What you saw growing up is not what you are meant to become.

You don’t have to become what you saw growing up. You have a choice. You can develop awareness.

Thanks to neuroception, your neural circuits allow your body to register whether an environment is safe or dangerous, to protect you from experiencing too much pain; it is not a conscious process.

In the face of what you perceive as danger, your nervous system along with the rest of your body responds, which enables you to survive a challenge by releasing stress hormones, to help you fight or flight.

When your stress response is ongoing it may become chronic stress because the response seems never-ending up to a point where it may have been normalized.

This means chronic stress may have your body responding, even when you are in a safe environment, because you are living in a dysregulated state where the stress response has become maladaptive.

In cases of overt and covert trauma triggering a chronic stress response, you may have normalized the experience and the response of your nervous system to it, in order to survive.

This is why your homeostatic place of balance may have shifted and become dysregulated.

Once your body has learned these responses, it can get triggered into a maladaptive stress response, without being consciously aware of it.

When you go into maladaptive stress response you tend to misread the cues from other people because you are reading them from the lens of your dysregulation.

💡 This is why one of the echos of childhood abuse is that because you experienced a traumatic world, you start to see the world as an abuser: you see other people as threat, even when you may no longer be in a dangerous environment.

Through the process of neuroception, you are recreating for your-Self, into your present life, that same trauma that is familiar to you.

Living in maladaptive stress response perpetuates the cycle.

This will happen until you learn how to change that.

Reseting your homeostatic balance is possible.

You can retrain your nervous system back to a calm, healing state.

You are not meant to become what you saw growing up.

You can choose differently.

You can choose awareness.

~ L, 🌻