Sitting with Discomfort

17 June

There it is.

That familiar feeling.

Once upon a time, I could never have sat with.

The discomfort. The panic rising inside my chest. The contraction. The feeling of my throat closing over as fear tries to take hold.

It has to remain.

I feel the urge to make it stop, to escape it, to fix it, but instead I find myself allowing it.

"This too shall pass."

I've been waiting for this news, yet even with all the anticipation, I couldn't have prepared myself for its arrival.

And yet, despite the fear, I feel empowered.

Not because the situation is easy.

Not because it doesn't hurt.

But because I know I'm not alone.

Not like before.

Today I have tools. More importantly, I have learned how to surrender to Him.

To feel comfort in uncertainty has deepened my faith in ways I never thought possible. It makes me reflect on all the times in the past when I pushed, reacted, fought, defended, or tried to control an outcome because I couldn't tolerate the discomfort of the moment.

The truth is, discomfort is often fleeting if we allow it to be.

But when we're stuck in survival mode, discomfort can feel like life or death.

I know that feeling all too well and I have said things I later regretted.

I've made choices from fear.

I've reacted from a place of terror rather than truth and those choices often carried consequences.

This is why somatic work has been so life-changing for me.

I won't lie, it is hard at first.

Coming out of numbness is hard.

Coming out of dissociation is hard.

Allowing yourself to feel emotions when you've spent years building walls to protect yourself can feel overwhelming.

Those walls were never built because we were weak and they were built because at some point they were necessary.

Most people don't understand emotions, not only how we receive and process them, but that emotions rarely come alone.

What we often see on the surface is the secondary emotion the survival response, the coping strategy we've developed, consciously or unconsciously.

Underneath that sits the primary emotion.

The vulnerable one.

The one we're trying to protect.

The one we don't want others to see.

For many people, anger is the emotion they fear most, we've been taught that anger is bad, dangerous, or unsafe.

But anger itself isn't bad.

When expressed appropriately, anger can communicate boundaries, values, and needs.

For me, though, anger wasn't my primary emotion, in fact, for much of my life, anger became my vice.

My automatic response.

For years I believed I had inherited it.

My father, by all accounts and from what I've sensed, was an angry man.

After the birth of my third child, I even attended an anger management course, but around that same time I experienced a deep betrayal by someone I trusted a friendship that left me feeling exposed, vulnerable, and unsafe.

Eventually I found myself reverting back to old patterns.

Not because the course failed.

But because I never truly understood myself well enough to know what was happening underneath the anger.

I hadn't yet met the part of me that was hurting.

I hadn't yet discovered what I was protecting.

Now, as this pending day draws closer, I feel the dread sitting heavily within me.

And as I sit with it, I find myself asking:

Why does this frighten me so much?

I know that in some ways, after this day, my voice will have been heard. Truth will have had an opportunity to be heard.

Yet I also know I will be forced to remain emotionally restrained. To sit amongst dynamics that have long manipulated me into prioritising the needs of others above my own.

Part of me feels that this day may finally bring closure to a chapter that has defined so much of my life.

Yet closure comes with its own grief.

Its own loss.

Its own mourning.

Because sometimes what we're grieving isn't just what happened.