Try Softer: A Fresh Approach to Move Us out of Anxiety, Stress, and Survival Mode--and into a Life of Connection and Joy

by Aundi Kolber

Understanding why you came to live and behave the way you do is critical to implementing long-term change.

The work of trying softer begins when we release our desire for the quick fix and tend to the wounds underneath the surface.

From a psychological and physiological perspective, the more disconnected we are from our lived experience, the more overwhelmed or numb to our lives we’ll be.

This is the nature of trauma: It doesn’t simply go away but instead informs how we exist in the world whether we acknowledge it or not.

When left unaddressed and without proper support and resources, these little t traumas can significantly affect our nervous systems. This is especially true if those events occurred from birth to age eighteen, when the brain is particularly malleable.

To put it concisely, we integrate our minds by making sure we have adequate resources to reprocess the painful material into a memory as we would a normal event.[21]