Frozen in a Moment of Time

Why We Second Guess Ourselves

Nov 15, 2024

I was living a happy life. I was deeply in love with and devoted to my husband. I shifted from being self-employed to landing a career that allowed me to use the same training and skills within a large corporation that guaranteed me financial stability and the freedom to work without being micromanaged. I had my own private office and a company car. The territory I covered was large, expanding over two provinces, Quebec and Ontario. I owned a condo in the city where my office was situated. Cycling along the canal to work, I often felt it was like living in Paris. It was so perfect because it gave me the flexibility to be in the city or work from my county home or on the road whatever worked best for me.

Then in one sudden moment, my life changed tracks.

It happens. Sometimes we decide to change direction in our lives. That’s what I had done by changing directions from entrepreneur to corporate life. And sometimes, life decides for you. This was such a moment.

I had a car accident. It didn’t involve another vehicle. No. I collided with a deer. This happened at dusk, at highway speed on a single-lane, two-way country road.

I’ve come onto some ugly and bloody scenes in my life and at the time, I described this event as the most horrific experience of my life. It was different from “coming onto a scene” after the fact because I was responsible for killing a deer. Plus, the added danger to my life. I had no safe way out.

This was the event that triggered my PTSD.

It was embarrassing. Humiliating. I didn’t want to talk about it with anyone because of the shame I felt. Yes, I had a long history of trauma but I had done the integration work and I had transformed from a victim state of mind and survival mode to feeling truly blessed and thriving. Then, BAM!

I switched back into survival mode. I disassociated. I operated on autopilot but that was sketchy at best. I was numbed out and paralyzed to think for myself and all my inner resources, my coping mechanisms were useless to me. I couldn’t work. Over time, my marriage broke down and I lost my support system. I had to find a new way of being in the world.

It was a role reversal. From a successful life coach to being on the other side of the table, again!

Sometimes a single life event can be so intense that it can program and trigger a disease, including mental illness.

I was ashamed to think that this experience could have this kind of impact on me after all I had been through. I thought I was made of stronger stuff! It’s as if I had forgotten all my knowledge of the nature of disease.

Yes, this event triggered my PTSD but it was not the event that made me prone to PTSD.

We all carry life experiences in us, especially those from early childhood when we are completely open to everything and absorbing life without the ability, yet, to filter what information is and isn’t important, or who to trust or distrust, or to discern truth from fiction. Early childhood is the age of innocence and discovery.

I didn’t realize at the time how I had become frozen in a moment of time and it wasn’t the car accident that was impairing my ability to make decisions. No, it had to do with being raped as a toddler.

That was the first time I saw something ugly and bloody. Me! I had no safe way out and my life had been threatened. And I felt responsible for what happened to me. I had disobeyed my mother therefore I deserved what happened to me. I blamed myself for what happened just as I was blaming myself for killing the dear.

But here’s my mini-maxi schizophrenia, the moment of time my mind was frozen in was the “wrong” moment. It wasn’t the rape that my mind focused on. No, it focused on what happened BEFORE and AFTER the trauma because it’s how the mind protects itself from trauma. When something is too much for the mind to process, it gets stored in the body. In this case the amygdala.

Why do we second guess ourselves is because we are giving our authority over to our minds and not trusting the messages we get from our bodies. Our mind is never our inner authority!

I blamed myself because I disobeyed my mother and went where I didn’t belong. I blamed my inability to make good decisions to keep me safe.

Despite therapy, it wasn’t until I discovered Human Design and started living according to my strategy and authority that I was able to overcome PTSD. This transformation took time but the magic of HD is how you can “work on yourself” without “working on yourself”. YOUR truth gets revealed simply by being yourself. With every decision you make using your correct inner authority, you shed the layers of conditioning and patterns of trauma.

Grieving happened naturally, in short bursts of sudden discharges of emotions. HD allowed me to shed my shame and give myself forgiveness.

Of course, I had other layers of conditioning going on in that traumatic event that played with my mind’s decision-making process.

There was a need for attachment (gate 40).
There was the need to feel valued (undefined Ego Center).
There was the desire to avoid conflict (undefined Solar Plexus Center).
There was a compulsion for attention (undefined Throat Center).

But all of that melted away when I followed my HD.

Learning that I had Sacral authority gave me my power back. It is significant to understand that this is the very energy center that experienced the trauma and robbed me of my power. Without my connection to my inner authority, I was forced to rely on my mind to make decisions.

When you make decisions from your mind, you aren’t living your life because there is a divine plan for each of us written in our DNA. Life will keep trying to give you course corrections until you figure it out.

With time and using my power, my authority correctly dissolved the mental barriers that prevented me from seeing the truth.

It wasn’t that I had made a BAD DECISION as a toddler when I disobeyed my mother and therefore shouldn’t trust my ability to make decisions. A significant component of PSTD is this inability to TRUST - to trust yourself and to trust the world.

Now that I understand what it is to have Sacral authority, I’m able to distinguish that I was correctly following my inner authority because that wasn’t the decision that caused me harm.

The moment that caused me harm was when I disobeyed my inner authority. My Sacral very clearly gave me the signal to run but I disregarded it because I was so young and hadn’t been given permission to use my authority. Everyone had authority over me and at that age, personal boundaries didn’t exist. That traumatic memory no longer makes me feel helpless. Instead, it empowers me. I know without a doubt to trust my authority to keep me safe and I can recognize the difference between my inner authority and my mind trying to be my authority.

Therapy doesn’t work when you’re focused on addressing only the trigger event. This is why it’s so important to have the right coach by your side, to ask you those deeper questions. The kind of questions you avoid asking yourself. You have to get to the root of the trauma if you want to heal. Healing can happen organically when you follow your strategy and authority but without a coach, I can guarantee, it will take longer.

Even if you don’t remember your childhood, your body remembers. Think of it this way, your memories have been recorded on a drive but it has sat on a shelf and you don’t even remember what has been stored there. Then something happens in your life that plugs that drive back in and there’s this echo from the past but it’s playing out in your subconscious.

Your subconscious is everything stored in your body, organically. It never leaves the body because even as cells die, before they die, they reproduce a sister cell that contains all the same information. One single cell of your body is like a hologram of your entire being.

Only when you bring that stored information from the subconscious to the conscious mind can that program be updated and transformed = HEALED. Otherwise, you too will have some part of you frozen in a moment in time and you will feel incomplete until you re-integrate with it.

I have to thank Susan J. Hilger for her thought-provoking post that inspired my article today. She asked, “…why do we second guess our feelings, thoughts, and choices? Why do we know what we want or need to do, and hesitate to make the best choice?”

My answer to this is because your body knows it can’t TRUST your mind to make decisions. How can you trust your mind when your mind hides the truth from you (mini-maxi schizophrenia)? This hesitation happens because you’re unsure of what your true inner authority is. Maybe it suffered a trauma like mine did or maybe it’s fully unconscious in your design. The most common reason for this hesitation is because when you are not taught to follow your authority in childhood you cannot escape the conditioning of others. Again, this is where a coach helps guide you back to your inner wisdom.

Feel free to check out Susan’s newsletter, Heart Speak by Susan of Agile Hearts. If you feel drawn to her, she is also a coach, if you’re looking for coaching.

Stay tuned for a new feature I will be offering to my subscribers soon.

Remember, I have no desire to be your authority. My intention with this newsletter is to inspire self-empowerment and for you to take back your authority. To do so it starts with identifying your patterns of conditioning. I hope this article gave you an Ah-ha moment about yourself. If you are so inclined, please share your thoughts or questions as they may inspire someone else.

Mental Health Matters by Grace Dakini

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