moving beyond survival

The first step in figuring out if you’re stuck in survival is looking at the signs. 

Believe it or not there are some pretty clear signs we can use. 

The first is a detailed listing of what survival looks like in terms of our mood, thoughts, feelings, behaviors, coping, and relating to others. All of these things are significantly affected by what’s happening in the nervous system. They’re like breadcrumbs that tell us what’s going on. 

The second is to look at the circumstances that are more likely to lead to people getting stuck in survival. 

And the third, is your own sense of the struggle you’re experiencing and what that’s like. You know best what’s happening for you. 

How we end up stuck in survival and what to do next usually makes sense once we understand more about how the nervous system works and what it actually means to be stuck. 

While whole books have been written about the complexity of the nervous system and the stress process, all of this extra information isn’t really helpful when we’re in survival. 

We just need the basics… 

Being stuck in survival means that the nervous system has spent so much time in defensive survival states in response to excessive or prolonged demands, threats or danger that it is no longer coming back (as it was designed to do) to its default state of FLOCK (connected, engaged and functional). 

In some ways it can be a little bit hard to recognize that we’re stuck in survival. But it’s hopeful too. Because it’s the beginning of knowing how to change the story.

There are lots of things we can do to help ourselves become “unstuck” and to move beyond survival.

The starting place focuses on SAFETY, because safety is the most important thing to the nervous system.