The 4 Setbacks You May Experience on Your Healing Journey
Psst. They aren’t pretty.
First, let’s define setback. A setback can be defined as “an interruption in progress.” Other synonyms for the word setback include (but are not limited to): disappointment, frustration, letdown, comedown, decline, descent, down, downfall, fall, turnabout, turnaround, recession, regression, retrogression, reversion, relapse, breakdown, collapse, crash, meltdown, ruin, undoing.
I think you can probably see a clear pattern here.
A setback feels like a break in our path, in a sense where beliefs, values, relationships, and even our own self identity comes to be questioned.
But why does this happen in the first place?
I believe these setbacks happen to each of us at moments in our life that we need to pay attention to something within ourselves.
Considering the shear fact that we are each a unique human being, with different upbringings, and life situations, there is no one size fits all answer as to why we experience a setback. However, becoming aware of our own arrival at a setback and moving through it, is a place that we can share a sense of common ground. Often, it has to do with our inability to accept either where we are or who we are in an event we feel powerless and small.
From my experience, here you will find four setbacks that you may be encountering on your healing journey and how to navigate them:
1. Relying on External Validation from An Abundance of Resources
This one is tricky because when we feel defeated, it may feel like common sense to deny our own guidance and truth and look to experts outside of ourselves for answers. However, I believe we reach a point in our development, even when we face a setback, where we know that we will only act in accordance with what we believe to be true to ourselves, regardless of what any scientist, book, news outlet, blog, article, YouTube video, or TikTok creator says.
When we seek beyond ourselves, it sends a message to our inner being that we are not enough, or that we are not informed nor knowledgable enough to know how to move through an obstacle.
We essentially give our power away, and at the same time, our confidence withers as a result because now we are unable to make decisions for ourself unless we are guided by someone or something beyond our own body.
To break this cycle of seeking and searching beyond ourselves, we must turn inwards. This is where self-help gurus can take a back seat because it is here at this moment where the tides shift.
Meditation and hypnotherapy has helped me realize, for example, that when we can get silent enough to hear our own inner being, which to be frank isn’t loud at all, the body begins to guide us towards our truth. The ego is what creates the chatter that we should be more than we are or that we should be doing something beyond ourselves because it believes we aren’t enough as we are. The ego will hold on for dear life until you recognize this power within yourself to take action on what you love and find a way to make it work because you can make it work. This setback shows us that we must breakdown the limiting belief we are not enough before we can breakthrough and trust ourself and believe in ourself enough to create a life we know to be true to our heart.
2. Isolation from People, Places, & Our Selves
Oh man, this one hurts. After being in the middle of a global pandemic for nearly two years now, we have been told by external forces that we cannot face people or places without the fear of contracting a lethal disease. This article is not to debate the current COVID-19 crisis, but what matters related to this crisis is how it has effected our sense of belonging in this world.
If you are feeling a setback begin to set in especially now coming out of this pandemic, please know dear soul you are truly not alone at all. I believe this macro-level isolation event influenced many individuals on a micro-level, in their own lives to distance themselves from the truth of what we are inherently capable of achieving. Sadly, during a setback we feel powerless and small, which makes us feel unworthy to do things or face people because we don’t believe we have it in us to even be seen for who we are.
To reframe this narrative takes consistent daily work. The work is all internal. To truly work through isolation, we must dive deep within our own heart and ask ourselves, “Why am I afraid to be seen? Why am I feeling incapable of taking action? Why can’t I make a decision and figure out what comes next in my life?” The answers to these questions will most likely be rooted in a childhood wound that we have been unable to access and become aware of until now, or it could be a trauma related belief your physical body picked up along the way that you now internalize to be true. Perhaps you were in a bad relationship, felt at odds with family members, disagreed with systems and institutions…that list could go on and on and on.
To move forward from feeling isolated, especially from ourselves, which is truly the most painful, I believe we must begin to engage with our external environment in a way that we can allow ourselves to be seen for who we are. Talk to new people, begin writing online about what you believe in, find a creative outlet to express and allow that divine feminine energy to flow because we are social beings and it is in our DNA to connect and feel a part of a tribe.
3. The Mind and Body is Stuck in a Freeze Response
Capstone Treatment Center describes the fight-flight-freeze response as:
“When we are faced with a threat, a message is sent to the amygdala in the limbic system of the brain. The amygdala assesses the threat and sends a message to the brain stem to activate the fight-flight-freeze response.Two systems are involved in this automatic process. The first one activates the adrenal glands to release superpower chemicals into our blood stream to give our muscles maximum power to first fight to gain safety and second, if fight can’t succeed, to flight to gain safety. This system is called the sympathetic nervous system (SNS)…
And flight goes through the same process that fight does. If flight is a viable option and leads to safety, then that person can do the same as the one above: go home, share their story, express their emotions, etc. But if flight is not a viable option, or it is attempted but is unsuccessful in gaining safety, the brain automatically shifts to freeze.
When fight and flight are activated but do not lead to safety, it is either because they were attempted and failed or because there was no possible chance of them being attempted: a child being abused by an adult, a soldier in an intense battle, a driver in an out-of-control vehicle about to crash. Because their cycle was incomplete, they, the Fight and Flight responses, continue “running,” like a car engine idling but not in gear.”
source: https://www.capstonetreatmentcenter.com/what-we-treat/trauma/
Thus, when we are stuck in a freeze response our mind is literally unable to move forward because our brain is essentially traumatized. There are ways we can begin to heal from this freeze response, which I must warn you, could take weeks, months, or even years depending on the level of trauma your precious body has experienced. These methods of healing surround getting back into our bodies because a freeze response ultimately could lead to dissociation which disconnects us from our sense of self, others, and the way we interact with our environment. I will save this conversation for a separate article, but I will mention that there are top-down and bottom-up approaches to resolving trauma and freeze responses.
The top-down approach concerns,
Whereas the bottom-up approach to healing has to do with,
A mixture of both approaches have helped me in my personal healing journey as I’ve suffered from panic attacks and severe anxiety in the past, but I will mention that yoga and energy work, like Qigong and Pranayama practice, have been transformative in my approach to healing. These are more aligned to the bottom-up approach.
4. We Let Our Ego Drive Instead of Our Heart
There is in no doubt a major shift happening in consciousness right now and the perception of reality for many communities in relation to systems and ways of living. Much of our modern world is driven in pursuit to fulfill our ego. We do need an ego to survive in this physical world because it does help us relate to our environment in a purely physical way, but the problem with always allowing the ego to drive the body is that we get trapped in our mind. Through lessons from yogic practices, we learn that we are not our thoughts, feelings, or even emotions associated with our physical body. We are each a being beneath these layers that observe the subject of the external world, such as those thoughts, feelings and emotions aforementioned.
To heal from being driven by egoic pursuits, we must again go inwards to ourself and ask ourselves questions so we can unlock and reveal our own deep truths. Do you see a pattern here? The power is always within us it just takes work to be able to embody it and feel it in its entirety.
So, setbacks. A main lesson we can learn from setbacks is that we are capable of moving through them, we just need to shift our perspective and reframe our position in our own healing and take responsibility for the narratives we choose to guide us. Each day is a fresh start, sometimes all you need to do is breathe in, pause, breathe out, and realize all you needed was a break to keep going. Oprah says in her podcast, “breakdowns lead to breakthroughs,” and that my friend, is where the true test of faith and resilience begins.
