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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Aundi Kolber
Read between
July 9 - July 13, 2023
What if emotional health doesn’t always look like being “the strong one”? What if sometimes it means stepping back and letting ourselves receive or grieve or feel? What if it’s not just facing hard things—though that matters—but also knowing our limits? What if it’s loving others, but also letting ourselves be loved? What if the truest strength is as expansive as the tide; the fierce and gentle elements dancing together as one? What if this strength has the flexibility to be both soft and bold; to both nourish and protect—because it is rooted in a foundation of love rather than fear?
He taught me what it was like to receive and feel and grieve and savor and lean in and lean out and be fully alive—to be strong and flexible like water.
God is teaching me that no matter where I am in the process of healing, I am worthy of receiving love, compassion, care, and support.
“People have two needs: attachment and authenticity. When authenticity threatens attachment, attachment trumps authenticity.”[2] God designed us to instinctively know in our bodies that we need the care of others. And if we don’t get adequate support—especially in our childhood years—we take whatever we can get so we can survive. We are as adaptive as the situation requires.
Having to access situational strength is simply information our body is giving us about our level of safety. At every point in this cycle, our bodies are working to keep us safe and alive—and this deserves to be recognized for the strength that it is.
When we operate from situational strength, it means our bodies have moved into a stress and/or trauma response to navigate or neutralize difficulty.
In temporary, short spurts, situational strength is extremely helpful, necessary, and even protective. And when the crisis has passed—and our body registers that it is over—we are designed to integrate the memory into the bigger story of our experiences and sense of self. We are then able to learn from, reflect on, or even build on what we’ve lived through.
If we live out of situational strength for too long—whether because the danger is still present or the trauma is so deep—our experiences will remain fragmented in our bodies and psyche. This means that even the good or helpful parts of these experiences aren’t available for us to leverage when we need them. With situational strength, we see everything and interact with the world through survival mode.
One way to tell if you’re operating out of situational strength is a persistent sense of feeling unsafe; that what you’re experiencing is life-or-death and/or that you are completely and utterly alone. Remember, this sense is a signal—not an indicator that you are bad or deficient. Your body reacts in this way to protect you.
Your body quickly and unconsciously decides that it cannot spare any energy to focus on goodness because diverting attention from the bad could endanger your survival.
The strength of resilience doesn’t happen because of wounding but because of what happens afterward. When pain and trauma are met with the love and support needed to repair the wounding, we heal—and by the grace of God, we are able to hang on to everything we learned from that experience.
Now caring for and accommodating others are beautiful ways to love our neighbor as ourselves—when we actively choose them. But if the body automatically defaults to putting others before ourselves, no matter the cost, the action is rooted in a trauma response and can be harmful.
As we honor the information of our bodies and respond with compassionate care, our nervous system also responds by becoming more flexible and capable of responding accurately to the information in front of us.
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk states, “Being able to feel safe with other people defines mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.”[10]
Neurons that fire together wire together—what we pay attention to quite literally changes our brain.
Sure, when someone says a child is acting “mature” or even “more adult than many of the adults I know!” it sounds as if they’re describing good behavior, but it can also mean that the child has learned to “trade in patterns of connection for ones of protection,”
The language we use in our house is something like this: “Tia, Jude—can you please check in with your body?” Every time I gently ask my kids to check in with themselves, I am not only helping them learn in real time, but I am also giving them a framework for how they might do this in the future: I am orienting them toward a way to be in the world.
Now, take a moment and look around the room. Notice the space. Notice the door. Notice the details of the furniture. Notice how old you are. Notice details in the space that help you know how old you are. As you do, see if you can allow your breath to settle into a rhythmic pace. Do what you can to avoid forcing your breathing and simply allow it instead. Now, look over your left shoulder (doing so stimulates your vagus nerve) and find a fixed point to look at for up to thirty seconds. As you do, notice if you sigh, blink, or yawn—this is a sign that your body is moving toward your ventral
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“Sometimes when I don’t hear back from you immediately, I start to panic, even though I know you care about me. What is it like for you when you sense me responding that way? Can we come up with a middle way to honor your needs while still enabling me to build trust whenever we have distance?”
connection is the remedy. Connection with myself. Connection with others. Connection with God. Connection is what creates enough safety for you and me to move along the flow of strength. It’s this flexibility, not the rigidity of stress or trauma, that makes us strong. Connection is what expands into hope, courage, and life.
IN A WORLD WHERE THERE IS MUCH PAIN & DESTRUCTION, SEEING RESURRECTION IS NO SMALL THING.
In every respect, a glimmer is the opposite of what is often called a trigger. If a trigger is anything (smell, taste, experience, person, etc.) that activates an embodied memory of a past threat or trauma, a glimmer is something that helps us connect with a sense of our felt safety and step back into our window of tolerance (or, in polyvagal theory, our ventral vagal system).
I will never celebrate someone’s pain, but I will embrace the reality that our God is a God of resurrection.
