I am the kind that likes to categorise people broadly based on their traits and response mechanisms. I even enjoyed doing so, because it made my head a little lighter and more organised. It only happened recently that I realised people have an overlap of multiple response mechanisms, multiple reactions to events and multiple personality traits that have nothing to do with one another. It also recently occurred to me that most response mechanisms are pretty harmful to our bodies as well as our hearts and minds.
Let me start by explaining what I know so far (and have personally experienced) about response mechanisms:
A). There was a phase in my life (mostly in my late teens) where I just ignored the existence of the problem and moved on with my life as though everything was normal. I never really took a pause to even process what had happened and what havoc that event might have wreaked. I never addressed the problem, and always just looked the other way. For years and years, I was just going on with life with a blank expression figuratively speaking. That was my flight response in a way that I just fled from that problem to the other and then to the next one.
B). There was a phase yet again in my life where I fought through each and every event. Everything and anything that happened had a fight reaction from me - I didn't even know what I was fighting for or against, but there was just so much of defence and fight in me, that it just seems alarming at this point.
C). Then there was a phase where I just froze - no reaction from me, no decision that I would take for my betterment or otherwise, no next steps in life - just freeze then and there. No matter how small or big the event was, that was the reaction my body gave.
In all these above mentioned scenarios of my life, my body always caught up to me with the natural response. The phase where I fled, was followed by a phase of immense sorrow and turmoil of emotions because whatever I hadn't processed, I was processing then.
The phase where I fought had its own set of repercussions as well. I lost truly valuable relations because of my own response mechanism. This phase was then followed by the phase of immense guilt and loneliness. I had essentially pushed away my loved ones, and I was immensely guilty of doing so as a part of my not-so-thought-through reactions.
The phase where I froze saw my anxiety go all the way up because of the fact that I didn't decide the better course of action for myself, and that resulted in awful consequences for me to deal with.
How these response mechanisms end up modifying my body is something I realised after a lot of contemplation in the years that followed:
My gut was so messed up that I had no "Gut feeling". I only had bad feeling that had nothing to do with instinctual response. Erratic eating behaviours, absurd sleeping patterns and anxiety that made me want to throw up made my gut as rotten as it could get. I would fall sick way too often in all these years that it was becoming a pattern.
Hairfall, dry skin, losing muscle every now and then were some of the many after effects of the stress I took, the crying sessions that had nothing to do with my current state.
I also developed mouth ulcers because of all the acidic content in my body that had no where to go.
Vivid and lucid dreams were starting to become a normal thing.
What helped me was awareness to begin with. Awareness that your gut never just sends out a false alarm, and that there is something wrong with your integral being that you need to figure out and fix.
A lot of therapy, a lot of conscious efforts in understanding how my traumas and my reactions and responses are hardwired. A lot of conscious efforts in going against the natural instinct of either running away or going all defensive.
Having the right support system by your side while you figure out the right way to respond (for both the parties) is also the key. An environment that made you have these responses in the first place cannot be the environment you flourish and grow out of them.
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