Grieving Old Survival Strategies
Coming down from a cocaine high 🫨 [ 2min read ]
With a client recently, I explained how the body processes shadow success
…something I've had extensive personal experience with,
using this cocaine analogy
…something I have no experience with, lol.
Someone can miss how cocaine helped them "crush" life before they really felt the consequences of that disconnect – disconnect from Self, body, and therefore true aliveness.
Personally, I still have to grieve that I'm not as good at dissociating as I used to be.
Which sounds like an oxymoron, I know. Because dissociating, people-pleasing, pushing etc. would be "bad" things, right? 🚫
But as you become more embodied, and your truth holds more authority, the ways you used to cope or survive can become harder to do. This can feel like a loss.
A loss of how you used to get what you want, get the success that you want.
My shadow side of success looked like:
"Crushing" it at work on four hours sleep.
People-pleasing my way into rooms I wanted to be in.
Performing calm while my chest was on fire.
Running on cortisol, battering my immune system, and calling it drive.
The complicated part is, it worked. I didn't just survive that season, I thrived in it. Until it broke and the candy was taken away from the baby.
Instead of tidying away that time under “analysed old chapter” though… grief is the body's way of processing there's actually been a change. 🙏🏽
The experience of grief honours what's been lost, somatically.
In turn, it opens space to receive what's available now. Without it, we feel the friction of trying to think our way out of a chapter our nervous system still lives in.
Until my equivalent cocaine highs were honoured in all their juicy toxicity, I couldn't expand into a new embodied reality. 🌸
So, although you might know better now, and wouldn't trade-in your aliveness…
It's okay to miss your old ability to: push through, suppress emotion, adapt to fit in, disconnect from the body, get what you want, soothe insecurity through an ego hit – you don't have to suppress these feelings of loss too! lol
