Bone Tired

When All You Can Do Is Breathe

Photo by Arno Moller on Unsplash

Last week was like the perfect storm, where anything that could hit us, did hit us…all at once. It’s like an earthquake that violently shakes the system, leaving us to dig through the debris and put everything back in order. Often, this kind of shake-up reveals new parts that we’ve never met before, which is what happened to us.

While trying to process what happened in last week’s session, Body called a meeting with the parts that showed up for therapy to debrief. There was a small group of parts, some of which we hadn’t met before. Most of them did not realize that there were others who struggled with the same issue. Their shame and embarrassment kept them isolated.

The goal of the meeting was not really to process last week’s session, but to introduce them to each other and us. There were five of them, ranging in age from 3 to 50. I don’t have their permission yet to share their names, except for 3-year-old Amy Jo, whom y’all met a couple of weeks ago as Body’s new Little. They are still very unsure of all this system stuff. It’s like being thrown into group therapy when you thought you were going for ice cream.

It’s so hard when you’ve never shared your story before. I remember when we reported our father for sexual abuse when we were a 17-year-old high school senior. At that point, we had kept that secret for most of our lives, and we didn’t have the words to explain what happened to us, not to mention that most of our memories were packed in boxes in the attic of our mind.

These new parts need time to get to know one another so they can feel comfortable with each other and with us. This was a lot for all of us to take in.

On top of that, the death of a couple of close family members just added to the grief, lack of sleep, and emotional dysregulation that was already weighing on us. And when you’re grieving, the exhaustion runs deeper than sleep can fix.

We still had some critical deadlines at work, and because we were powerless to do anything for those who were dying, we poured ourselves into our work. It’s one of our oldest coping strategies — busyness — and it works, until it doesn’t.

We did not have the energy to overcome the obstacles we were experiencing with trying to get our podcast recorded. We were trying to learn how to record without a script when our internal environment did not support learning in that moment. Cyndi, the former host of our system and the one in charge of our coaching business, was frustrated because we had stuff to get done, but the rest of the parts were crying out for rest…they were begging for it.

To Cyndi’s credit, she was able to see the fatigue in the rest of the parts and their struggle with trying to record the podcast, so she suggested that they go back to recording with a script — not trying to learn a new skill under the pressure of a deadline. They agreed, and they got it done. That was its own kind of leadership.

But by Monday, our whole body and system crashed. We hit the wall. None of us wanted to move. We’ve experienced this after almost every triathlon we participated in — an exhaustion that goes to the marrow of the bone. Bone tired. You have used up all your fuel, and you have nothing left to give. We didn’t want to go to work, and almost called out sick. We took naps, rocked in the rocking chair with our teddy bear and a blanket, journaled, and did the best we could with self-care. None of that helped.

And that’s how we walked into therapy.

I told M that last week was hard. New parts. Family deaths. Deadlines. The full weight of it. She read our After Therapy Report from the week before and our Community journal — the raw and real of our system processing — and said we may have understated how difficult last week was.

Minimizing is also an old coping strategy. It’s not that bad. We’ve seen worse. We recognize it, even when we’re in it.

We are so grateful for M, who just receives us no matter how we enter her office.

After sharing all of that with her, we had zero emotional energy left to do anything. All we could do was close our eyes and breathe. Her voice was very soothing to our raw nervous system, as she painted the picture of calm waters on a lake so still it looked like glass. As we breathed out the tension, we could feel our whole body and system begin to relax for the first time in a week.

When it was time to leave, we went through our routine of finding a responsible adult who could drive us home safely. And on the way out, we got a hug, which finalized the regulation process for us.

By the time we got back home, we felt regulated and energized once more.

Sometimes therapy is not about talking or processing. Sometimes it’s about arriving in an exhausted and dysregulated state and receiving someone else’s regulation as a gift. That’s what M did for us, and we are grateful.

She said that this is a collaborative journey and that we are the ones who determine the pace at which we move forward together.

Sometimes progress looks like a pause to rest.