Letting Go of What Once Sustained You

An old quilt folded on a bench with leaves scattered across it

I want to start by defending the thing you’re about to let go of, because nobody else will.

The people-pleasing kept you safe in a house where somebody’s mood determined how the night went. Perfectionism got you out of a town that had already written your ending. Going numb was the only door available when you were eleven and had no car keys and no money and nowhere to go. The control, the lists, the fourteen backup plans, all of that was a nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do.

Those weren’t character defects. They were tools, and they worked.

The expiration date nobody tells you about

Here’s the trouble. A coping skill is built for a specific environment, and it does not automatically notice when the environment changes.

You learned to read a room in half a second because reading it wrong used to have consequences. Now you’re forty-three, sitting at a restaurant with people who love you, and your whole body is doing threat assessment off the waiter’s tone. The tool is still running. There’s just nothing left to protect you from, and the running itself is what’s exhausting you.

I put it this way sometimes. You’re standing in a fire with a water pistol, and you’ve gotten so good with that water pistol. Genuinely. Nobody’s better. But at some point you walk out of the fire and you’re still standing in the ashes, squeezing the trigger, and the question isn’t whether you’re skilled. It’s whether there’s still a fire.

How to tell a strategy has expired

Look for cost not comfort but cost.

A working coping skill lowers your distress and leaves your life mostly intact. An expired one lowers your distress right now and takes something from you later. The wine takes tomorrow morning. The overworking takes your kid’s Tuesday. The keeping everybody happy takes your voice, one small concession at a time, until you genuinely cannot answer the question of what you want for supper.

Look for automatic. If it fires before you decide anything, that’s a body running an old program, not a person making a choice.

Look for who it protects. Ask who you’d be disappointing if you stopped, and then check how old that person’s voice sounds in your head. A whole lot of adults are still managing the feelings of somebody who has been dead for a decade.

Why you can’t just stop

People come in wanting the strategy surgically removed. Take the anxiety out, take the shutting down out, and leave everything else the way it is.

It doesn’t work like that, and here’s why. That thing is doing a job. It’s holding something up. If you rip it out with nothing underneath, the whole structure sags, and within about three weeks you’ll have picked it back up or found something worse.

This is where I get to do my favorite part of the work. We lick our fingers, put out the flames around the TNT box at the back of your head for a minute, pull out one crappy life experience, and bring it to the front so we can file it where it actually belongs. Once the original thing is filed correctly, the strategy that was guarding it starts to quiet down on its own. You don’t have to white-knuckle it away. It gets less necessary.

The grief part

Nobody warns you that letting go of an old coping skill involves mourning.

That strategy was loyal. It showed up every single time, which is more than you can say for most of the humans in the story. When you start putting it down, there’s a loneliness that comes in, and people misread the loneliness as proof they made a mistake.

You can be grateful to something and still not take it with you. I’d say thank you out loud, honestly. It sounds ridiculous until you do it.

What goes in its place

Small and boring, which is not what anybody wants to hear.

Get your body involved, because you cannot think your way out of a nervous system pattern. Cold water on the face, a walk without your phone, feet on the ground and naming five things you can see. It feels stupid and it works, and I say that as somebody who rolled my eyes at it for years.

Practice one honest sentence a day. “I’d rather not.” “That doesn’t work for me.” “I need to think about it.” No is a complete sentence with a period at the end, and the first few times you use it your heart will pound like you shoplifted.

Find one person who gets the true version of you. One. Not a village. The coping skill exists partly because nobody was there, and the repair happens partly because somebody is.

Expect to backslide. You will be doing beautifully for eleven days and then somebody uses a certain tone and you’re right back in it. That’s not starting over. That’s how this goes. Try again.

Before you go

I know the strategy feels like yours. It’s been in the room longer than most of your relationships.

But the tree isn’t loyal to its leaves. It drops them the second they cost more than they give, and it does it without a shred of guilt, and in April it makes new ones. You’re allowed to do that. You’re allowed to set down the water pistol and notice the fire went out a long time ago.

Peel it back. One layer at a time.

This is education, not therapy. If you’re in crisis, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. If you’re in Kentucky and this sounds like your life, I’d be glad to hear from you through Circle of Hope Counseling Services.

Trauma Responses Are Survival Skills, Not Flaws