I often do a meditation where I guide the moms through imagining a wall around them, and sometimes we judge that wall as something bad, as it shouldn’t be there. But if you can take a moment to recognize that this wall has been there to protect you. Your body and brain does everything it can to protect you and keep you safe, and if you can take a moment to thank it, and see how it’s trying to help you, then you can open up to what’s underneath.

Ask yourself, why am I holding on to this? Why do I need this? How is this helping me? Give yourself some time and space to really pause around this question, as nothing will change until you are honest with yourself about it.

“We live in Cape Town, South Africa and our son, Nicholas was working as a Chemical Engineer in Texas. He was a golden child, words are not enough to describe his zest for life, beautiful nature and the opportunities that lay ahead of him after we had "launched" him into adult life. We received a call in the middle of the night 21 months ago to say he had been involved in a freak vehicle accident and had died instantly. We had messaged with him just half an hour before as was our daily custom. Our lives were turned upside down as we navigated this trauma and getting to the USA with Covid and all the restrictions and all the complex detail that has followed”

What if you could just allow yourself to be present in the emotion you are feeling now? Without resistance or judgment? Just allowing yourself to be exactly where you are at. Letting yourself grieve the expectations that you have had for your life. Allowing yourself to feel the pain that your life has not gone the way you thought it would. Allowing yourself to acknowledge that you’re hurt, in pain, broken.

If you don’t find the time for it, someday you will be forced to, which is the whole point of this episode. I would love it if I could show you why right now is the right time to start doing the internal work rather than after everything has fallen apart, but I’m not sure if you’re going to listen to me! Right now is the time to care for yourself, before you don’t have any other choice.

So this means slowing down. This means noticing what’s going on in your body. This means getting out of your head and into your body.

From my own experience, it feels horrible to give with resentment. It feels horrible to do the actions I should do just because I know I should. I want to do the actions because I want to, because that’s what I truly want to do and show my love to my spouse or my kids that way. This doesn’t mean to nix the actions, sometimes it just means taking care of yourself, so you can take care of your family in the way that you want to.

So, if you’ve been numbing or trying to pretend everything is good for many years, it’s going to be a process to almost soften the ice on your body per say. To slowly allow your body to feel, notice sensations, and become comfortable with different sensations and intensities in your body.

When you are suddenly overwhelmed with emotions that you’ve never experienced and it almost forces itself on you, it can put you into shut down. You don’t even want to go there. You try to numb as much as possible. You don’t want to feel anything. It’s all too much.

Megan Hillukka shares her story with grief and trauma after her daughter Aria dies. She goes through the differences between grief and trauma, and dives deeper into trauma, what it means to live with it and what it feels like to have trauma.

Sometimes it’s hard to say things that need to be said, because I know the other person is going to go through the shame cycle. I guess I can’t completely know it, but I assume, because I know exactly what this feels like. I know exactly what it’s like to hear something, and immediately notice how I’m not doing those things in my life, and how bad of a mother I am and start beating myself up, and then I want to crawl into a deep dark hole and never come out.

If someone else is doing it a certain way, maybe I’m doing it the wrong way. Maybe I’m bad. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I need to do it differently.