When Coping Looks Like Thriving

I have built a beautiful life that my nervous system apparently still thinks it needs to survive.

There. That is a strange fucking sentence to write.

Nothing is obviously wrong with my life. In fact, quite a lot is right. I love my home. I live near the lake, surrounded by trees. I have my children and six grandchildren I adore. I just married a man I love. My work matters to me, even though I still have days when I struggle to believe that I matter inside of it. There is freedom in my life that younger versions of me would have considered unimaginable. I have good relationships, meaningful conversations, people I love, clients I connect deeply with, and a family that fills my life in ways I am profoundly grateful for.

Still, there are places where I feel lonely. There are days when meaning seems harder to locate than it should. Connection exists in my life, yet sometimes I find myself hungry for more of it. None of this rises to the level of crisis. Nobody looking through the windows of my life would say, “Dear God, somebody get that woman out of there.” If anything, from the outside, I probably look like someone who figured a lot of shit out.

Maybe that is precisely why Bali rattled me.

I didn’t realize how activated my nervous system remained until it wasn’t. That distinction matters because I wasn’t walking around Texas thinking I was terribly stressed. I wasn’t having daily panic attacks or falling apart. I was functioning. Working. Writing. Loving people. Raising children. Exercising. Running errands. Making plans. Creating things. Solving problems. Laughing. Having sex. Going to dinner. Living my life.

Then I went somewhere else, and my body stopped bracing.

Not gradually, either. It was as though some internal guard who had been standing watch for forty years finally looked around and decided he could sit the hell down.

That has been harder to come home from than I expected.

I wrote yesterday about what Bali showed me regarding community, prayer, joy and the increasingly technological world we are creating. This is something different. This is about what happens when contrast exposes a condition you didn’t know existed. Sometimes we become so competent at living inside an environment that we mistake our ability to tolerate it for evidence that it is good for us.

Human beings are remarkably adaptive creatures. That is one of our greatest strengths, and I am beginning to wonder if it can also become one of our greatest liabilities. Give us enough time inside almost anything and we will begin developing strategies for functioning there. We adjust to noise. We normalize urgency. We learn to sleep beside tension. We become efficient at managing difficult relationships. We arrange ourselves around stress, clutter, loneliness, traffic, schedules, emotional unpredictability, overstimulation and a thousand tiny demands that never become catastrophic enough to deserve our full attention.

Then we call ourselves fine because we are still getting everything done.

I have spent more than twenty years helping people understand survival responses, trauma, emotional patterns and relationships, and somehow I am still capable of missing this in myself. Maybe that is part of the humility of being human. Knowledge does not remove us from the experiment. You can understand the nervous system beautifully and still live inside your own adaptation so long that it starts feeling like your personality.

We tend to imagine survival mode dramatically. We picture someone barely holding their life together, unable to sleep, crying in the bathroom, missing work, exploding at their spouse or collapsing under responsibilities. Certainly, survival can look like that. Yet it can also have excellent credit, answer emails on time, remember everybody’s birthdays, make dinner, keep the house clean, run five miles, manage a business and show up smiling.

Sometimes survival mode is extremely high-functioning.

That version is harder to recognize because people reward you for it.

They call you dependable. Productive. Strong. Driven. Capable. Organized. Resilient. You become the person who handles things, and eventually handling things becomes so deeply embedded in your identity that you stop asking what all that handling costs your body.

Successful adaptation can look a hell of a lot like wellness from the outside.

The body, however, keeps different records.

Mine apparently remembered something I had forgotten. The peace I felt in Bali was strangely familiar, and eventually I realized where I knew it from. I had felt something like it as a little girl, maybe six or seven or eight, at my parents’ gold claim in the Sierra Nevada mountains. There was earth beneath me, trees around me, space, quiet and very little demanding my attention. I wasn’t accomplishing anything. Nobody needed a performance from me. I was simply there.

Forty-something years later, my body recognized that feeling before my mind had language for it.

That recognition has made coming home uncomfortable because now I know the difference.

This does not mean Texas is toxic, America is terrible, or I need to sell everything and move to Bali next Tuesday. Contrast gives us information; it does not necessarily give us instructions. That may be one of the most important distinctions we can make when something suddenly feels better.

If your headaches disappear on vacation, you don’t necessarily need a permanent vacation. If you sleep differently when your children are at their other parent’s house, that doesn’t mean you don’t love being a mother. Feeling calmer when your spouse travels doesn’t automatically mean your marriage is bad. If Sunday afternoon in the woods feels better than Monday morning in your office, you probably shouldn’t submit your resignation from the trailhead.

But maybe you should get curious.

What changed?

Was it the noise? The pace? The screens? The responsibility? The constant decision-making? Did you move your body more? Were you outside? Did somebody else cook? Were there fewer notifications? More people around you? Less emotional management? Did you touch your spouse more? Talk to strangers? Walk instead of drive? Pray? Laugh? Sleep? Have sex? Eat slowly? Look at the sky?

What disappeared that your body had quietly been spending energy managing?

That is the question I brought home.

We are often told to pay attention when our bodies break down. Notice the migraines. Notice the insomnia. Notice the digestive problems, exhaustion, panic, pain, irritability or inability to concentrate. Those signals matter, and persistent symptoms deserve appropriate medical care. But perhaps we should become equally interested in the opposite experience.

Notice where your body exhales.

Pay attention to the places where your shoulders drop without instruction. Notice the people around whom your voice changes. Watch what happens when you enter certain rooms. Become curious about the environments where you suddenly breathe deeper, sleep harder, laugh easier or stop checking the clock. Those moments may contain information about you that no personality test, journal prompt or diagnostic label could explain as clearly.

I don’t think our bodies are infallible oracles. Fear can misread the present. Trauma can mistake familiarity for safety and safety for danger. A regulated nervous system isn’t the same thing as a life without discomfort. Growth itself can be uncomfortable as hell. The goal cannot be constructing an existence in which nothing ever activates us.

What I am questioning is our tendency to require collapse before we consider changing anything.

Why does something have to become unbearable before it counts?

Perhaps you don’t need to hate your marriage before asking for more intimacy. Your work doesn’t have to destroy you before you reconsider your relationship with productivity. Loneliness needn’t become depression before you admit you need more people around your table. Exhaustion doesn’t have to become illness before rest becomes legitimate. A life doesn’t need to be bad before you are allowed to wonder whether it could fit you better.

That last one is confronting me.

I have a good life.

I also have a body that recently showed me another way it is capable of feeling.

Both things can be true without turning either one into a problem.

So I am not burning anything down. I am paying attention. I’m looking at pace, noise, community, nature, prayer, purpose, connection and the subtle ways urgency sneaks back into my days. I’m questioning which parts of my life genuinely nourish me and which parts I have simply become exceptionally skilled at tolerating.

Maybe that is one of the quieter forms of healing in midlife. We stop being impressed solely by our capacity to endure.

We begin asking whether endurance is still necessary.

And for those of us who became extraordinarily good at surviving, that may be a much harder question than it sounds.

→I want you to sit with this one for a minute:

Where does your body exhale?

Not where should you be happy. Not where your life looks good on paper. Not where you’re productive, needed, successful, responsible or holding everything together beautifully.

Where do your shoulders actually drop? Where do you breathe deeper? Who are you with when you stop bracing? What disappears from your environment when you suddenly feel more like yourself?

Tell me in the comments. Where does your body exhale — and what do you think it’s trying to tell you?

Because maybe we don’t have to wait until something breaks before we listen.

As always loving and praying for you and our world,

Rene Schooler

—

This post was previously published on medium.com.