6. When Calm Feels Unsafe - Understanding Trauma and Hypervigilance, and Learning to Enjoy Life Becoming Quiet

Peace can sometimes feel wrong. Like your body doesn't know what to do with it. Like there's an addiction to chaos, which is something I'm going to be covering in Episode 15A through 16B. This is something that used to confuse me and still sometimes surprises me.

This is the transcript for Episode 6.

If you've lived through chaos, emotional abuse, instability, constant conflict, your nervous system learns that tension equals normal. You don't even notice it happening, your body just decides, "okay, well, this is what life feels like I guess". So then when things finally quiet down, when no one's yelling, when you're not scanning for the next blow up, when the phone isn't vibrating with dread, your body can panic. Because stillness doesn't register as safe, it registers as empty. And that emptiness can feel dangerous when you've only ever known noise.

"Stillness doesn't register as safe, it registers as empty"

I remember the first few months after leaving that environment. My son was a baby, our home was calm for the first time. But instead of feeling peace, I felt my heart race over nothing. I'd hear the quiet, and my body would tense like I was waiting for the next disaster. And that's what hypervigilance looks like in everyday life. It was my body saying, "ooh, something's off, why is it quiet?" And the discomfort that came with that.

If you've lived through chronic stress or trauma, your nervous system got wired for survival

Nothing else matters. The cortisol, the adrenaline, the scanning, the predicting, that became your baseline. And the brain won't unlearn it just because you changed your environment.

Again, I'm going to point you to Episode 15A, Episode 15B, and Episodes 16A and 16B where I talk about that addiction to chaos and the underlying neurochemicals that drive that addiction to chaos.

The calm feels unfamiliar and the unfamiliar feels unsafe

It's not mindset, it's conditioning. Here's how I think of it: If you slept next to a train track for years, and you had become used to the rumbling and the usual schedule of trains and of that noise and vibration, silence would actually keep you awake. You'd lie there listening and waiting for the rumble that never comes. That's exactly what it's like for your nervous system when you're in recovery and trying to learn a new rhythm without that constant rumbling, if you follow my metaphor. Then you've got people saying, "ooh, find your peace", which sounds so beautiful, but it's so vague, because in real life, it feels weird.

It can feel like numbness, like boredom, like you've lost your spark. Some of us get into new relationships, we are exposed to safe people and they feel boring! That's because we need a recalibration. We need to help the body lower its baseline from constant alert to... mildly okay. And the middle ground can feel flat until your system adjusts.

If this is happening to you, here's something that was really powerful for me: It's to notice the physical sensations of calm.

"Work to notice the physical sensations of calm"

So you notice when your shoulders just dropped a little, or if you just sighed deeply. I sigh a lot. You may hear it throughout this podcast! I've become used to really deep breathing. This is new ish, it's been a few years now. But I had to catch myself the first few times I would breathe very deeply. I caught it. I was like, "okay, so I am actually relaxing".

And when you notice those signs, you want to name them out loud: "This is what safety feels like in the body. This is my body feeling safe." You need to catch it. You name it. You're teaching your brain what that looks like. You're reinforcing it.

For mothers, especially those who left high-conflict situations, the relearning is even harder. You're not just trying to regulate yourself. You're also having to regulate your child. And if we're talking about a neurodivergent child, that regulation dance can be intense.

There were days when my son's autistic meltdowns pulled me right back into old panic-like symptoms. Even though logically I knew he wasn't recreating a situation that I had been in before where I felt very controlled, my body reacted as if I were under threat again. It took time to separate his dysregulation from my trauma responses.

An example of that is when your child's a toddler, neurodivergent or not. They need structure, they need predictability, and so my child would demand that we do certain things a certain way, and that would trigger that exact same feeling that I had in my relationship of being told exactly how things needed to go. And I had to catch it and say to myself, "this is a different situation. Hello, this is a two-year-old who needs predictability. This is not an adult person making me feel controlled, making me feel like they're calling all the shots. Different situation. Let's not react the same way." What I would tell myself, what I would whisper to myself was, "this is not the past, this is my child needing help".

You learn to pause before you react. Before you respond, actually. You get to a point where you no longer reacting, you're responding. What you're trying to do is create enough space to respond instead of react.

I want to share a few grounding tools that actually worked for me to get away from the theory and talk about real things that I use:

• The first was to name one sensory fact. So your mind is spiraling - you may know exactly what that feels like if you're listening to this podcast - you're ruminating on things, your thoughts are going around in circles... I like to catch it and then name what's physically true, "okay, right now the window's open. I smell coffee. I can hear a bird outside", facts, sensory facts that are going to pull you out of the imaginary danger and back into reality and safety.

  
  

• The second thing was to keep movement tiny; because for some of us, especially on the autism spectrum, big body-based grounding, like dancing or exercising can be too much sometimes. So instead, I'll rub my hands together; or I'll trace the edge of my keyboard with my finger. Small, repetitive movements that will tell the brain, "we're here, we're okay". That is grounding. And for some of us, that's exactly what stimming does. So some of these little movements for people on the autism spectrum, there's a name for them, it's stimming; definitely stim if you need to because that is a grounding tool.

  
  

• Third is to practice micro-calm. I would never afford to aim for an hour of meditation, I don't know where I would fit that hour in my day because that single mom life is crazy, it's non stop. So I started with 15 seconds, like literally seconds of noticing one calm thing. This sound, my breath, I was saying, "ooh, this was a good, nice, belly breath that I just took." You're building tolerance for peace, the same way you once built tolerance for chaos, with those micro-calm seconds. Do not shoot for an hour, shoot for a few seconds of calm.

  
  

• And the fourth and final tool is safe predictability. Whether you're on the spectrum or not, when you're recovering from trauma, you're going to love predictability. You're going to crave it. And so personally, I like to keep certain rituals the same. The mug I use in the morning, it's always the same mug; it's always the exact same movements that I make to prepare the coffee; the prayer playlist I start my day with (the Rosary if I'm deep in Spiritual Warfare) it's always the same. I've reduced the amount of clothes that I have in my wardrobe, so on most days it's going to be black pants and a black top, done. Routine, routine, predictability, I know what's going on, I know what's coming, and I've designed it for myself. I'm building my own safe predictability. This is not predictability that's relying on your train being on time every day or your show playing every day at the same time. I'm talking about predictability that you designed for yourself and you know what's coming because you designed it. The more the senses know what to expect, the higher the sense of reclaimed control, the less your nervous system is going to be searching for danger.

Sometimes peace feels unsafe because it means aloneness

After leaving chaos, you may not trust quiet people or empty spaces because again, it's unfamiliar. You might crave noise because silence feels like neglect. And so that's where you bring in safe connection. Even short, low-demand connection, a text check-in, a voice memo on your WhatsApp, a walk with a safe person, someone who is steady, knows you, understands you. That teaches your system that safety doesn't equal isolation. You don't want your system to be afraid of safety because it equates it with isolation. We're made for relationship, connection is healthy. You just have to make sure that it is safe.

Especially if you're autistic or introverted, that connection needs to be small. You definitely don't have to or don't want to be talking for an hour, but just let someone's presence exist near yours. What I found out is the following:

"Calm shared is calm reinforced"

When I was sharing a calm moment with a safe person, it was more powerful, more impactful than a calm moment by myself. Calm shared was calm reinforced.

Then we move on to talking about rebuilding identity. You've spent years reacting, adjusting, predicting. Calm can feel like loss, like you don't know who you are without the fight. I remember feeling blank, and I did not know what to do with time that wasn't filled with survival tasks or thoughts of survival. This is the point where many of us try to fill the quiet too fast. New projects, overworking, constant distraction. For me, it was watching every season of most of the Housewives franchise... That's how I filled the void. I think it's normal, but if you can, actually give yourself permission to not fill it immediately.

I would have recovered faster if I had not rushed into filling the void with dumb content. Actually, considering that in some shows that are available to us, we witness patterns of abuse, we witness narcissistic relationships, toxic dynamics... That can actually be a trigger. So if you do fill the void with content, make a wise choice as to what content you're filling your mind with during those months. I would probably do that part differently if I were to go through that again because who I was becoming would have needed a little empty space to form as incubation for the new me.

At some point, you'll know that calm is becoming safe when you can experience silence without rushing to fix it. When your child is playing quietly and you don't need to interrupt the moment to prove everything's fine, or when you're having a quiet evening and that doesn't make you reach for your phone, when peace feels neutral, basically... That's integration.

You've integrated the calm

The calm stops being a trigger and it starts being the new normal. It takes time, but it happens. If you practice what we talked about, you're intentional about it, you catch yourself when you're spiraling, you practice the micro-calm, et cetera, it does end up happening and it definitely doesn't happen from forcing yourself to relax. You've been through enough of that struggle energy. It happens from noticing and naming what is safe over, and over, and over, for weeks and weeks and months until your body starts to believe you.

If calm still feels unsafe at this point, you're in the middle of rewiring. You're doing it right. You're in the middle of rewiring a nervous system that had to be on guard to stay alive. You're learning that you no longer have to be on guard to be alive and that's a brave thing to learn! You're definitely out of your comfort zone. Well done.

This is Light in the Battle. Thank you for being here. If you enjoy my content, please make sure to follow the show because I'm happy to create this content to help other women that go through similar journeys as I have. The other piece that is required is for listeners to comment, leave a 5* review, share and follow so that the podcast platforms actually push my content upwards. Between me creating the content and you ladies reacting to it, that's how together we get to reach more women who need this information.

Remember to take it one day at a time, always.

If you've enjoyed this Episode, you might want to give this one a try: Episode 7: Beyond "Touched Out" - 4 Tips for When You’re "Stimmed Out" - Solo Parenting in Sensory Overload, Meltdowns, and Your Nervous System