I got a piece of pretty striking advice over the Mid-Autumn Holiday, which was that for other people to be good to you you had to be good to them first. It was a message that I had often received from my grandma, but I hadn’t noticed her kindness before this.
But we did have a shocking time at Mid-Autumn Festival. It wasn’t so much a good time as a really sad time. I realised at this time why I had such a hard time self-regulating. It had something to do with the nervous system always having been shot when I was growing up. The many traumas and facets that had happened to a child, that should never have happened. One thing I read was about the overwhelm of the nervous system, which can cause long-term damages. But what I’ve found is that I was constantly in need of rectifying this nervous system because things had gotten so dire and drastic, and the best way to do this was to use tools for self-soothing, to stop feeling the pain.
What happens when a child’s nervous system is overwhelmed? And how does she feel about herself when it is being overwhelmed? What about her own sense of self, who she is in the world and where her place is in it? And perhaps if I ever became sensitive as a child or a person, it was they who made me this way.