Getting To Know You, After Relational Trauma

Understanding Ourselves Before Trying to Change Ourselves

I wonder if anyone else awakens to a rediscovery of self as they come to the end of constant hypervigilance. I’ll stick to one example I spent several months coming back to and exploring: If I haven’t decided on, and likely prepped and prepared, dinner by noon, I probably won’t. I’ll just graze on raw plants and some sweets, keeping the kids’ dinner mostly raw and simple as well.

When I started analyzing this behavior, I realized my brain seems to make an extended morning commute from planning into execution. If everything is not already packed, prepared, and set before I make that transition, it cannot easily be incorporated later.

By early afternoon, my attention is fully invested in work or whatever task is needed, but usually work. Preparing a meal requires breaking concentration, changing gears, and rebuilding momentum afterward. I am not unwilling to eat; I am unwilling to interrupt deep work.

Try as I have throughout my 40-plus years of life, I cannot force myself to cook at six o’clock. I have to remove the decision before six o’clock arrives.

Every morning I prepare the day’s food. The smoothie is made. The fruit is washed. The salads are ready. When I’m hungry, I eat. When I’m immersed, I don’t have to think about it.

Coming to understand myself in this way has been liberating and has changed more than just the daily stress of dinner.

I have realized I function best when I make my decisions early in the day, then spend the rest of it executing them. The more meaningful my work becomes, the more valuable uninterrupted attention becomes. Every preventable decision competes with that.

I understand this is easier with older kids who also have schoolwork and independent tasks we can work on alongside one another—our very own coworker annex.

Understanding Your Habits Before Trying to Change Them

Instead of continuing to treat this pattern as something I needed to correct, I became curious about it. Once I understood what was actually happening, I could build a meaningful routine around the way I function while still taking care of the things that matter.

I feel like we have a tendency to spend our lives trying to change our habits without first understanding them.

That becomes particularly interesting to me because I am brand new to learning how to adult on my own so late in life. For perhaps the first time, I have the freedom to observe how I naturally function and build a life accordingly.

Learning to Love Yourself Before Loving Someone New

Yet I hope I won’t always be building a life for one.

If I were to remarry, another person’s natural rhythms, needs, and routines would have to become part of mine, just as mine would become part of theirs. I don’t think the answer would be abandoning what I have learned about myself to fit someone else’s life. It would be approaching that relationship with the same curiosity: learning how we each function and finding the places where mutual compromise allows us to build something healthy together.

I find it incredibly important that I remember loving another person well should not require returning to a habit of changing myself more readily than I expect them to change for me. Healthy love has room to consider both people.

Maybe that is part of the endgame of understanding ourselves in the first place. We aren't learning ourselves simply to make our own lives more comfortable. We are learning how to care for what God has entrusted to us so we can carry that understanding into the relationships we hope to build.

Self-Awareness Can Become Part of Deep Healing

My life was already telling me how my mind works. I want to first be sure the way I live honors God without compromise, and then have grace for the ways I naturally function that may differ from what I have convinced myself they should be.

I have found myself paying attention to when my thinking is clear, when my focus is strongest, and where friction consistently appears. Those patterns have become a blueprint for building a life that works with me instead of against me.

Productivity has flowed more freely as I’ve come to understand myself well enough to stop wasting energy fighting myself. More importantly, understanding has given me a kind of internal peace I am truly grateful for.

I hope we all give ourselves the grace to get to know ourselves again in a peaceful and mindful way after distortion and trauma. To understand our habits before deciding they need to change, to be considerate of our natural rhythms and needs, and eventually to bring that healthier understanding of ourselves into the way we love other people.

There is something beautiful about reaching a place where even growth no longer has to begin with a fight. 🤍