I’m not perfect, I’ve still got layers, it’s honestly why I feel I’m well equipped to do this work, but it can also be really fucking confronting. That’s the vulnerable truth. Sometimes it’s consuming. And then you breathe and find your way out of the spiral.

It’s been a hard thing to approach with my new man, yet he’s so understanding and patient. But it sometimes feels like I have my hands over my eyes peaking out to make sure he’s still there.

But this is where the deep healing is… And it weaves with everything else. The threads are becoming more clear. The journey unwinding. Realizing that concussions can cause leaky gut, then the surgery deepened all of that and that trauma likely triggered the Crohn’s to set in. So the overwhelm in the nervous system and with sensation, the trauma around the womb, and the gut and immune health are all intertwined. Hence why it’s all been up in this new relationship!

Because finally here is someone I could actually envision a life with. And it’s so beautiful. And it forces me to confront my deepest fears… whether rational or not, of is my body safe, will I die.

This part is not to be skipped as it arises, as this deep feeling allows the release of the somatic memory from the past to come to a point of integration, of freedom in the body to actually welcome this person into your heart.

This is where those deeper levels of intimacy can be cultivated from, from allowing yourself to purge the fear and grief and truly open your heart to the possibility of love.

This is what I believe allows for the true creation of magic and allows deep resonance to come into our life, whether it be in relationship or in our creation, or in our work and service in the world.

when we really let our hearts crack open to feel all of this it creates space in our body, an energetic flow, and we can come into resonance with what we have said we wanted all along. It allows it to come into our life. We no longer push it away in some twisted sense of protection that manifests as self sabotage.