5 Ways to Stop Living in Survival Mode Pt. 1

Hi, loud friends. We are back on Cadre. We are in our series aloud, where we normalize talking about taboo topics, and we're talking about the five steps you can take to stop loving in survival mode. Coming from my lived experience as someone with anxiety, CPTSD, who parents a child with autism. And it's what I learned in my seven years in air network therapy. Air network therapy. Google it. It's where I learned how to recover and how to stop living in survival mode and start living in a place of emotional safety.

So today we're going to talk about step one, which is knowing. So what does knowing mean? So I'm going to say something that sounds intense. It's intense, and you'll probably remember it. I was raised to believe that my choices in life were to be a wife or to be a w****. And I know that's rough language and it's true. That's what I felt in my soul. I was raised in a religious family. I was raised with the understanding that if you are a woman, you are x, you are these things. If you are good, you take care of the house, you always put your children first.

You are selfless, you defer to your husband. You don't have needs, you don't talk about your needs, and you just make yourself small. You serve the role, you serve everyone else. But there isn't a place for you to have an identity beyond that, really, of a mother first and a wife second. And if you didn't want to be those things, if you weren't a wife and if you wanted to have, like I did, boyfriends and more than one experience in the world, then you were a w****. And again, I know that language sounds so extreme, and it really is that teenage part of myself, you know, coming out.

It's something I work on in therapy. And it's that part of me that's just feels angry to this day that that was the name for someone who didn't want to be the wife. So what knowing is. Is looking at the roles and the labels that are on you that have been put on you by yourself, by the world you live in, by how you were raised and the narrative that you were taught as a child, intentionally or unintentionally, and saying, when did you get these labels? When did you start to put this expectation on yourself of what you're supposed to be, even things like the black sheep in the family?

How did you get that role and why? And are you a caretaker? Is that good or bad? Are you the strong one? And what comes with that. It's really looking at all those things. And for me, it was again going back to that construct in my head. If I can be a wife or a w****, I knew. And when my world blew up, and you can go back and watch my last live to see it, my world blew up when I knew that the truth was that I couldn't be a wife in the way that I was supposed to be a wife. I knew it. I couldn't. I tried and I tried and I tried and I couldn't.

And it left me spent and hurt and tired and empty. And it was truly no one's fault in that nothing was intentional. It caused great pain for me to say these truths out loud and these were rules and roles and expectations that I didn't believe were true. I didn't believe they were true and I knew it. And that's what knowing is. So my assignment for you today as a human, as you try to get to that place of emotional safety, is to think about the roles that you have and the words that you use to describe yourself and think about how do they make you feel?

Do they feel like you? Are you proud of them? Are you ashamed of them? And just start to notice it and see if there's any misalignment in who you are inside and what you value in the words that the world and you yourself are using to describe you and pay attention to that knowing. And that's going to be your first step to stop living in survival mode is to start to know who you are, how you got there, and really just start to become aware that whatever it is is exactly right, because it's true. So that is step one.

Thank you for being here. Try it. Please leave notes in the comments or make comments or reach out. Dm me, message me and tell me about your experience. Because again, we're here to be a safe space to talk about things like this. I want you to see people like you. I want you to hear stories like mine and others like you. And I want to be a lifeline if you are in a place where you feel helpless or hopeless in knowing something isn't true and not really knowing what to do with that information. So come back and see us next time.

We're going to talk about step number two, saying it out loud. So more to come then, and I will. See you soon. Cadre friends, take care of yourself. Thank you for being here. You're doing a great job being exactly who you are. See you soon.