Your Tender Side

Learning how, when, and why your survival (trauma) response shows up in your life is one of the key factors to successful cycle-breaking. A good first step to building this awareness is to pay attention to the environments that bring out your soft and tender sides and try to spend as much time as you can in those environments. Once you are well acquainted with your tenderness, the goal would be to practice tapping in to your tenderness in the times/place/with the people that usually trigger your survival response.

When your survival response is not activated, your tenderness is allowed to come to your surface. When this happens, you'll feel like the truest version of you. From this space, you won't have to rely on the protective mechanisms your mind has built to keep you feeling safe and secure.

Your survival response is activated in environments where you do not feel safe and secure. For example, your survival response may show up as hyperarousal (anxiety): rigidness/body tension, spiraling thought cycles, feeling on edge, activated, and irritable. It may show up as hypoarousal (depression): feeling disconnected from yourself and others, numb, lack of motivation, fatigued, tired, and low energy. These are all signs that your body is trying to protect your sense of security so that you can meet your emotional needs, not be “hurt” again, and stay functioning.

If you are curious about figuring out how, when, and why your survival response turns on, I invite you to try paying attention to the following:

What environments trigger this response?
What is within your control in those environments to change/adjust/set boundaries so that your survival response isn't activated as often or as big?

On the other hand, getting curious about your tender side is really useful! Pay attention to what allows your tenderness to surface. It could be a relationship that provides this, a place, an activity, time with yourself, or a combination of these.

To learn more, reflect on the following:

What helps you access your tenderness? When do you feel safest? When are you able to show your vulnerability to yourself and to trusted others? What is it about those instances that help your tender sides come to your surface?
What is within your control to change so that you are able to access your tenderness in environments that usually trigger your survival (trauma) response?

I hope you enjoy learning about these two sides of you!

Take care and be well, Cycle-breakers!

Alyssa