Sometimes We Survived It Before We Ever Had the Chance to Process It

There are also times when we didn't really process what happened because processing it wasn't what life required from us at the time.

We survived it.

We carried on.

And I think there is an enormous difference between those two things and actually having had the opportunity to deal with what happened.

Sometimes life doesn't give us the luxury of falling apart when something happens.

There might be children who still need feeding.

Bills that still need paying.

Work the next morning.

People relying on us.

Practical things that need sorting out.

Decisions that need making when we can barely think straight ourselves.

Or perhaps the experience itself was so overwhelming that simply getting through the next hour, the next day or the next week was all the capacity we had.

So we did what we needed to do.

We pushed things down.

Distracted ourselves.

Kept busy.

Focused on everybody else.

Told ourselves we were fine.

Told ourselves other people had been through worse.

Or decided we needed to stop being dramatic, pull ourselves together and get on with it.

Sometimes we didn't even make a conscious decision to do any of those things.

We just went into doing mode.

What needs sorting?

Who needs me?

What do I need to do next?

And sometimes that really was what got us through.

I know that because there was a period of my own life when surviving and moving forward were exactly what I had to do.

I had been in a toxic relationship for years.

There were addictions within that relationship that I had lived alongside. There were things I had endured, names I had been called and experiences that had affected me far more deeply than I understood at the time.

Eventually, I found the strength to leave.

And leaving was absolutely the right thing for me.

But leaving didn't mean I suddenly had the time or capacity to sit down and process everything I'd been through.

Leaving also meant I was now a single mum.

There wasn't a convenient pause between surviving one part of my life and having to build the next one.

I had to be a mum.

I had to keep a roof over our heads.

I had to deal with the practical reality of starting again.

I had to move forward.

So I did.

And from the outside, that could quite easily have looked like recovery.

I'd left.

I was getting on with my life.

I was raising my child.

I was functioning.

I wasn't sitting around talking about the relationship every day.

But years later, I began to understand that leaving the relationship and healing from what I'd experienced within it were two very different things.

The relationship had ended.

Some of the ways I'd learned to survive it hadn't.

I struggled to trust people.

I found vulnerability incredibly difficult.

I had learned that letting people close enough to hurt me could feel dangerous, so keeping parts of myself protected made sense.

I isolated myself.

And for a long time, I didn't necessarily connect any of those things with what I'd been through.

They just felt like me.

My personality.

My preferences.

The way I was.

I could tell myself I liked my own company.

That I didn't need anybody.

That I was independent.

That I was simply careful about who I trusted.

And some of that was true.

But underneath some of it was protection.

I'd learned how to survive by becoming someone who could cope.

Someone who could keep going.

Someone who didn't need too much from anybody else.

And those ways of coping had served me when I needed them.

That's important to me.

I don't want to look back at that woman and criticise her for not processing everything properly.

She was doing what she needed to do.

She got herself out.

She looked after her child.

She kept moving.

But years later, I could also see that surviving something doesn't necessarily mean it stops affecting the way you live once you've survived it.

And perhaps you recognise some version of that in yourself.

Maybe you've been through a relationship that changed the way you trust.

Maybe you've experienced betrayal and now find yourself looking for signs that somebody else might do the same thing.

Maybe you've spent years being the person everybody relies on and now find it almost impossible to admit when you're struggling.

Maybe you've been hurt after allowing yourself to be vulnerable, so now you keep people at a comfortable distance.

Maybe you tell yourself you prefer doing everything yourself because relying on other people has disappointed you too many times.

Maybe you're incredibly independent, but somewhere along the way independence became I cannot let myself need anybody.

Maybe you withdraw when you're overwhelmed.

Maybe you disappear when you're hurting.

Maybe you keep yourself permanently busy because slowing down gives your thoughts too much room.

Maybe you're brilliant in a crisis but don't know what to do with yourself when everything becomes quiet.

Maybe you minimise your own experiences because somebody else had it worse.

Maybe you struggle to accept kindness without wondering what somebody wants from you.

Maybe compliments make you uncomfortable.

Maybe conflict immediately puts you on edge.

Maybe you rehearse conversations before having them because you need to feel prepared for every possible response.

Maybe you apologise when you've done nothing wrong.

Maybe you over-explain yourself because somewhere along the way you learned that simply saying what you needed wasn't enough.

Maybe you find it difficult to say no because you learned that keeping other people happy helped keep things calm.

Maybe you rarely ask for help because being disappointed feels worse than doing everything yourself.

Maybe you have people around you and still feel strangely alone because allowing somebody to really see you feels much harder than simply being with them.

Maybe you've become so good at appearing okay that people genuinely don't realise when you're not.

Or maybe none of those things are yours.

Because survival doesn't look the same for everybody.

The point isn't to turn every behaviour we have into evidence of something unresolved from our past.

It's to recognise that sometimes the things we learned to do during difficult periods can continue long after the difficult period itself has ended.

And there can be a cost to that.

Not only in weight regain.

This is bigger than weight.

It can cost us closeness.

Trust.

Rest.

Connection.

The ability to ask for help.

The ability to receive help when it's offered.

The freedom to be vulnerable with people who have actually earned our trust.

The ability to switch off rather than constantly anticipating what might happen next.

Sometimes it costs us energy because we're always monitoring, thinking, preparing, protecting or holding something back.

Sometimes it costs us relationships because we keep people at a distance and then feel lonely behind the distance we've created.

Sometimes it costs us opportunities because staying with what feels safe feels easier than risking being hurt, rejected or disappointed again.

Sometimes it costs us the ability to recognise our own needs because we've spent so long responding to everybody else's.

Sometimes it costs us peace because the difficult situation ended years ago, but part of us is still living as though we need the same protection today.

And yes, sometimes those costs can eventually touch our weight too.

If we're exhausted, isolated, emotionally overloaded or constantly operating from old ways of coping, that becomes part of the life in which we're trying to care for ourselves and sustain change.

But I don't want to reduce experiences like these to what they did to the number on the scales.

Understanding my own emotional weight gave me far more than another explanation for why I'd struggled with weight.

It helped me understand myself.

Why I reacted in certain ways.

Why some things felt harder for me than I thought they should.

Why I could be incredibly strong and capable and yet find vulnerability so difficult.

Why I sometimes isolated myself when what I probably needed was connection.

And why parts of my life were still being shaped by things I believed I'd already left behind.

That's why I don't think the question is:

Why didn't I deal with this properly at the time?

Maybe you couldn't.

Maybe you didn't know how.

Maybe you didn't have the support.

Maybe nobody asked how you were doing because everybody assumed you were the one who could cope.

Maybe you didn't feel as though you had permission to struggle.

Maybe there simply wasn't enough of you left to deal with what you were feeling as well as everything the situation itself required from you.

Perhaps keeping going was the only thing you knew how to do.

And sometimes I think we need to give that version of ourselves a little more understanding.

She wasn't necessarily failing to deal with something.

She may simply have been surviving something in the only way available to her at the time.

But survival can sometimes leave something behind.

The crisis passes.

The practical things get dealt with.

Life begins moving again.

People stop asking about it.

Eventually we stop talking about it too.

And because we're functioning again, we can assume the whole experience is behind us.

But sometimes our response to what happened hasn't disappeared just because the situation itself has ended.

Perhaps we become more anxious afterwards.

More watchful.

More easily overwhelmed.

Perhaps something reminds us of what happened and our reaction seems much bigger than we expected.

Perhaps we avoid certain situations without really understanding why.

Perhaps we find ourselves carrying anger that never really had anywhere to go.

Or sadness we never really allowed ourselves to feel because there was always something more urgent that needed our attention.

Sometimes we're simply tired.

Not the sort of tired that disappears after an early night.

The kind that can come from having spent far too long holding yourself together.

And this is where I started to think differently about the question I was asking myself.

Instead of:

Why didn't I deal with this properly at the time?

I began asking:

Is there anything from that experience I'm still carrying now?

That question feels very different.

There's no accusation in it.

No assumption that we did something wrong.

No expectation that there was some perfect way we should have responded.

It's simply curiosity.

What did I need to do to get through that?

And is any part of me still doing it?

What did I have to push aside because I couldn't deal with it then?

And is any of it still asking something of me now?

What did I learn to do to protect myself then?

And do I still need that same protection today?

Because emotional weight doesn't necessarily disappear because we ignore it, avoid it or push it down.

And that doesn't mean every difficult experience is sitting somewhere inside us waiting to cause a problem.

It doesn't mean we need to go digging through our past looking for things to process.

Sometimes something difficult happens, we get through it, and we genuinely do move forward.

But sometimes there is residue.

Something still feels unfinished.

Something still hurts.

Something still gets activated.

Something still takes us back there.

Or perhaps, as I eventually discovered, the experience itself doesn't feel particularly present anymore, but some of the ways we learned to survive it are still quietly shaping the way we live.

And sometimes our mind and body have simply continued carrying what, at the time, we didn't yet have the capacity, safety, support or understanding to put somewhere else.

That isn't failure.

Sometimes it's evidence of just how much we were capable of surviving.

But surviving something and wanting to continue carrying the emotional weight of it for the rest of our lives are not the same thing.

And once I understood that, I stopped asking myself why I hadn't dealt with things better.

I became much more interested in what I might finally be ready to understand, support and, where I could, begin to put down.