Think about the tiredness you’re currently feeling. Tiredness in any form: mental, physical, emotional, spiritual. Think about how it might change, if something new were to exacerbate it. If a misfortune, challenging and weighty, were to bear down like the proverbial straw on one’s back.
Now, let’s say you prevail, you enter restoration mode. Perhaps this involves a movie, shopping, reclining in a mid-morning bath. Your recovery routine is practical and satisfying; relief floods your system allowing you to emerge refreshed, ready for the future.
Until the next thing happens.
Then, how do you feel? Does the new impact come as a fresh single blow, or does it travel deeper, re-animating old wounds? Cast your mind back, to the time you thought you were through the tunnel, only to suddenly find yourself at its epicentre. Were you as far through, as deeply rested, as the shopping or bath would have you believe?
These questions are asked to illustrate how the reception we give to stress can affect our wellbeing as much as the stress itself. The history of exhaustion, trauma, grief, or disappointment that we carry is often compounded when we fail to thoroughly cleanse our inner landscapes. We know that moving through life in any sort of meaningful way will make it difficult to avoid baggage accumulating. Even when we carry a mixture of good and bad memories, how we store them will largely depend on our conditioning and personalities. For some, good events are more quickly overwritten; they happen, then regular life resumes and any elation slowly fades. The fallout from events construed as bad may differ; it may linger, permeating areas not so easily flushed clean by time. When misfortune compounds more easily in one’s psyche, or overstays its welcome, it’s never too far away, even if we’re not consciously aware of it. Like those who suffer from serious post-traumatic stress disorders, the road back to a particular feeling is shorter than we’d imagine.
I work with clients who have never fully discharged the major events and stressors in their life, but it is also evident in non-professional situations. As an example, recently I watched someone stub their toe and whilst we all know that it can hurt like hell, I could see immediately that their reaction wasn’t about this one isolated incident. Their reaction would have been normal, say, if the toe stubbing had happened ten times already that day. But, I knew it hadn’t. Their annoyance and pain ran deep and one could sense this was merely adding insult to injury (or vice versa). This was their icing on a cake of woes.
So, what can one do about the build-up of toxic stress and the internal landing space we provide for new arrivals? Well, full disclosure – the first steps are difficult, time consuming and likely to kick-up more dirt than you want to see, or feel capable of managing. But it’s the process and it’s necessary. Every time there is significant stress (get to know yourself, if you don’t know what significant is for you) acknowledge it fully instead of simply trying to forget or recover as quickly as possible.
Next, trace it down to a root, to where it lands in your subconscious. What else lives there that may require excavating? What else is there to be curious about, that would be helpful to release, to guard against overcrowding? If you can, alone or with support, clear the unhelpful feelings associated with past events, enough so you feel elevated afterwards. On this occasion, level ground is overrated. You’re not looking to return to balance, you want to end on higher footing than where you began. It means that should another blow come, you’re not so easily knocked below a healthy range, but into a balance that allows you to heal any new challenges, calmly and fully.