The Lighthouse: Trusting That the Light Will Return

In this episode of Untamed Voices, Lizzi explores the two stories held by every harbor: the story of the ships searching for light and the story of the lighthouse that remains.

Through personal reflection, trauma-informed neuroscience, and resilience-based insight, she examines why being deeply seen can feel both life-giving and terrifying—especially for those who learned early that love, safety, and connection could disappear without warning. She shares how emotional starvation can create a longing that feels impossible to fill, why hypervigilance can be mistaken for empathy, and how the fear of being “too much” can lead us to monitor our needs and manage abandonment instead of learning true regulation.

This episode also speaks directly to therapists, parents, helpers, caregivers, and anyone whose heart naturally bends toward people in pain. Lizzi reflects on the difference between witnessing and rescuing, supporting and over-functioning, and becoming a steady presence without abandoning your own shore.

At its heart, this is an episode about learning that healthy love does not have to remain fixed on us to remain faithful. It turns. It returns. And through enough consistent experiences, we begin to realize that the light we spent our lives searching for has been waiting within us all along.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Hello everyone and welcome back as always to Untamed Voices. Thank you for being here. I really appreciate just, you know, having a sounding board for all of this, right? So I just wanted to let you know how grateful I am for each and every one of you who are listening. So there is an old saying among those who have spent their lives at sea. They say that every single harbor holds two stories. One belongs to the ships and the other belongs to the light. The ships tell stories of leaving, of sails catching the wind for the very first time, of chasing distant horizons where the seas just stretch so endlessly that the sky and the water forget where one ends and the other one begins. Sounds beautiful, right? They tell stories of storms that rose without warning, of waves tall enough to swallow certainty, of nights so dark that even the stars seem to disappear behind curtains of cloud. The ships know what it is to drift, to search, to wonder whether they have wandered too far to ever find home again. But the light the light tells another story. It has stood upon the same rugged cliffs throughout generations of changing tides. Wow. It has watched children become captains, and captains become old men with silver in their hair and salt etched into the lines of their hands. It has witnessed joyful departures, tearful homecomings, shipwrecks, miracles. And quiet mornings where the sea looked so still it reflected the heavens themselves. The light has learned something the ships have not yet discovered. That the sea will always, always, always change. That the wind will always shift, that storms will always come. But faithfulness, faithfulness does not. For most of my life I only knew the story of the ships, right? But I knew what it meant to search. I knew what it felt like to scan the horizon, hoping for something, anything at all, right, that looked like safety. I knew the ache of believing that I finally found a light. I had better hold on to it with everything that I had, because who knew when another one would appear? So this has taken me years and more storms than I can possibly count to become curious about the other story. The story of the light that stays. Because lately I started to realize that I have spent my life on both sides of that horizon. Sometimes I have been the ship desperately searching for the light, and sometimes I have become the lighthouse. For a really long time I misunderstood what love actually looked like. I thought love climbed into the waves. I thought love exhausted itself trying to rescue every ship that was taking on water. I thought love abandoned its own shore if someone else was drowning. And if someone continued to struggle, maybe I just simply hadn't loved hard enough. But looking back now, I don't really judge that younger version of myself for believing that. She came by that belief, you know, by experience, by being in these different places by learning certain things, by the reactions of others. Because when you grow up in an environment or in environments where love feels unpredictable, where connection sometimes disappears without explanation, where you learn to read moods before words, your nervous system becomes astonishingly intelligent, astonishingly, that's a hard word to say, astonishingly intelligent. Children who grow up this way a lot of times become experts in emotional weather. They notice the light the tightening of a jaw before anyone else does, the sigh that means someone is disappointed, the footsteps that sound different tonight, the silence that carries more danger than shouting. People often look at adults like this and say, You are incredibly empathetic. And maybe they are. It becomes more vigilant, it becomes hyper-aware. It starts predicting danger before danger arrives. Because prediction feels safer than surprise, obviously. And suddenly, what once protected us begins shaping every single relationship that we have. That's why hypervigilance can look so much like compassion. Empathy says, I can sit beside your pain. Hypervigilance, on the other hand, says, your pain has now become my responsibility. Pretty different, right? Empathy allows another person to remain whole. Hypervigilance quietly convinces us that we must carry them. One is connection, the other is survival wearing the clothes of love. So when I became a therapist, something beautiful happened. The sensitivity that once helped me survive became something that genuinely helped other people, which felt so good for me. I could hear what wasn't being said, I could feel grief hiding beneath anger, shame hiding beneath perfectionism, fear hiding beneath control. Clients would sometimes look at me with tears in their eyes and say, I feel seen. There are very few words more sacred than those. Because being truly seen, truly, truly seen, can change a life. Or perhaps more accurately, it reminds someone of the life that has always been waiting underneath the protection. But somewhere along the way I noticed something. Sometimes my clients didn't leave when the session ended, not physically but emotionally. I'd think about them while driving home, while making dinner, while folding laundry, and wondered, are they okay? Did I do enough? Should I have said something different? For years I believed that this was really just simply the cost of caring deeply. Until one day, curiosity actually asked a different question. The question was, what part of me feels so responsible that it can't let go? The answer caught me completely off guard. It wasn't only my therapist speaking, it was a little girl, a little girl who remembered waiting, watching, longing, hoping someone would stay. There's something I've never shared quite this way before. When someone truly, truly saw me, I didn't really know how to receive it. Not really. If someone looked at me with kindness, with curiosity, with genuine understanding, my whole body wanted to stay there forever. It felt almost impossible to get enough. Like in Spanish, there's a term, it's barril sinfondo is the name of the words for it, but it's like barrel without an end, right? Like you can never get enough. If I could somehow just absorb every ounce of safety that they offered, every ounce of understanding, every ounce of acceptance, I think I would have tried. And it's not really because I wanted to control them or manipulate them, or because I was too much. It was because I was starving. So imagine walking through a desert for days, and the sun is burning your skin, your throat is dry, your body begins to weaken, then suddenly you discover this giant spring. Nobody would judge you for kneeling down and drinking deeply or, you know, just chugging, chugging, chugging, chugging water. Some people would tell you to probably slow down a little bit before you started throwing up, right? But nobody would say, don't you think that's a little excessive? No, because everyone understands something about starvation. When the body has gone without, it doesn't sip, it drinks. Really, really truly drinks. So developmental trauma can create something remarkably simple or similar. Sorry, not simple. Similar. And there is such a difference. So I've learned to understand it in ways that I couldn't, you know, years ago. I've learned to understand it as our nervous systems are not only designed to survive, but they're designed for connection. Like a baby can't regulate its own emotions, its heart rate, its breathing, its stress responses. They're all influenced by the nervous system of people holding it. And, you know, there are studies about this as far as, you know, if you leave a baby unattended for a long time, you know, they just start shutting down. They don't, they don't regulate themselves, they shut down. They don't know how to regulate themselves. So we teach them how to regulate themselves with our own bodies. You know, it's called co-regulation. Long before we learn language, our bodies learn relationship. They learn when I'm overwhelmed, someone helps me come back. Over thousands and thousands of experiences, those moments become our wiring, how our brain gets wired, how our body gets wired. The brain starts to predict, even when I'm distressed, I won't stay here forever. And that prediction becomes safety. But what happens when those experiences are inconsistent? When comfort sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't? When love is available but unpredictable. The nervous system doesn't stop needing co-regulation, it simply becomes desperate for it. It begins attaching survival to proximity. If they're looking at me, I'm okay. If they answer the phone, I'm okay. If my partner reassures me, I'm okay. If my therapist understands me, I'm okay. It's not asking for attention, it's asking for regulation. That realization broke my heart because I suddenly understood that younger version of myself. She wasn't trying to consume people. She was trying to breathe. She had confused another person's presence with oxygen. And here's what made it even harder. I was terrified, not only terrified of losing people, but terrified they would leave because I needed too much. Because somewhere along the way, I had gathered evidence that I was too intense, too emotional, too deep, too sensitive, too much, right? Based on other people's reactions to my too muchness, you know, and or to my starvation, let's put it that way, right? And it doesn't mean that I was too much. It just means that maybe to those people, it was overwhelming. Maybe they haven't hadn't encountered someone who needed more, you know, or maybe they didn't know how to handle it, maybe they didn't know how to set boundaries, or maybe they were setting boundaries, but my interpretation of it was I am too much. Right? So many different things that could be possibly happening. So another strategy quietly developed. I started monitoring myself. Don't ask for too much, don't call again, don't let them know how much this matters, be grateful, take up less space, right? I started finding ways that were more socially acceptable to be able to get what I needed. And they weren't the healthiest ways either. But looking back now, I realized something that makes me want to just reach back through time and just really hug that younger version of myself. I wasn't regulating, I was managing abandonment. There's such a profound difference. They are two very different things. One grows from trust, and the other one grows from fear. One says, I know I can find my way back to myself. And the other one whispers, if they leave, I disappear too. I think many of us actually know that whisper. Maybe we don't say it out loud, maybe we don't even realize that it's there sometimes. But it shows up in the way that we anxiously wait for someone to text us back, the way our mood changes depending on someone else's approval, the way we replay conversations wondering if we said too much, the way we become afraid of our own needs, in the way that we apologize simply for existing. How many people do you know that that constantly say sorry? Just constantly. It has become a very socially acceptable thing to do. Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. What are you sorry? What are you sorry for? You know? It's it's sorry for existing, sorry for for getting in your way, you know. I and and this this is a lot of people, a lot of people that I know. The way we begin shrinking ourselves because somewhere, somehow, someone convinced us that our fullness was difficult to love. Looking back now, I don't think I was actually afraid of being alone. I have spent a lot of my life learning how to be alone. I was afraid of actually being forgotten. I was afraid that if someone looked away, they would never look back. And maybe that's why the lighthouse has become such a profound teacher for me. Because the lighthouse never promises to keep its light fixed on one single ship. It promises something much, much, much more healing than that. It promises to come back again and again and again. So something beautiful began happening in my own life, not not obviously not at all at once, and it wasn't because this one extraordinary person appeared and finally loved me enough, you know, like those little fairy tales that we watch or Hallmark shows. It didn't show up as one grand moment. It showed up as hundreds of ordinary moments. Friends who called when they said they would, mentors who remembered my heart when I had forgotten it, therapists who stayed steady without becoming responsible for me, who set boundaries with me, and I learned that boundaries are good, it's a good thing. People who didn't disappear when I cried, people who weren't frightened by my intensity, who praised it, in fact, who saw it as something wonderful, passion, people who didn't require me to become smaller so they could remain comfortable. My children who love me no matter what, right? Again and again and again. So my nervous system began collecting evidence, not ideas, but evidence. And there's a very important distinction here. Trauma is rarely healed because someone gives us better information. Trauma begins healing when the body has enough new experiences that it starts making new predictions. I'm gonna say that again because it's really important. Trauma begins healing when the body has enough new experiences that it starts making new predictions. So the brain is constantly asking what is most likely to happen next. So, for example, I use EMDR as a modality in therapy, and part of EMDR is reprocessing. It's not processing, but it's you know, you still process things, but you're reprocessing. So what you're doing is you're creating something new for the brain to latch onto, some new experience. So you take a negative belief, like I'm not good enough, and you replace that negative belief with I am good enough. So you take the experience of the belief that I'm not good enough. So for example, an experience where somebody rolled their eyes at you, you know, and given how many experiences that you had of not feeling good enough, that kind of went on that pathway, right? And now taking that experience and processing it and then reprocessing it in the positive experience of I am good enough, seeing that in that moment, in that memory of that person rolling their eyes at you, recognizing that them rolling their eyes at you had nothing to do with you. It had everything to do with them and with whatever they were experiencing in their life and whatever their lives had told them. And then bringing that into this doesn't define who I am. This doesn't mean that I am not good enough. This means I am good enough, and this person had a reaction to me, and that's okay, right? So, so that's exactly what happens when working through traumas. It's not necessarily that you know you just process the experience and it's over. You're providing a new a new pathway for it. You're providing something positive, you're you're recognizing that this experience itself has been an opportunity for me to learn this, you know. And I make it sound simple, it's not. It can be very challenging. But that's the gist of it, right? So for years my brain predicted abandonment. And it wasn't because it was broken, it was because it had evidence. But then little by little, new evidence arrived. You know, people came back, people answered, people repaired, people remembered me, they kept showing up for me, right? Also, I became more selective in who I allowed in my life. If people were not feeding my positive belief, you know, so if people were actively rejecting me constantly, right, then I realized, okay, maybe that person isn't right for me in my life right now. And, you know, maybe I distanced myself a little bit and found people who actually were more open to me and people who received me better, right? People who who helped feed that positive belief within me, right? And I allowed them to help me heal. So one day I realized something, right? That I didn't have to absorb an entire lifetime of love in one afternoon. I don't even think that that's possible. I didn't have to drink the whole river because another drink would be waiting for me tomorrow, right? So, because I knew I knew that another drink would be waiting for me tomorrow. So healthy love wasn't scarce, healthy love wasn't asking me to consume everything before it disappeared. Healthy love came back, and there was enough. And it wasn't because love had suddenly become infinite, it was because it had become consistent. I think consistency may be one of the greatest expressions of love. Not necessarily intensity or grand gestures or becoming everything to someone. It's consistency. It's the quiet promise that says, I'll see you again. We'll keep building. You don't have to earn your place here every single day. You know, if if I was starving and I went to a doctor's office, they would tell me, eat in itty bitty pieces because your system is not used to eating right now. So give it some time. Let yourself absorb it a little piece at a time. If I was to eat a whole bunch all at once, I my system would reject it. I would probably start throwing up. You know, it's the same way with emotions. When we're starving for emotions and we just consume, you know, emotions from somebody else, that somebody else is giving us all of this love, we can't get enough. It's a lot for our system to handle. But if we can slow ourselves down enough to say, okay, I'm receiving this love, and tomorrow I'm going to have this love here again. Now, easier said than done again, because how can you trust that that love is going to be there tomorrow? Well, it's consistency. You don't, you don't know until that becomes consistent. And when it becomes consistent, then you know. And then you can trust that maybe there are other areas in your life where you can find that consistency as well. You start recognizing consistency. And you also start recognizing what is not consistent and what is not helpful. So suddenly I actually understood the lighthouse. When I was younger, every time the beam swept away from me, my nervous system thought, I've lost it. You know, it's gone. Now I understand this differently. The light isn't abandoning the ship. It's simply keeping its promise to everyone else before faithfully returning once more. The realization didn't just change me as a person, it changed me as a therapist because I began noticing something else. Something my sometimes my desire to rescue wasn't only about my clients. Sometimes it was about a younger part of me. And she remembered what it felt like to long for someone who would never ever leave. So when someone sat across from me in tremendous pain, a part of me wanted to become that person for them, to stay, to fix, to rescue, to make sure they never felt what I had once felt. Can you hear the tenderness in that? There's nothing wrong with that little girl. She has a beautiful heart. But she was asking me to heal her by rescuing someone else. And that's that's a burden that no relationship can carry. It's impossible. It's not therapy or friendship or marriage or parenting or ministry or coaching or even love. So one afternoon while I was reflecting on all of this, a thought came to me that kind of stopped me. It made me pause and think, if a lighthouse left the shore to chase a ship, it would no longer be a lighthouse. It wouldn't be sturdy. The very act that looked compassionate would destroy the very thing that made it helpful. And so I sat with that image for a really long time. How many times had I left my own shore? Emotionally, spiritually, mentally? How many times had I climbed into someone else's storm believing that was love? How many times had I abandoned my own steadiness trying to rescue someone else's? And then another realization followed. The lighthouse doesn't only trust itself, it trusts the sailors, it trusts that they have maps, it trusts the stars, it trusts the tides, it trusts that somewhere beneath their fear they possess the capacity to steer. It doesn't mean every voyage is easy. It doesn't mean that every sailor avoids the rocks. It just simply means that the lighthouse refuses to believe that another person's strength has disappeared simply because they have forgotten it. That, my friends, is resilience. Resilience, such a beautiful word, isn't something that we hand to another human being. It's something that we help uncover. And trauma says you are powerless. Healing gently whispers, look again, there's more of you here than you realize. So one of the things I love the most about resilience informed care is that it asks a different question. Trauma asks very often what happened to you. Resilience also asks, what has always been true about you that survived anyway? What carried you this far? What refused to disappear? What wisdom kept breathing underneath all of the protection? Because here's something extraordinary. Every single time you survive something that your nervous system once believed would destroy you, your brain gathers evidence. Maybe I really can do hard things. Maybe I am stronger than I thought. Maybe I don't need someone else to carry me every time I stumble. So that evidence becomes confidence, and confidence becomes trust. And trust becomes resilience. And resilience slowly becomes freedom. Sometimes as helpers, we unintentionally interrupt that process. And it's not because we don't care or because we even know that we're doing that. It's because we care so deeply. When I continually do for someone what they are capable of learning to do for themselves, their nervous system misses the opportunity to gather its own evidence. This goes for parenting too. So overfunctioning in one person often invites underfunctioning in another. When we do too much for our kids and we don't build them up and tell them that they are capable and that we believe in them, then they can interpret it as they're not capable of doing these things. Same thing with other human beings, right? So because my philosophy has always been empowerment, I have often told clients, I don't want you to need me forever. But now I understand those words even more deeply. I don't want anyone to become dependent upon my light. I want my light to help them remember their own. That realization has really changed a lot of things. It has changed the way I sit with clients and the way I parent my children, the way I love people closest to me, the way I create this podcast even. Because if I'm honest, there was a time when a part of me wanted to be indispensable. And it wasn't ego, it was the opposite. It was because somewhere deep inside me there was still a little girl who believed that if someone truly needed her, they would never leave. But love that depends on necessity is not freedom, it's survival. And survival, while brilliant, I mean brilliant, brilliant, was never meant to become our permanent home. I came to believe that one of the most loving things that we can do is help another person need us a little less. And this isn't, you know, to gain distance or because we want freedom. There is a difference. When I sit with a client now, my hope isn't that they leave thinking she healed me. My hope is that one day they say, somewhere along the way, I remembered who I was. When I think about my children, I don't want them to grow into adults who need me to make every decision. I want them to hear my voice for a while until they begin trusting their own. When I think about this podcast, I don't want you to leave each episode believing that I have the answers. I want you to leave feeling more deeply connected to the quiet wisdom that has always, always, always lived inside of you. Because if my voice ever becomes louder than your own, then I have missed the point. My goal has never been for you to follow me. It has always been for you to find yourself. There is another lesson with the lighthouse. And this might be the most surprising one of all. So for years I was afraid of darkness. Not, you know, little I mean, yeah, actually, I was afraid of darkness, darkness until I worked midnights and got over that fear. But I was afraid of the darkness inside of people, their grief, their shame, their despair, their fear. I wanted so badly to remove it, to fix it, to carry some of it so they wouldn't have to feel so alone. But then it just struck me the lighthouse isn't afraid of the night. Its entire purpose only makes sense because darkness exists. Without the night, the light would never ever be noticed. Without the storm, the harbor might never be sought. Perhaps our calling is not to eliminate darkness, maybe it's simply to remain lit while someone travels through it. There's a quiet confidence in that, and that confidence says, I trust that your soul is stronger than this storm. And it's definitely not because storms don't matter, they do. Some storms change us forever. But because I've come to believe that every human being carries within them something trauma cannot destroy. It may become buried or hidden beneath fear, covered in shame, protected by walls that once made perfect sense, but it's still there. The essence of who they are, whole, waiting. And sometimes all another person needs is not someone to become their light forever. They simply just need someone to remind them where to look until they begin seeing their own. There's a phrase that recently I came to hold very dearly in my heart. And the phrase is my light is non-negotiable. The light that I carry within me is non-negotiable. It is no longer porous, nothing comes through it. I am solid within myself, and this non-negotiable light lives within me and can carry through every part of my being, and it can light the way for others. And it's kind of like lighting a candle for each other. You know, when my light can hit somebody else's light, they can recognize their own light, and hence their light can spark within them, and their light can become non-negotiable. So if you're listening today as a healer, I want to speak to you for just a moment. Maybe you're a therapist, a nurse, a physician, a coach, a teacher, a first responder, a parent, a friend everybody leans on. Maybe your heart naturally bends toward people who are hurting. Please, please, please don't lose that. That's so precious, so wonderful in this world, and this world needs that. It definitely needs, desperately needs compassionate people. But just remember this that some of the people who come to you are emotionally dehydrated. When they finally feel seen, they may want to stay in that feeling forever. They may want to look to you for certainty, for regulation, for safety. Definitely meet them with tenderness. Definitely meet them without judgment. Because you may have once been that ship yourself. But don't stop turning. Don't keep your beam fixed on that one vessel. Don't abandon your own shore trying to rescue someone from theirs. Because the greatest gift that you can offer another human being isn't becoming the source of their life, it's becoming steady enough that they begin trusting life within themselves. And if today you are listening as the ship, if you're exhausted from searching, and if you know what it feels like to finally be understood and immediately become afraid of losing that person, if you have ever wondered why one kind conversation could bring you to tears, why saying goodbye after therapy feels surprisingly difficult? Why you replay meaningful moments over and over and over because your heart doesn't want to let them go? I really hope that you hear this with every part of your being. There is nothing nothing absolutely wrong with you. Nothing at all. You are not broken, you are not weak, you are not too much, you are not clingy, you are not a burden. Your nervous system simply learned that love was unpredictable. So when love appeared, it drank as though every cup might be the last. Of course it did. It wasn't dysfunction, it was adaptation, which is amazing that we can do that in the first place. Look at who we are. This is this is who we are, we adapt. We are wonderful, amazing creatures. Your nervous system was trying to keep you alive with the only strategies it knew how. And now it gets to learn something new. Healthy love does not disappear because you stop drinking for a moment. Healthy love comes back again and again and again. You don't have to swallow an entire lifetime of love in one afternoon. You can receive it slowly. One conversation, one hug, one safe relationship, one repaired misunderstanding, one honest moment at a time. Until eventually your nervous system begins gathering new evidence. Maybe I'm safe. Maybe people can leave the room and still come back. Maybe I don't have to earn love every single day. Maybe I don't have to be less for someone else to stay. Maybe I can become home too. Perhaps that's what healing really is. It's not becoming the lighthouse or remaining the ship, but becoming someone who trusts, even when the light sweeps across the horizon and moves on. It has not abandoned you. It is simply keeping its promise. And maybe one quiet morning, almost without realizing it, you look out across the water and notice something extraordinary. You are no longer navigating only by someone else's light. There's warmth inside your own chest. A flame that wasn't there before, or perhaps one that has always been there. Waiting patiently behind years of fear, waiting beneath survival, waiting beneath the stories that told you your worth depended on someone else's gaze. And as that flame grows, something beautiful begins to happen. You stop chasing every light in the horizon. You begin tending your own. And in doing so without even trying, you become a light for others. Not because they need you forever, but because your steadiness quietly reminds them of what is possible. The light was never meant to end with you. It was always meant to awaken something within them. So today I leave you with this blessing. May you remember that steadiness is not the absence of chaos. It is remaining true to yourself while chaos passes through. You may have the courage to love deeply without abandoning yourself. May you have the courage to love deeply without abandoning yourself. May you trust that boundaries are not walls that keep love out, but the shoreline that allows love to remain standing through every tide. May you receive love in gentle doses, knowing you no longer have to consume it before it disappears. May you become someone who no longer mistakes distance for rejection or silence for abandonment, because your heart has learned that healthy love returns. May you believe in the resilience of those you serve as fiercely as you believe in your desire to help them. May you trust that another person's healing does not depend on your constant presence, only your authentic one. May you tend your own flame with the same tenderness you offer everyone else's. And when the sea grows wild, which it will, when someone else's storm calls every part of you to leave your own shore, which it will, may you remember the quiet wisdom of the lighthouse. Stand, root deeply, keep turning, trust the sailors, trust the sea, trust the light, and above all, trust that the light you spend your whole life searching for has been patiently learning to burn within you all along. Until next time, be gentle with yourselves, keep tending your flame, and keep listening to the untamed voice within. Thank you all. See you next time.