When Thinking Became My Way of Surviving

I learned something incredibly significant about trauma this past weekend from playing paintball at a team outing (of all things).

There was a time when I believed healing was something you could solve.

Not through time. Not through grief. Not through feeling.

Through understanding.

But this experience pointed to something completely different…that maybe, just maybe, I had gotten it all wrong.

When I left my abusive relationship, I didn't cry as much as I expected to.

Instead, I researched. I woke up every morning with another question.

How did this happen? Why didn't I see it sooner? Why did I stay?

Most importantly...

How do I make sure this never happens again?

At the time, I thought I was healing. Looking back, I think I was trying to negotiate with uncertainty.

If I could understand every detail, every red flag, manipulation tactic, attachment style, psychological theory, etc. Then maybe I'd never have to experience that kind of pain again.

So I read. Constantly. I wasn't reading because I enjoyed psychology. I was reading because I thought information could replace safety.

People have always described me as someone who thinks deeply. After those relationships, though, thinking became something else. It became survival.

Friends would tell me I was reading too much into things. That I took comments too personally. That I assumed intentions people probably didn't have.

At the time, those comments hurt. They made me wonder whether something was fundamentally wrong with the way I experienced the world. Now I think they were noticing something real. Just not understanding why it was happening.

When you've lived through a relationship where your emotional safety depended on reading another person's moods, your brain gets very, very good at looking for patterns.

A slight shift in someone's tone. A delayed response to a text. A facial expression that lasts half a second. Someone becoming quieter than usual. Someone becoming kinder than usual. Your mind starts collecting evidence long before you're aware you're doing it. Not because you're trying to judge people. Because you're trying to predict them.

Prediction feels safer than surprise.

I started noticing this everywhere. Whenever I walked into a room full of people I didn't know, I didn't introduce myself first. I observed.

Who interrupted people? Who asked questions? Who seemed genuinely interested in others? Who made people laugh? Who complained about people when they weren't around? Who seemed emotionally consistent?

I didn't realize it then, but I wasn't simply learning about people. I was trying to answer a question my nervous system kept asking.

Am I safe here?

Only after I felt reasonably confident in the answer would I begin relaxing enough to be myself and that was a rare occurrence.

The same thing happened with new experiences. I slowly stopped doing things that made me uncomfortable. Not because I wasn't adventurous but because my body already felt overwhelmed most of the time.

People often imagine trauma as someone who's afraid of everything. That wasn't me.

From the outside, I probably looked thoughtful, reserved, careful. Inside, my nervous system was treating uncertainty as something to prepare for.

Over time, without ever making a conscious decision, my comfort zone became smaller.

Then something unexpected happened. I started a new job. I thought I was there to make videos. Instead, I found myself learning about who I had become.

One of my mentors had a way of noticing patterns in people. She didn't criticize me. She was curious.

She noticed how often I apologized, how hesitant I was to share ideas before I was certain they were good, how much time I spent thinking before acting, how uncomfortable I was with uncertainty.

She would ask questions I had never considered. Not because she thought I was broken. Because she knew I could grow.

For the first time in a long time, someone wasn't asking me to change. They were encouraging me to understand myself.

One specific conversation we had, changed everything.

Instead of asking,

"What's wrong with me?"

I started asking,

"What happened to me?"

I can't explain how much compassion that single question created. If my patterns were adaptations, then maybe they weren't flaws.

Maybe they had once kept me alive. That realization gave me something I hadn't felt in a long time.

Hope.

Not hope that I could become the person I used to be. Hope that I could become someone new. Someone who wasn't controlled by fear.

So I made a quiet promise to myself that night. Whenever opportunities came along that scared me, I would start saying yes. Not because my fear disappeared but because I wanted to prove to myself that my life didn't have to keep shrinking.

Which is how I ended up paint-balling with a bunch of Navy Seals disguised as warehouse workers on a Friday night.

Everyone else seemed really excited about going. I tried to talk myself out of it while also remembering the promise I had just made to myself and telling myself that this would be good for me.

"You'll probably enjoy it once you get started."

"Everyone's nervous their first time."

"This is exactly the kind of thing you've been trying to do more of."

Then I was standing on the field, the game had already started and I was terrified. People were intentionally aiming at me. Every loud pop made my shoulders tense. I never knew where the next shot would come from. I found myself hiding behind barriers, trying to predict everyone's movements before they happened.

I would end each round trying to catch my breath, not because I had physically exerted myself but because the panic was never-ending. My nervous system was dialed to max volume and I couldn’t seemingly calm down or be present. Logically, I knew I was safe. Emotionally however, my body wasn't responding to logic. It was responding to familiarity.

I remember at one point, one of my teammates came up behind me and startled me so badly that he became concerned that maybe I was a little bit too scared of what was logically happening around me. He wasn’t wrong either, I snapped out of it for a second and could see it too but eventually, I was right back in that heightened state.

On my drive home, I judged every single one of my co-workers for enjoying something so brutal. I felt like the odd one out. I blamed them for putting me through that. I told myself I would never be able to understand them. I was subconsciously victimizing myself instead of feeling my emotions and being logical. I could not get myself to calm down. I later researched why paint balling was psychologically “team-building” because when I got home and saw my bruises, I kept reliving the fear I felt. Over and over again.

That night, I had terrible nightmares about being shot at. The next morning, I woke up with a limp and a bruise on my leg that made my stomach turn and my head spin. I could not stop thinking to myself:

Why did everyone else have fun while I felt like I had survived something?'

At first, I did what I always do. I analyzed it. Maybe I was just too sensitive, or maybe I wasn't competitive enough or not the athlete I used to be. Maybe it really was because I simply didn't like paintball like I had originally assumed before.

But the more I reflected, the more I realized something deeper might have happened. The game hadn't traumatized me.

It had exposed my nervous system.

For everyone else, being shot with a paintball was playful. For me, intentional pain carried a completely different emotional meaning. It wasn't the bruises that stayed with me. It was the anticipation. Never knowing when the next hit would come. Constantly scanning, preparing, waiting. Those feelings were familiar.

Not because paintball was abuse. It wasn't. But because my body recognized the experience of living in anticipation, something I had lived in for several years of my life.

I had spent 3 years trying to change the way I thought. Paintball showed me I hadn't yet changed the way my body felt.

That realization changed my understanding of healing.

For years, I'd believed recovery was mostly cognitive. Learn enough. Understand enough. Reframe enough. Think differently. But our nervous systems don't speak the language of logic. They speak the language of experience.

You can't always reason your body into feeling safe. Sometimes it has to experience safety over and over again before it begins to believe what your mind already knows. Maybe that's why healthy relationships matter so much. Maybe that's why consistency heals.

Maybe showing up, keeping your word, repairing after conflict, and creating emotional safety can literally reshape how someone experiences the world.

My world suddenly opened up a little wider.

I had taken a risk by trying something that scared me and in turn, had taken back a little piece of myself.

I know that I will still instinctively think deeply and ask a lot of questions, I actually love those qualities about myself. Now however, when I notice myself trying to analyze every possible outcome, I will always gently ask myself another question.

Am I trying to understand or am I trying to protect myself?

Sometimes the answer is both. And maybe that's okay. Because healing hasn't meant becoming less thoughtful. It has meant learning that I don't have to think my way to safety anymore.

Some things can only be learned by a nervous system that has finally been given permission to rest.