Rupture And Repair

Your mind can understand what happened and still feel hijacked by it. That’s the reality of rupture and repair, and it’s why I keep coming back to the nervous system. When a relationship breaks, a family bond strains, or grief hits out of nowhere, the hardest part isn’t always the story. It’s the body reliving the charge through triggers, contraction, panic, numbness, or sudden tears that make no sense on paper. 

I share a deeply personal pattern I couldn’t explain at first: every year, like clockwork, I’d cry through the same early-fall window and feel like something was wrong with me. The truth was simpler and more haunting my nervous system was remembering my mother’s death through implicit trauma memory, seasonal cues, and anniversary grief. From there, I talk about what somatic healing has taught me: trauma is what happens inside our physiology when an experience overwhelms our capacity to process, and repair starts when we help the body feel safe enough to complete what got interrupted. 

We also get practical about nervous system regulation and resourcing. I walk through what it means to name your safe people and safe spaces, and to lean on tools like breath, movement, nature, creativity, spirituality, music, pets, and journaling. Repair doesn’t mean forgetting or pretending the rupture didn’t matter. It means integration: the story softens, the body stops bracing, and there’s room for love alongside grief and unanswered questions. 

If you’re in a rupture right now with another person, with someone who has passed, or with a part of yourself, I hope this brings you relief and a next step you can actually feel. Subscribe, share this with a friend who’s carrying quiet grief, and leave a review if it resonates. What does your body keep remembering that your mind keeps minimizing?

Transcript

Welcome And The Idea Of Repair

0:01

Hello and welcome back to the Spiritual Shit Show. My name is Julie Nguyen, and today I wanna talk to you about this idea of rupture and repair. I'm realizing in my own personal experience, I. Understand rupture. There have been so many times in my life where I have experienced rupture breaks within relationships, estrangement from family members, hardships in marriage, relationships that just break apart and. That can be painful. You know when you're invested into somebody and there's a rupture, and that investment now is broken and there's blame and there's miscommunication. All of this is part of the human experience, but what we don't talk about enough is repair and how can you land in repair and something that. I'm learning in my own

Rupture Lives In The Body

1:00

healing journey is that rupture does not live in the mind. We can of course, make sense of it in the mind, but the rupture actually lives in the body, which is why sometimes it can be so hard to overcome and why we experience triggers. I spent a year in a really beautiful somatic practitioner training, and one of the core things we learned over and over again was how to resource the nervous system, how to help the body feel safe, how to support regulation, how to recognize when the nervous system is overwhelmed, and how to gently guide it. Back towards stability, and something that was so fascinating to me because it was so close to my own story, is learning how trauma can live in the body long after the event has passed. this is why we can think of a memory and feel those emotions again, or we can meet up against the person that harmed us and feel triggered. Trauma is what happens inside our nervous system. When an experience overwhelms our capacity to process it, meaning the body holds the imprint, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes symbolically, sometimes seasonally.

Anniversary Grief And Implicit Memory

2:17

I'll tell a quick story. When I was 26, I remember thinking I was going fucking crazy because every single year. From about September to October, I would cry and I didn't know why. I remember one time I was at the dance studio and we had a guest choreographer in town, and after classes we were gonna go to a movie, and I was gonna drive separately because I think I had to close up the studio first, and I was stopping to get gas and I'm pumping gas and I am crying. nothing. Was wrong. Nothing happened. I just was standing there feeling like a psychopath, pumping gas and crying my eyes out. And then in that same stretch of time, I remember driving down the highway. And again, just like something came over me and I just began crying. And I remember calling my sister and saying, I just don't know what's wrong with me. I can't stop crying, but nothing's wrong. And she said, you know, you do this every year. And I said, what do you mean? She said, you cry at the same time every year. And I think it's your body remembering what happened to you oh so long ago. But you cry literally. The month that mom passed away, and I think that's what it is. And then suddenly everything made sense to me. My nervous system was remembering something that my conscious mind was not actively thinking about. My body was grieving on a timeline. I wasn't consciously tracking. Trauma memory is often implicit. It lives in sensation, emotion, timing, physiology. The nervous system remembers anniversaries. I want you to remember this. The nervous system remembers anniversaries, smells, seasons, light, temperature, music places. For me, when the loss of my mother happened, it was sudden. It was shocking. It was a rupture in the deepest sense. Not only losing my mom, but losing the opportunity to know her as an adult, to ask her questions, to understand who she was as a woman. I never really got to know what made her laugh, what made her mad, what made her sad, what she struggled with. There was a part of me that deeply wanted to understand her humanity and And when I would ask my family members about her, they would just say she was perfect. She was amazing. She was the kindest person ever. She was wonderful. You could never say a bad thing about her, And that didn't help me get to know her because I wanted to know what made her human. I didn't wanna know her perfection. I wanted to know her story. So when I was 26, and I had this realization that I was grieving every year and I was not in fact going crazy, but that my nervous system, the physiology of who I am, was just remembering this rupture. Number one, I didn't wanna be doing this every year. Number two, There was an opportunity for me to explore this rupture a little bit deeper, to allow the grief that maybe hadn't been processed through my entire system to maybe begin to process this rupture. So

Cemetery Visit And Completion

5:38

at this particular time, I went back to Ohio where my mom is buried, and I remember walking. And so here's a little angelic story. I remember walking. Through the cemetery. I haven't visited for years. I haven't been there for years, and I'm crying because I'm making this whole adventure to go, to clean up my grief around my mom. So I'm not crying every September, October. I just wanna move on with my life. So I fly home, go to the cemetery with the intention of like crying. I don't know, I just wanted to, to process the grief. And I'm walking around and I'm noticing all of these other gravestones on the ground and I'm like, whoa. There is been a lot of people who have died and I cannot find the gravestone of my mom. I know she's in this area of the cemetery, but dang. There's been a lot of people who've been, added to this little cemetery friend group here. So I'm crying, I'm kind of laughing now too, wandering around trying to find it and then I hear, can I help you? And I turned around and I was embarrassed 'cause I was crying and I was like, no, I'm okay. And this, it was a man. And he said, well, I work here, I can help you. locate who you're looking for. And so I gave this man my, my mother's name. He walked me over to the grave site and no lie, I turn around to say thank you, and he was gone. And I was like, I think that's my mom's way of helping me. She sent a quick little angel. So anyway, I stood there looking and I was like, whoa, I just think I had an angelic encounter. Then I came back to do my business, which is to cry and to grieve. I laid there on the gravestone, saying I'm just, all the tears that I have inside of me, I just wanna cry. I wanted to allow whatever needed to move inside of me to move because what I understand now through somatic work is when grief does not get to fully move through the nervous system, it can stay stored, and then it resurfaces when the body senses something familiar. Healing involves allowing the nervous system to complete the stress response that was interrupted. It's important that we allow the body to process what it could not process and or understand at the time, and that moment at the grave felt like completion, a layer of completion. And then the beautiful part was that led me on a quest to understand my mom more fully, to understand her humanity, to talk to people who knew her. I asked questions, what was she like? What did she struggle with? What did she care about? And then.

Journaling And Ongoing Connection

8:17

Something else really cool happened because I began journaling about my life. So at this time in my life, if you've been following the story up until this point, one of the ruptures was leaving my business. And the huge rupture that that had in my life around identity and finances and family and, whole heaps of other things, which is also why I created the Spiritual Shit Show podcast because my life at the time was such a shit show. And I was doing so much internal healing work. I was doing so much spiritual work. So to understand who I am and to understand my life and to desperately try to achieve some sort of peace, I began journaling and I started from birth, and then every day I was gonna journal like. My life, like who I was when I was born. Then one years old, two years old, all the way up until, I think at this time I was probably 40, 40 something. And then my mom started writing through me and she was telling me things, sharing stories, sharing feelings, sharing things that I couldn't have logically known. And a part of me wondered, is this my imagination or is this connection. So I began to reach out to people who knew her well and shared what was coming through. And so one of her friends, I said, you know, this is gonna sound weird. but my mom has been coming in through these journaled writings and I wanna validate if this is accurate or if it's just my imagination. So I began to tell my mom's friend. what my mom was telling me in these journaled writings. And she paused. and she said, you're absolutely correct. Like she did feel all of those things. we had many late night talks when she would stay at my house and we did what friends did, which was talked through it and. And what I loved about this and what I am returning to, again as I'm speaking this podcast out as I'm sharing this podcast, is we are not separate from our loved ones. There are ways that connection can always continue energetically, emotionally, somatically, even when there has been rupture, even when there has been loss.

Resourcing And Nervous System Safety

10:45

And here's where I want to bring it back to the nervous system, because even though my mom is no longer physically here, there has still been rupture inside of my body there. Like last week I spent three days crying. Because there is still grief inside of my nervous system, and like I've shared, there's moments of anger, there's moments of longing. There's moments of feeling the absence of something that other people have, seeing friends with their mother, seeing people call their mom, having parents still alive, seeing the relationships that are there within family units that I just don't have. And I notice that activation in my body, that contraction, that sadness, this protest even. And this is where somatic healing becomes so powerful because repair does not always happen externally. Repair happens internally. Through the nervous system, through allowing the body to feel what it feels like to feel safe or have space enough to allow this grief or the sadness or the anger or the confusion to move. And when we allow it to move, it tends to soften, and then we can stay curious about as this emotion, the grief, the anger, the sadness, the confusion, the. frustration, the, the panic, the trauma story. If we allow it to move, then there's space for something else to emerge maybe, and maybe through this space and willingness for something to move within us, then the story itself can evolve. The nervous system is always moving toward regulation. When it has the right support. In your experience, in your healing journey, in your story, making sure that you have the right support is so important, and part of that support is resourcing. Resourcing might include knowing who your supportive relationships are or you know, how you connect to nature or movement or creativity or breath or spirituality or journaling or music or your pets. Being able to name your safe people and your safe environments. Being able to know the things that you can return to, either physically or mentally, or in your imagination, that will bring you back to a sense of regulation. Resourcing also helps the nervous system to remember, I am safe now. Repair in a somatic sense means that the body no longer feels stuck in the moment of rupture and the body can recognize that was then. This is now, and this is the space I personally am in, is reminding myself that that was then, and this is now, this is now, this is now.

What Repair Means Over Time

13:45

And what continued repair can begin to happen now. Where the repair means that the nervous system is no longer reliving the past in the present moment, that repair means the emotional charge has softened. Whew. That is hard because that means you have to revisit the story to allow anything that hasn't been processed to process through. And what I find so meaningful in all of this is that repair does not mean forgetting. And repair does not mean shutting down or cutting off or pushing away. That repair does not mean that the rupture never mattered or the rupture didn't happen. Repair means that the nervous system has integrated the experience. That the story is no longer frozen, that the body is no longer bracing in the same way or waiting to be triggered, that the body is no longer orienting to these people or spaces or experiences that once triggered abandonment, betrayal, trauma. The story is no longer frozen. The body is no longer bracing. The same way repair allows more room for love, even alongside grief, even alongside complexity, even alongside unanswered questions. And as I always say. It takes time. It takes time. Repair work takes time. Rupture can happen in a split second, and repair takes time. Healing is not just cognitive. Healing is experiential. Healing is felt. Healing involves allowing the body to complete what it needs to complete. Again, allowing the emotion to move, allowing connection to evolve, allowing meaning to emerge over time. So if you're navigating rupture right now, whether with another person or with someone who has passed or with a part of yourself, know this, your nervous system is not broken, your response makes sense. Your body is trying to protect you, and with enough gentleness, with enough support, with enough breath, with enough compassion, repair is possible, Sometimes the repair happens slowly and that it was okay. It requires tenderness and rest. Sometimes the repair happens quietly, and sometimes it happens in ways we never expected. But I want you to remember that the nervous system, you, the universe, is always moving towards the direction of healing, towards integration, towards wholeness, and that is something that we can trust. Even when the timeline is unclear of when we'll move through this when we'll stop feeling this way, even when the story is unfolding at a timeline, that it is annoying to you. Continue to remind yourself that repair is possible. Everything. The soul of who you are, the universe, loving frequencies, everything is always moving towards love, not away towards love, and many times repair begins in the body. I also wanna say leave space for repair. In my journey, I can see that my own suffering. Was created by my stubbornness to not let it go, to want the other person to, because I, my desire to have my pain witnessed was so strong. I also didn't know what it's like. Nobody talked to me about what repair is. It's easy for us to say, cut it off. It's easy to say, let it go. It's easy to, for us to say, go no contact. But I question these things now because under this idea that energy is always moving towards love, how can we orient to love? How can we orient towards repair and allowing the nervous system to be strong enough and stable enough to be able to experience what repair could be like. Can we settle in to repair and safety and or safety and repair? The journey, the part of the journey I'm in is what does love look like and really realizing that love is, is the hardest part. It's easy to stay angry. It's easy to cut off. It's easy to push away. It's easy to, to, it's easy. to orient towards love. And forgiveness and radical self-acceptance, that shit's hard, y'all. It is really hard. But wherever you are first, begin to think about, learn about your nervous system. And begin to question how regulated your nervous system is. And I think that's it for now.

Gentle Closing And Next Steps

19:47

I'll share more about the nervous system, give tips and tools on nervous system regulation, and maybe a quick little meditation or somatic work that you can do at home just to begin to attune to your ability to befriend and be with and understand and notice your own regulation. And then get curious about, wow, I do have some stories still living in my body. How can I get them to move and how can I allow myself to feel safe enough for these things to move through? And what does that look like? Alright, y'all, thank you for being here. Thank you for allowing to share. Thank you for allowing me to share so many parts of myself in this space where I honor and embody the opportunity for personal and soulful self-expression. Till next time, I.