The Mountain Is You

could be and should be if only things were different, if only everything
would click.
That’s why life gives us this kind of insurance. Sometimes, it pulls away
from us what is wrong for us when we are not willing to see it for ourselves.
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Because the truth is that we do not want what is not right for us; we are
simply attached to it. We are simply afraid.
We are simply stuck in the assumption that nothing better will replace it,
that its absence will open up a well of endless, infinite suffering for which

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there will be no solution. We do not want what is not right for us; we are
just scared to let go of what we believe will make us secure.
The funny part is there is nothing that makes us more insecure than hanging
around what isn’t right for us. There’s nothing that will collapse faster.
There’s nothing that will bring us inner turmoil quite like it.
What is not right for you will never remain in your life, and not because
there are forces beyond us navigating the minutiae of our everyday lives.
What is not right for you will not remain with you because deep down, you
know it’s not right. You are the one who eventually lets go, sees reality, and
walks away. You are the one resisting, you are the one holding back, you
are the one concocting healing fantasies about how great it will be when
you force something wrong to finally be right.
What is not right for you does not remain with you because you don’t want
it, and so you don’t choose it. You step away when you are ready, you let go
when you are able, and you realize, all along, that all you were really in
love with was a little trick of the light that made you feel safe.
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R E C O V E R I N G F R O M
E M O T I O N A L T R A U M A
You might think trauma is in your head in the metaphorical sense. It is
actually in your body in the literal sense.
Trauma is what happens when something scares you and you do not get
over that fear. If you do not resolve or

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“defeat” it, you get into, and remain in, a sustained state of fight-or-flight,
which is essentially the human panic response for survival.
Trauma is the experience of disconnecting from a fundamental feeling of
safety. Unless you are able to reestablish that connection, a particularly
destructive bias distorts your worldview: You become hypersensitive, which
means that you will ascribe intent, overthink, overreact, become triggered
by innocuous stimuli, personalize neutral situations, and remain in a mental
“combat mode.”
After experiencing trauma, your brain will rewire itself temporarily to seek
out the potential “threat” in anything, which makes it very difficult to both
move on from the initial problem and then not to develop a victim complex.
After all, your brain is literally trying to show you every imaginable way
the world could be “out to get you.”
This is why exposure is so effective as a treatment for fear or anxiety. By
gradually reintroducing the stressor into someone’s life—and showing them
that they are able to handle
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it—the brain is able to return to a neutral state because a feeling of control
and security is being reestablished.
This is also why people who have stronger social ties and mental resilience
prior to a traumatic event are more likely to use the event as a catalyst for
self-reflection, growth, compassion, and healing as opposed to self-
destruction.
They had multiple ties to that essential feeling of “safety,” so even if one
was eroded or severed, others still were there to support them.

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What happens to your brain after a traumatic event?
Neurologically, we process stress in three parts of the brain.13
The first is the amygdala, the second is the hippocampus, and the third is
the prefrontal cortex. Individuals suffering from post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) have a smaller hippocampus (the center of emotion and
memory), increased amygdala function (the center of rumination and
creativity), and decreased medial prefrontal/anterior cingulate function (the
center that governs complex behaviors like planning and self-development).
It becomes clear, then, why trauma tends to have the following impact on
us:
• Our brains stop processing memory fully, leaving us with fragments of
what happened, sometimes con-tributing to the feeling of disassociation.
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• Our ability to manage a range of emotions decreases.
• We become stifled and stuck, have trouble planning for the future, and our
self-development and actualization come to a halt.
• When we enter a state of fight-or-flight, our body literally ceases any
advanced function that is not necessary for our survival. The body’s main
receptors become extremely sensitive and reactive to stimuli.
This is a beautiful and essential part of being human; it’s kept us alive as a
species. However, it is not a state that is meant to be sustained.
Centuries ago, when we were at the lower rung of actualization, or the
bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy,14 what concerned us most was physical

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survival. Today, our focus is primarily on self-actualization and
meaningfulness and trying to feel “safe” through social acceptance, money,
or mental acuity.
With all of this grey area, it seems obvious that more people would be
mentally and emotionally struggling than they did prior, despite having
more physical challenges to overcome.
Recovery comes down to something very simple, which is restoring the
feeling of one’s safety.
However, the most important part of this restoration is
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that you must reestablish a feeling of safety in the exact area of life that
traumatized you.
Often, if someone is traumatized by a relationship they had when they were
young, they will reinvest that energy into valuing being attractive or
successful. To them, they believe that if they are “good enough,” they can
never be denied or rejected again. However, we all know this is not how
this works. It actually makes us have unhealthy and destructive attachments
to these things.
If we are traumatized by a relationship, we restore the feeling of safety by
working on other healthy, safe relationships.
If we are traumatized by money, we restore the feeling of safety by doing
what we must to ensure we have enough and by saving for an emergency
expense.

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If we are traumatized by job loss, we restore the feeling of safety by having
a backup plan or a side gig in line in case it were to happen again.
If we are traumatized by being bullied, we restore the feeling of safety by
finding new friends.
What most people try to do is overcompensate in an area of life that is not
the real problem. For example, if they struggled in relationships, they hoard
money to keep themselves feeling “safe.” Of course, this is always futile,
because the problem never gets solved.
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Your trauma is not “in your head”; it is literally a changed state in your
brain, and the only way you will help your body to return to its actual state
is by recreating the feeling of safety that allows you to “turn off ” survival
mode and return to normal life.
R E L E A S I N G E M O T I O N A L B A C K L O G
Your emotional backlog is like your email inbox.
It might be a simple analogy, but it’s an effective one.
When you experience emotions, it’s as though you’re getting little messages
from your body stacking up one at a time. If you don’t ever open them, you
end up 1,000+
notifications deep, totally overlooking crucial information and important
insights that you need to move your life forward. At the same time, you
can’t sit around all day and respond to every message just as it comes up;
you’d never get anything done.

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It is a mistake to assume that emotions are optional experiences. They are
not. But we are masters of avoiding our feelings, and we do it in so many
ways. Often, we rely on substances that physically numb us, projections and
judgments that place the attention on someone else’s faults as opposed to
our own, all kinds of other worldly pursuits, and on the most basic level,
tensing our bodies up so efficiently that we are rendered incapable of
feeling.
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Psychologically, you probably know that this doesn’t work for long. The
backlog starts to jam eventually. You are forced to sit and be still and sleep
and cry and feel it all.
I wish there were some poetic, mystical truth to share here, but there isn’t.
There is only your anatomy, the physiology of what’s happening inside you
when you feel.
Emotions are physical experiences. We flush our bodies of everything, and
regularly so. We defecate, we sweat, we cry, we literally shed our entire
skin once a month.
Feelings are no different; they are experiences that must likewise be
released.
When not felt, emotions become embodied. They become literally stuck in
your body. This is because they have something called a motor component,
which means that the minute they begin—before you can suppress or ignore
them—they create a micro-muscular activation.
Our bodies respond instantaneously.

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We often store pain and tension in the area of the body where an expression
began but was never fully materialized.
This is because, neurologically speaking, the part of your brain that
regulates emotions, the anterior cingulate, is next to the premotor area,
which means that when a feeling is processed, it immediately begins to
generate a physical, bodied response. The premotor area connects to
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the motor cortex and then spans back into the specific muscles that are
going to express the emotion.
Which muscles express which emotion? Well, it depends.
We have a lot of language that clues us into where we have physical
reactions to emotions. We often feel fear in our stomachs (think of a
nervous stomach, or a “gut instinct”) and heartache in our chests (that’s
where the whole “broken heart” thing comes from), stress and anxiety in
our shoulders (think of the “weight of the world on your shoulders”), and
relationship problems in the neck (think “they are a pain in the neck”).
But it actually goes even deeper than this. Let’s say that someone did
something to you that crossed a boundary, and your instinct was to yell at
them. However, because you understood it was not effective to literally
scream, you held back. Though this may have been the right thing to do in
the moment, your body may be storing residual tension in the neck or throat
area. In other cases, people can experience psychosomatic effects of their
emotions that are a bit more abstract, such as pain in their knees or feet
when they are traumatized by “moving forward” in their lives, and so on.

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The truth is that our bodies are speaking to us in voiceless symbols. If we
can learn to interpret what they are saying, we can heal ourselves in an
entirely new way.
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So you know that emotions sometimes get stored in your body when they
are not fully expressed. Be this as it is, how do we begin to flush ourselves
from them?
There are a number of strategies that you can use to do this, and what
matters is that it’s effective for you. There is no one-size-fits-all, but there
are a few options that tend to work well for most people, particularly when
they are used in tandem.