Nicole LePera

Fleeing can look like physically leaving the room or emotionally checking out.

If and when those things don't work and we're still under stress.

And so for some of us who have lived with a lifetime of stress.

So my anxiety in childhood turned down to a shutdown state where when I first met my current partner, which was now almost, gosh, 15 years ago.

She would be like, are you are you here?

Like you're here in presence and you're looking at me and I'm talking to you, but I'm getting the sense that you're a million miles away.

And I was I was on my spaceship, as I called it.

I was so shut down from a lifetime of stress that much like an animal were there in body.

Yes.

But emotionally were disconnected.

And again, some of us, while I was able to I was in more of the functional freeze where I still had my foot on the gas a little bit to push myself to go to work and achieve the things that I needed to achieve.

Some of us are in that full state of shutdown.

And so to know without shame, right, to not shame ourselves even more in the moments where we're struggling to act.

And again, to understand that this is where it's a little illogical.

We cannot because we're already overwhelmed.

re-overhaul our life.

We cannot decide that I'm going to push myself into so much discomfort, that I'm going to do all of these things and force myself to do them.

Because what we're doing is we're now overwhelming an already overwhelmed system.

So we need to gradually, even physically, slowly start to inspire movement in the body.

Emotionally, as we're reconnecting with our body, we're becoming more aware of