It’s not uncommon for me to dole out advice in the ladies restroom 😆

Typically, I mind my own business… especially after office hours.

But I will routinely step out of my lane when I spot someone spiraling and a sentence or two will recenter them, and bring them back to themselves. And many women go to the bathroom when they’re spiraling 🌀

This was me last night.

We walked into the restroom and a girl was coming out of a stall saying to her friend “I am not okay”.

One look at her face and I knew she was serious. She had the demeanor of someone who’s had to viciously have her own back for a loooooong time, even though she was only around her mid-twenties.

I saw my younger self in her. And when someone who’s used to carrying everything says those words, they mean them.

Me: What’s going on?

Her: <Summarizes her relationships with her boyfriend and her friends, admitting that she has been lashing out at them, and she can’t seem to stop and she didn’t know what to do. They had just experienced one of these moments. She was watching her relationships crumble under her emotional reactivity and she didn’t know how to course correct. She explained she was vacillating between anger and depression>

She was mid-shame/ guilt spiral, which is why I got so much access. She was “making her relationships toxic” as she put it, and she wanted to stop.

In two mins, I told her what was happening.

Due to her extremely inconsistent childhood - I hazarded to guess she had experienced abuse on more than one occasion - which her and her friend confirmed emphatically, her nervous system and body was trained to be on high alert 🚨

Her nervous system had no idea what safety felt like. Moments of peace were perceived as the breath before the jump-scare, and instead of being able to relax, her body went into hyper-vigilance waiting for the inevitable attack it was trained to believe was coming.

When your body is scanning for a threat, it will find one no matter how innocuous the conversation or event actually is.

I explained that is how her friend could see what her boyfriend said as perfectly innocent (her friend nodded) and she perceived it as a threat, as an attack and lashed out in defense.

I texted her the book Polyvagal Theory for Therapy, so that she could get deeper into regulating her nervous system (which I highly recommend!)

I told her that her nervous system went into collapse after these lashing outs, because she feels helpless to control her body because of literally being hijacked by the emotion and neurochemicals and because she didn’t have tools to manage it.

Collapse = feelings of helplessness, hopelessness and deep shame around things we perceive to be wrong or broken about us. An endlessness to the suffering we are experiencing. The literal “there’s no light at the end of the tunnel and I’ll be stuck here for eternity reliving this excruciating moment, unable to escape it” feeling.

I became ChatGPT in that moment 😆

Me: You’re not broken. There’s nothing wrong with you. Your body was taught at a young age to brace for attack and it isn’t out of that pattern. But it can be, and very quickly.

Her: I really needed to hear that. Thank you.

Her face relaxed. She looked peaceful. It was beautiful. I was so happy.

I share this because I know that THIS part of humaning is the darkest.

The least talked about.

The one we don’t ever tell anyone because there is so much shame around it, and we cannot bear for people to know that these behaviors exist within us.

Times when we cause harm and that wasn’t our intention.

This message is for YOU. Who’s been in the same situation, and wondered with an aching heart if you’ll always be this way.

The answer: Only if you choose to, boo.

You have choices. There are tools.

Your choice to continue to have these kinds of experiences is to simply choose to do nothing.

At any moment, you can be having a radically different life experience.

You’ve got this 💜