Maybe It's Freedom.

Peace is something we all say we want—but what happens when we finally find it and it feels uncomfortable?

In this episode, I'm sharing what I've learned about healing, learning to sit in the silence, and why sometimes the hardest part of growth isn't leaving the chaos—it's learning to trust the peace that comes after it.

If you've ever wondered why calm can feel unfamiliar, or why healing doesn't always feel peaceful at first, I hope this conversation reminds you that maybe the absence of chaos isn't boring...

Maybe it's freedom.

Transcript

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I need to admit something to you guys because I come off sometimes as being this really strong, independent person that's got it all figured out. The reality is that I don't. And peace makes me really uncomfortable. And I say that because I've sat in peace enough and I've sat in my own silence enough to be able to say that it does make me uncomfortable. It's Cheyenne, and this is nothing to prove. This is the podcast where we talk about life as it is happening because life is happening and it's not always easy. It's not always comfortable. And sometimes we just need to talk about it. So we do. Welcome. So a couple weeks ago we were talking about attachment theory, right? We talked about um how I have an anxious attachment style, and I'm actively working to heal that and work through it. And now that I'm I've been single for so long that I just sat within my own peace, and I truly refused to um sacrifice my peace for trying to be in a relationship, which for me was really, really hard. Um, and then last week we talked about having pulling off the performance and being more authentic versions of ourselves, which all kind of wrap back together. But what happens when you find peace? And is finding peace even easy? Is it worth it? And like what does our body do when we find it or as we're finding it? And that was also something that I have had to wrestle with the last couple of months as well, and the last couple of years, right? Because the type of trauma that I've been through, and I say that very lightly, okay? I'm not, I I speak of the trauma because the way that I've been wired and what I have gone through truly created the person that I am today. And it's the things that I have to heal are from those moments in my life, which make it really hard. So believe me when I tell you, I'm not saying my trauma or the trauma I've been through as a trigger. I'm more so saying it as a grounding word so that we know where I'm coming from rather than pushing off responsibility because I take full responsibility for any triggers that I might have, any trauma that I might have experienced. I take full responsibility for my own healing, my own growth, and my own nervous system. Okay. So what happens when your body is addicted to chaos? Right? What happens when your body is addicted to people who are putting your nervous system on the fritz? Are we even able to have peace when that is who we are? The answer is yes. Okay, the easy answer to that is we absolutely can find peace. It's just hard. It's not easy when you are, first of all, surrounded by people who also crave the chaos. And that's a really hard thing to come to terms with as well. Because if we are surrounded by friends who are like-minded like we are, there's a chance that they crave the same type of chaos and the same type of drama that you do. Um, so you have to be really careful with the people that you're around. Maybe do an inventory on that. If you're always around people who, for whatever reason, just have drama in their lives, you might want to figure out if those are people you want to be around, okay? First and foremost. But if you are also like you're you're just continuously drawn to people, and let's just hypothetically, let's hypothetically say that you're in a relationship with somebody, and you could be. This could be you, and this could hit really close to home. You're in a relationship with somebody that is absolute chaos, that's stressful, it's unhealthy, and you know that it's unhealthy, right? The majority of us, if we're in an unhealthy relationship, the majority of us know we are, we just refuse to leave for whatever reason or we can't leave, okay? I don't want to diminish the can't, all right? And if you've never been in a situation where you don't understand what you can't leave looks like, um, ask somebody. But be prepared for the response that you're gonna get when you say that you can't, when they say that they can't, because you're gonna get a very real version of what their life looks like, okay? So be prepared for that. But our body starts to create, starts to crave what it is that we know. So we start to crave stress, and our bodies start to crave the endorphin rush that we get when we're in those stressful situations. So when we talk about peace after leaving situations like that, or when we talk about leaving stressful friendships and even going like no contact with family members who are constantly creating this dope, this endorphin rush for you, your body is literally going to withdraw from those. So, in order to understand how to get to peace, you have to understand that there is going to be this wild, this crazy period of time where you're going to withdraw from these endorphins that these people or this person has been dumping into you from the chaos that your body has been craving. It is such a weird thing because you think, why would our bodies crave stress? Why would I feel more comfortable in the chaos than I would peace? Well, because when you've been in chaos for so long, peace becomes uncomfortable. And I get uncomfortable in peace. I have always been uncomfortable in peace. Okay. And it's not like something that you can immediately just, you know, want and you're okay with, you know, having peace. I wanted peace. We all want peace. I had to take a lot of time sitting by myself and detoxing from endorphins that were being given to me by other people. And when I say given to me, I'm not talking about like they were handed to me. It was the chaos that they were providing me. And it took a long time for me to fully come off of those highs in a way where I was now sitting in a healthy endorphin, I guess, category or amount that I was now creating my own endorphins. For a lot of people, let's take abusive relationships, for example. When you have somebody um coming out of an abusive relationship, there is a really high probability that they will fixate on things that give them an endorphin rush, like working out. And I say that with a really big cheesy smile because that was me. When I came out of a when I came out of a very abusive relationship that um took almost took something from me that I was never gonna be able to get back, um, I found myself in the gym two, three times a day for two hours at a at a time. It was the only thing that I could do to maintain an endorphin rush, any form of endorphins that I needed to be able to stay in what I thought was peaceful. Okay. Um, I had dropped a ton of weight, I put on a ton of muscle, I looked incredible. Okay, it was not healthy. What I was doing to my body to maintain the peace and maintain the endorphin rush was not healthy, and I will admit that every single day. As I sit right now, today, I am almost I am 10 pounds away from the same weight I was then, and I do not look the same. I absolutely do not look the same because now I sit here healthy. Then I was very unhealthy. While I looked great, um, I looked great because I was so unhealthy. Okay. To everybody else, it looked fantastic, but the inside it was it was not. It was not healthy. And my nervous system was on pure survival mode from the trauma that I had experienced and the trauma that I was coming out from. And I had to learn to manage my endorphins and my adrenaline and find a responsible way to get those, okay? And I cannot speak for everybody, and I'm not going to because I can only speak on my lived experiences. But when peace feels unfamiliar, sometimes we mistake the unfamiliar for unsafe. And truthfully, that's what was happening. I wasn't, I didn't feel safe. I didn't feel um calm. And a lot of people, the majority of people go through that, go through that. When when we remove the stress and we remove the chaos, it's really uncomfortable for everybody. There is not a single person who's come out of something chaotic and stressful and has said, the minute they walk out the door, I feel like a brand new person that doesn't exist because the body's not designed that way. The body is not designed to just walk away from the stress and the chaos and never having anything to do with it ever again. The body has to go through processes and the body has to work through those things. The nervous system has to come out of survival mode and it has to enter into a period of silence where they can you can sit in in the uncomfortableness that is healing and growth, right? One of the things that really helped me heal was having healthy friendships that I could depend on, and healthy friendships that knew me prior to the chaos and could help me not go back to being that person, but could help me retransform and find some stability. Stability was one of the hardest parts for me, um, and still is. Silence is still not easy for me. Peace is still not easy for me. I was just talking to my boyfriend the other day, and I said, I just want to fight with you. I just want to have a fight because this peace and this steadiness is making me uncomfortable. And I feel like we need to fight. And he looks at me and he goes, We don't need to fight. We're fine. You're uncomfortable, and that's okay. Who is this man? Fight with me. And he refused to fight with me because the only reason I wanted to fight was because I felt uncomfortable. I don't know how to be in a healthy relationship. I don't know what this is like. I don't know how to not live in the chaos. I don't know how to just be. It's uncomfortable for me, and I have to learn to be okay with it. And my healthy friendships help me because they are secure. They say, and this goes back to attachment theory, they say that when you are looking to become more securely attached and you're trying to heal your negative attachment style to find friends that can show you what it's like to be secure. And those friends have helped me so much. And it's not even that they themselves are secure, but they're so secure in their their relationships and their friendships and their marriages that it gives me the opportunity to see what not living in chaos looks like. And that for me has been imperative to the healing I've had to do over the last six, seven weeks. Because, like, we all want to go through healing by ourselves and we want to go through counseling and all these things and work on ourselves, and that's great. But what happens when you're staring at somebody who's showing you the open gashes within yourself that you didn't even know you had to deal with yet because you you refuse to let go of the peace that you found. And we talked about this last week. Like I found so much peace in being alone that I didn't want to disrupt it. So I just sat being single for four years. I didn't date anybody after a relationship went really south really fast. And bless him, he put me in therapy, and he was he's truly the reason I have the healing and the growth that I have today. And I am so thankful for that relationship because it changed me for the better. It changed me in a way that I could look at myself and say, I'm not broken, but I need to change something. So I'm very, very grateful for that. And then I found a crazy amount of peace within my silence. I found myself being able to and preferring being at home by myself on the weekends. I found myself preferring not having any drama in my life, which also shrank my friendship circle a lot. I said goodbye to a lot of friendships, or I didn't just say goodbye, not necessarily say goodbye to them, but I kept them at a very arm's length away because I didn't want the drama. And then it comes down to learning to sit still with myself in a way that I'd never really had to do before. I found myself being more comfortable sitting at home and being happier by myself. There's this interesting thing that happens in the transition that I wish people would understand more, at least for me. When I went from being so caught up in the chaos and so addicted to the stress and the chaos and the transition into finding some form of peace, I truly went, I like cleaned my hands of all chaos and went, This is more important to me than being a wife. This is my peace is more important to me than the one thing I've ever wanted in my entire life, which was to be a wife, be a mom, and have a family. So I found myself sitting at home in silence on the weekends. I still find myself driving four hours in silence. I will drive to Vegas and not turn on a single thing. And I will drive in silence. I have learned to be okay with not having drama around. And this is an interesting transition period because it's such a polar opposite from where I was to where I am now. And somewhere you have to find the middle ground, right? And that's the that's the interesting part. The it is interesting finding yourself from chaos into peace, but now I'm in this interesting trans transition period where I have to find middle ground. And if I want to be a wife and I want to be a mom, I am a mom, but if I want to be a wife and have this family that I've always wanted to have, I have to learn to live in the middle somewhere because somebody's gonna interrupt my peace. Somebody that is going to be my husband has to come in and disrupt that peace a little bit because now I'm taking two different people with two different attachments, two different sets of trauma, two different lived experiences, and now I'm trying to bring them together in one place and cohabitate. And that's terrifying. That's a different type of peace and a different type of silence that I am not ready for, or at least I thought I wasn't ready for. So learn to sit at home alone on the weekends and through all of that and through the transitions of deciding that I was gonna take a chance on life, and I I had to decide that what I wanted more was worth my peace being disrupted. But I need you guys to understand that peace is really hard to get to because it's so uncomfortable when you've been stuck in mass chaos. It's so hard to get to when all your body knows is the stress that it's been subjected to because your body is so used to it and it craves it, okay? Like it's hard, it's not easy, and I'm not gonna tell you that it is. I'm not gonna lie to you. When you choose your peace over anything else, there is a beautiful thing that comes from it. But if you especially are single and you're choosing peace, there is going to come a time where you have to choose is what you want out of life worth a little bit of your peace being disrupted? And how much of that peace are you willing to give? And that's where I'm at. I have to decide how much of my peace am I willing to give in order to have the things that I want in life, which is a husband and it is a family, and it is having that partner in life, and that's what I know I've always wanted. So, how much of my peace am I willing to give for that? Right. And that is another form of uncomfortability that I have to sit with, that you're gonna have to sit with, and I know that you're gonna do well. I say all of that, I say all of these things, the weekends alone, the finding my peace, the being okay with being by myself, all of those things were really great and they served their purpose for a really long time because I had to heal that. I had to heal the withdrawal of the endorphins by myself. I had to heal needing the chaos from everybody else to feel like I needed to survive. Okay. And that in itself is incredibly important, and we all need to go through that. We all need to learn how to live in peace because peace is hard and it is uncomfortable. Okay. But also, Jesus promises us peace on multiple occasions. Okay. He tells us, he says, uh, my peace I leave with you. Peace be still. And he never says, he never says, the excitement I will bring you. The chaos will be yours. No, he says, peace be with you. The peace will be with you. I leave my peace with you. So maybe, maybe we have been chasing the wrong emotion and the wrong feeling this entire time. Maybe what we should have been chasing this entire time is peace. It is finding peace within our situation. It is finding peace within us as a person. It is maybe, absolutely 100%, finding peace within Christ so that he can bring us that peace. I'm not saying that if you were in an unpeaceful situation to leave it immediately and all the things I'm saying, pray about it so that God can bring peace to you. Because if you ask him, he will, he will. Right? Anyway, peace is hard, it's not easy. Uh butterflies are all great and dandy, but healing is when you're finally finding peace within those situations where you used to find chaos. Okay? Butterflies are all great and dandy. But there is something beautiful in the healing of when you can find peace where you've normally found chaos. Alright? And maybe the absence of chaos isn't boring. Maybe it's a freedom you've just never experienced. And maybe you and your partner just need to find that peace together so that you can both lay the chaos down and find that peace somewhere. Find that middle ground. And I know that you can. And I'd like to pray for you if you'd let me and your peace. Heavenly Father, we just thank you so much for the peace and the blessings that you're bringing everybody listening to this podcast, Father. Father, I thank you for bringing each and every single person here and using me as a vessel to get your point across, Father. While it might be a little chaotic and crazy, and it's a little, you know, sometimes the map doesn't always go in one straight direction and the conversation sounds chaotic, Father. You are speaking through me. And the conversation goes exactly where you need it to go, Father. And we just thank you for the peace that you're bringing this person. Thank you for giving them the ability to look at themselves and their situations and say, Today I need to choose peace. Today I need to let go of the need for the endorphin rush, Father. Today I need to let my body relax and I need to find peace exactly where I am today. And Father, we ask that you bring them that peace. In your heavenly name we pray. Amen.