(Trigger warning: this post discusses my rape, which happened almost 20 years ago and yet is still somehow (not actually surprisingly) very relevant to my nervous system.)

Yesterday, after three consecutive nights of poor sleep due to my kids developing rogue MONSTER allergy symptoms (due to the rainy season here finally starting, yay!) + me drinking coffee + one pretty major real life trigger (more below on this), I had about 50% of my normal bandwidth (or less)..

After weaning my toddler, I’ve been getting GREAT sleep for the first time in like EIGHT years, which has felt amazing in all of the ways, as I’m sure you can imagine.

I kind of couldn’t believe how dysregulated I felt after merely three nights back in Poor Sleep Town… I also think I have been doing so much somatic and embodiment work myself lately that I have much higher awareness of what is going on in my nervous system minute to minute, so maybe my AWARENESS of how dysregulated I was is what increased…

Anyway… the thinning of my regulation and bandwidth had provided the space to have some pretty deep and intense conversations with my husband by day 2…

And then day three, I went to get a DECAF coffee around 2:30 and then at 3, we took the kids to jiu jitsu for the first time.. it ended up being the wrong day/time for their entry level skills so they didn’t get to join in with the class.. and yet… it was totally perfect because it provided a huge trigger for me to have even deeper more intense conversations with my husband which helped me gain even MORE self awareness..

The major real life trigger was that I walked in to the jiu jitsu studio and there was a man sitting there in the parent area who looked a LOT like the man who raped me when I was 21 years old. Same beard, same hair, same coloring, same stature…

And this man kept looking at me like he recognized me! And he was very curious about us as we sat down in the waiting area to watch the class for a bit.

A large part of my brain KNEW this wasn’t the same person who had raped me 17 whole years ago…

AND my nervous system didn’t believe that large part of my brain…

My nervous system believed… not completely enough to send me into full-out breakdown mode, but enough to make a huge difference in how I experienced life… that this person was the man who had disempowered and taken advantage of me.

It was such a great experience to navigate using all of the amazing tools I’ve gathered in the last couple of years to resource myself in safety and nourish all the parts of myself that felt afraid or angry.

This man at jiu jitsu turned out to actually be a very friendly man (incidentally, from the same borough of New York City that my rapist was from).

After chatting with him a bit about himself and his kids and which school they went to, my kids were done observing the higher-level class taking place, and we decided to leave.

We got home and everything felt abrasive to me…

The sounds of the kids eating at the table.. the forks clinking against their bowls.. Even their adorable little voices laughing and joking with each other felt like WAYYY too much for me to handle.

The fridge stank, the yard stank.. it had just rained and there was a musky smell similar to freshly mulched wood.. and it was making me nauseous…

I was like… WHAT is happening right now?

At first I thought it was the DECAF coffee I drank a few hours prior..

But then I tuned into my body and my body very loudly said, “YO, you literally just interacted with the doppelgänger of the man who raped you all those years ago, which I actually kinda feel might as well have been the same person.”

Ahhhh… my nervous system was heightened and making all of my senses more keen, while at the same time considerably diminishing my capacity for all of the input from those heightened senses..

I was in full on flight mode, but I wasn’t fleeing so my nervous system was like, “Alright, if you’re not going to keep us safe, I guess I WILL have to do that with some HYPER vigilance.”

Once I had the awareness of what was happening, I was able to take about 10 minutes for myself to resource, ground into the earth, shower these parts of myself with unconditional love, and give myself care in a way that really set my nervous system back at ease.

I sniffed and everything smelled more normal… I listened and everything sounded back to normal.. Ahhh… a little bit of love was all my nervous system needed.

Really, I just treated myself the same way I would treat my child after they had a majorly upsetting or triggering life event.

It seems so simple, but I literally had to learn these tools in a 650 hour trauma-informed somatic training certificate program to be able to help my adult self in this way after my own triggering experience yesterday.

I told my husband, “Thank GOD I know about my nervous system these days, or this could have sent me into a spiral of discomfort that would have lasted WHO KNOWS how long.”

All that being said, not long after this self-soothing, my husband and I had to have a business-related discussion and make a decision about that before the business day ended, and I totally cut him off as he was talking and minimized his input and was really just not nice to him at all.

Ahh, I see I still have less than my usual amount of bandwidth to work with here… 😬

This whole experience parlayed into a deeper discussion about the dynamic within our relationship (the second evening in a row we discussed this same topic, but a much deeper layer of it), and I could feel that our relationship perhaps called this series of events in, in order for us to grow and evolve and deepen in the ways that we have been needing to.

It was the perfect series of events for my layers of control and regulation to lessen to the point where these hot topics would flare and really show themselves for what they were: not aligned with where we are headed and where we want to be NOW in our relationship.

It’s so funny and amazing how this school called Life works sometimes.

(Caveat: sometimes I don’t like creating Story around what happens in my life, like I just did there…

And sometimes I do, and I feel it’s a really integral part of the human experience..

To make sense of what happens in life by creating a narrative.)

I can’t unsee the narrative of … the kids getting stuffy noses to the point they couldn’t sleep well… which led to me lacking sleep… which led to deep relationship conversations… which led to going to the WRONG jiu jitsu class… which led to seeing the doppelgänger and being triggered… which led to me resourcing myself … which led to even DEEPER and more truthful and raw relationship conversations…

Which will hopefully lead to a great night of sleep eventually :)

Or maybe even more layers of regulation being removed over the course of the next few days…

And THEN … great sleep again :) (Please god! haha)

Anyway, to all of you warriors out there doing the work to heal and grow and evolve, all while having lives and jobs and families and kids and stress and traumas…

I see you!

We are all in this together :)

Wishing you all a day full of ease and of treating yourselves with the same kindness you would treat your grandchild <3 Because you deserve it.

In Gratitude & Service,

Ashley