Cycles.

Dear reader,

The end of last month marked the beginning of my favourite season, a season of letting go of the parts of ourselves, our habits, old ways of being and the areas of our lives that no longer fit with who we are becoming.

It got me thinking about the cycles of both the universe, the planet and my own life, my inner world, my emotions and my body.

Some of these cycles are natural - the monthly cycles of my body and the cycles of the seasons and the years.

The cycles of letting go of who we once were to become who we are growing into.

And then there are the cycles that are thrust upon us by our parents, by society and the world around us.

These are the cycles that we spend our lives trying to undo from our psyches, our nervous systems and our genetic make up.

Cycles of trauma, abuse, addiction, violence and rage.

If we're lucky, we become aware of those cycles and have the opportunity to heal and undo them before they affect us on a deeply intimate and lasting level.

For most of us, however, that is not the case.

Even when we are not aware of them on a conscious level, most of us carry these cycles around with us and bring them into our relationships, romantic and otherwise, our parenting and even our daily self talk and core beliefs.

On a personal level, one such cycle that I have recently began to see more clearly in my own habits of self talk, relationships and how I fundamentally experience the world around me is the rage I carry around in my body and the wall of bullet proof glass I constructed around myself in an attempt to protect myself from experiencing the type of pain that caused me to put those walls up in the first place.

The issue that has arisen from these walls, however, is that they are no longer protecting me from getting hurt, but keeping me closed off from those that meant me no harm and are wanting to connect with me.

Whenever the person I care about most in this world and most want to connect with emotionally tries to get close, he only ends up smacking straight into the hard wall between us and coming out bruised.

The rage I feel within me when I feel him getting too close for my nervous system to handle or doing or saying something that feels like a crossed boundary to my very wide scope of emotional walls is that of an animal of prey being attacked by a predator and preparing to fight for it's life.

I know that this rage does not come from a place of wanting to harm or a place of malice - it comes from a place of deep fear and the belief that I am inherently unsafe in the world.

My intellectual brain knows that I am no longer in any danger; but my emotional brain - the part of my brain that stores the emotional responses of my traumatic past - automatically tells me that someone getting close, physically or emotionally, signals a threat to my wellbeing - or even my life.

The result of this response in my brain is that my body goes into fight or flight and I begin experiencing the physical response of a real threat: the rapid heartbeat, the tensed muscles and braced shoulders and finally the surge of energy intended to help me either fight off a predator or flee from the threat.

The problem lies in the fact that there is no real threat to my wellbeing in present time.

But in those moments of perceieved unsafety, my brain isnt in present time, it is in trauma time.

And trauma time doesn't work in logic or in what I know intellectually - it works in what my body remembers about where the trauma first originated.

Trauma is yet another cycle that gets passed down through the generations, especially complex, relational trauma. The kind of trauma that comes from the areas I named earlier.

I know that, for me, the cycle of fear that has given way to the rage I feel in my body is the result of that feeling of unsafety.

What I am still trying to work out is how to get to a place in my body and psyche where I feel some level of safety and don't constantly feel as though I am an unarmoured soldier in the middle of a war zone.

The cycle of searching for any thing to help numb you from feeling the impact of trauma is the very same cycle that lead to yet another cycle - addiction.

So, as you can see these cycles - anger, abuse, trauma addiction - are all intrinsically linked.

And they all perpetuate each other. One leads to another, which leads to another, which leads to another and the cycle continues; until someone makes the conscious decision to do the work to break the cycle.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend that breaking these cycles is a walk in the park - on the contrary, it is scary, vulnerable, painful and exhausting work.

I'm also not going to lie and say that I am on the other side of it. I'm most definitely still right in the thick of it.

In fact, I'm not entirely convinced that there is even another side to get to - there will always be more inner work to do and patterns and cycles to break.

I think the important part is that we are actually doing the work, in whatever capacity we can; even if it is just as simple as becoming aware of your own unhealthy ways of relating to those we are in relationship with - partners, children, friends and family - and doing our best to find new, more adaptive ways to relate.

This is something I'm still actively working on every day; and I still slip back into my protective ways of relating regularly.

What I have made considerable progress on is recognising after the fact when I have slipped back into those habits and making amends.

The next step in this process is to begin to recognise when my fear is beginning to show up as rage in my body and being honest with myself - and the person who I am trying to relate to, if appropriate - about what that fear is really saying, rather than using rage as a protective shield against the vulnerability required to show my pain to others.

And that is how we begin to break the cycles thrust upon us by the systems of harm that we are born into - families, communities, societies and cultures alike.

We have no choice in what we are born into and the implicit beliefs and ways of being we are taught in our formative years, but, as adults, we have the choice to do the work to learn something different, do different and break the cycles that caused us harm, so as to cause as little harm as possible to others.

There are some cycles that exist in nature, the cycles that keep everything in the universe in alignment and flowing.

And there are some cycles created out of pain, trauma and the need to feel in control out of fear and feelings of unsafety.

These are the cycles that we can break - and until we do, the systems of harm will continue to have control.

Because healing is the greatest form of resistance their is.

Love,

Lulu x