Your Body Is Protecting You From Stillness

Restlessness after grief is normal when our nervous system finally comes online after numbness. I share a trauma-informed way to practice real rest in tiny steps so our body can learn that slowing down is safe. 
• why emotional release can lead to nervous system activation instead of calm 
• how stillness can feel unsafe after sexual trauma and chronic stress 
• movement-first rest 
• “you are the frog” making self-care the first task of the day 

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Good Music for Healing

🎵 **Divine Woman Playlist (Apple Music):** https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/divine-woman/pl.u-leyl096uMoD885j

You’re not alone. 

We’re healing together.

Transcript

Welcome And Healing Focus

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Awaken Heart, a podcast for healing women who are healing from trauma, chronic stress, and who are navigating neurodivergence, especially later in life, late diagnosed. I'm Autumn, a licensed professional counselor, a life coach, a yoga instructor. And here we move beyond surface level coping. We integrate trauma therapy, nervous system regulation, and somatic body-based healing to help you move from survival into true stability and power. So welcome. I'm happy that you're here. Thank you for being here. Let's roll right into it. Last week we talked about the double grief after sexual trauma, the grief of becoming someone new, seeing things more clearly, or even the grief that comes from the numbness when it starts to lift. And if that episode resonated with you, you might have noticed a little something afterward. Instead of feeling calm, you might have felt restless, more overwhelmed, maybe more on edge, like you just couldn't settle. Because a lot of women expect to be like, aha, if I finally let myself feel, I'll feel better. But what actually happens is when you open the door to feeling, your nervous system has more to process. So instead of resting, it gets activated. So you can't sit still, your mind starts racing, you reach for the phone or distractions, food, TV. And you feel anxious when things get quiet, or you suddenly feel exhausted but unable to relax. And this can be very confusing because, like when you're on this healing journey, you think, I cried, I priced less. Why can't I just rest? I did all, I checked all the boxes. It's because your body is not used to being open and safe at the same time. When grief surfaces, your system shifts out of numbness, but it doesn't immediately land in calm. It often moves into activation, vulnerability, and heightened awareness because your body is now feeling more. And if your system learned that feeling equals overwhelming, that slowing down is unsafe, that stillness is when things happen badly to you, then rest doesn't feel like relief. It feels like you're exposed. Your body isn't resisting rest, it's protecting you from what it thinks happens when you slow down. So instead of forcing rest, let's teach the body something new: how to practice rest after grief. That's what today's episode is about. So, step one, don't go straight to stillness because this is where people can get stuck. After emotional release, your system often needs movement before it needs or will accept stillness. So try walking, stretching, shaking your body, standing up, bouncing on the balls of your feet, shaking your arms, shaking your hands, wiggling your body in any way. Some gentle yoga, tai chi. Let the energy move through first. And then downshift. Don't stop. Instead of saying, I need to rest, try slowing it down just a little bit. I'm going to slow down by 10%. So that might look like dimming your lights, lowering the noise around you, sitting instead of standing or pacing or walking or doing, and doing one thing instead of five. Because rest is a gradual downshift, not a hard stop. Step three your nervous system needs to know this won't last forever. So you need to communicate with your system and have time-bound safety. So try something like I'm going to rest for two minutes. Set a timer, stay with your body, then you can move again once that alarm goes off. Step four, stay anchored in your body. While resting, try not to check out. Stay connected. Maybe your feet are on the ground, maybe your hands somewhere on your body where you can feel the pressure and the warmth. Maybe you hold on to something soft, like a stuffy or a blanket, a weighted blanket, a pillow. A heating pad. I can't say how helpful a heating pad could be. Like if you're just sitting, especially if you have a tense pelvic floor, like you can have a heating pad, low heat where you're just sitting. It helps you stay warm if you're, you know, cold nature. When you're lying in bed, when you're watching TV, you can put it over your belly, you can put it underneath you, you can put it around you, anywhere that feels good. That heat is such a good comfort. Like I said, a heating, a weighted blanket can be helpful as well, or a comfort of a pet or a child. This tells your system, I'm here, I didn't disappear. Step five, expect discomfort. You might feel restless, anxious, emotional. Hell, you might even be irritated. That doesn't mean rest is wrong. It means your nervous system is learning something new and it takes repeated effort. It takes time of repetition. So you're not trying to feel peaceful. You're building the capacity to stay with yourself. Rest isn't immediately going to be like I rested for a half hour, I rested for a day, all my troubles go away. This is something that you're going to have to do over and over and over again before it becomes natural. You are essentially teaching yourself to speak a new language, your nervous system to speak the language of rest when all it's known is that rest is danger. So it's having to learn new things, and that takes time. So let's take a little mini practice. If you can, place your feet on the floor. I'm gonna sit up. I've been lounging while I'm talking. I'm gonna sit up and put my feet on the floor. Let's take a nice deep breath in. And a longer deep breath out. Let it out of the mouth. Now look around your space for a moment and just notice I can slow down and still be right here. Let's try it one more time. Inhale deeply. Exhale, let it out a little longer. Look around your space and tell yourself I can slow down and still be right here. Because this is how you change the nervous system. The change happens in moments where your body experiences, even in small amounts, safety while being present. And this is a part of what we're doing in this season. We're not trying to rush into feeling better. We're not trying to push into some version of healing that feels forced or overwhelming or spiritually bypasses the whole process. I want us to all learn together how to move at the pace that your nervous system can actually handle. Because healing after sexual trauma isn't just about what happened. It's about what your body learned, about safety, about slowing down, about being in your body, about whether it felt safe to fucking even feel. And right now we're in the part of the process where your body is beginning to come online, where numbness is softening, where grief is opening, where rest feels unfamiliar. This is not the end of healing. This is the beginning of connection to yourself. This is the part where most people say, come back to the person you were before the trauma. But if your trauma started earlier in age, maybe you're coming to yourself for the very first time. So it's about connection, not reconnection, but about connection to who you are. And in the episodes ahead, we're going to keep building on this slowly. We're going to talk about what it means to heal when you don't have a safe place to process, how to stay safe with yourself when things feel quiet or lonely, and how to begin trusting your body again. And like I said, this is not all at once. Not in a way that overwhelms you, but in a way that helps your body feel like saying, Okay, I can do this. Baby steps. Because healing doesn't always feel like progress. Sometimes it just feels like noticing, slowing down, or just simply not running away from yourself. And that's that's enough. That's more than enough. We're not trying to get you somewhere else. I just want you to feel at home with yourself. Before we close, the short and sweet episode that is today, I want you to just come back to your body for a moment. Notice your breath. Notice where you are. Maybe gently place a hand on your chest or your arm or your neck or anywhere that feels supportive. And if things still feel activated or unsettled, that's okay. Nothing has gone wrong. Your body is learning that it can feel and stay safe, that it can slow down without something bad happening. Your body is learning that it doesn't have to stay in survival mode all the time. But that doesn't happen all at once. Like I said, it happens in moments like this: small moments, quiet moments, barely noticeable shifts. So if all you did today, all you do today was pause for a few seconds, notice your body, or understand yourself just a little bit more, that matters. That counts. Because you don't have to force yourself into rest. You don't have to push past what feels like too much. You just have to stay with yourself just a little bit longer than you used to. You are allowed to go gently. Please take all the time you need. Why didn't you rest? You took a week off. What are you talking about? You're burnt out. What are you saying? Just because you might lay around in shutdown mode doesn't mean you're resting. Because resting, genuine rest means to rest without guilt. Rest without worrying about obligations and responsibilities. Rest without worrying or thinking about anything else other than what you're doing in the moment. And that can be really hard. For someone that's been numbed, for someone that's been traumatized. For someone that's trying to come back to healing, this could be a hard spot. So take your time. Ten percent more resting, ten percent less working, however you want to see it. Two-minute rest time, sprinkle throughout the day, sprinkle throughout the week. Take it at your pace and have faith that these small moments are healing moments, because they are, they matter so much. I've been saying it to my clients a lot this week, and I don't know if this is right or not, but I made it up. I didn't make it up. I just combined two things. There is, I think it's corporate speak, but you eat the frog first, right? The frog is your hardest task of the day. And when it comes to healing, when it comes to growing, when it comes to like loving ourselves, we are the frog. We are the hardest thing in our day to take care of. So the concept of eat the frog is to do the hard task, the frog, first thing in the morning. So you're the frog, my dear. You need to wake up and you need to conquer your task. Self-care, rest, journal, meditate, move your body, honor yourself, light a candle, say something positive, talk to yourself in the mirror, whatever it is, that's your frog. Eat that frog before you do anything else. That's your priority of the day is you. You're the frog. Eat the frog. Say hello to yourself in the morning before anyone else. All right, my dears. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for listening to this short but helpful, hopefully helpful episode on resting. Until next time, remember you are never too much, you are never too late, and you are not broken. And you never have to carry this alone because I'll be right here waiting for you every Wednesday and Friday. So Friday's episode coming up will be a little bit more about resting. We'll be a little bit more in depth about what we talked in today. Maybe some shadow work, maybe some chakra notifications, some affirmations. We'll get there. We will learn to rest in a pleasant, productive, healthy way. Please share this episode with someone who may also need to allow themselves to rest after drama, after sexual trauma. May you find peace in the ache. May our healing ripple outward, bringing a little more softness and freedom to the world. Protect your awakened heart, and I'll see you soon.