My body can’t handle stress

I’ve been anxious lately. And then decided it was a good idea to add to that and look at buying a house (not a bad thing, but...) Not just any house. A house that needs TONS of work, cause that’s a good idea.

I read somewhere recently that having lived through trauma, your body confuses butterflies (excitement) with red flags (stress/anxiety). I thought I was excited at the thought of this fixer upper.

My body has a physical reaction to emotions, mostly heavy ones. At the end of the day yesterday I could barely take it; my shoulders were aching, my neck was stiff, my hips were throbbing. I could not get comfortable in bed. I got up every 45 minutes because it was too intense.

When I went back to bed for the nth time, I was laying there thinking about the fixer upper and realized that it was stressing me out. I wasn’t excited, I was freaking. And then I realized that I was clenching my jaw. My neck was stiff. My shoulders were flexed. I was squeezing my hips. Once I kind of clued into this, I consciously relaxed my jaw and shoulders, set myself up on a heating pad and finally fell asleep.

I think 90% of my chronic pain in emotional. The problem is I don’t always know what the emotion is, or how to deal with it, so I suffer. I suffer less now compared to last year, but when it hits, it hits hard!

Even as a kid I had a lot of pain. I had an unstable childhood, and my legs would kill me a lot at night. Everyone said it was growing pains, but they were too intense and lasted too long now that I think about it. I obviously didn’t feel like I could communicate my feelings, and nobody was asking the little kids anyways, so I guess I stored them. When it got too much, I had pain. And now unknowingly my body does the same thing. Well, not unknowingly anymore.