Is your Permacrisis a state of being?

Recently, Carolyn Freyer-Jones wrote about Permacrisis. She explained that Permacrisis “refers to a state of ongoing instability and insecurity, where unexpected challenges seem to arise constantly”.

We all know people who live in a constant state of Permacrisis, regardless of anything happening in the world. Their lens (based on upbringing and other circumstances) is Permacrisis. They look out into the world, and they see Permacrisis everywhere. They find things to worry about and they experience life as one emergency after another. Even when things are going well in their lives, they live in constant anticipation that something will go wrong.

Stephen Covey would have said that when we live in a state of Permacrisis, we are spending most – if not all – of our time in our Circle of Concern – that is, we spend all our time worrying about things that we cannot and do not control. The end result is that we always feel out of control. We feel like we have no control over our lives and our circumstances, and we essentially experience life as happening to us, or worse, we might experience life as one crisis after another…

Please understand that I’m not saying that the global challenges like climate change, hunger, poverty, and war are not real or are not happening. I’m simply pointing out that when we spend most of our time worrying about those things, we increase our sense of powerlessness. We continue to feel overwhelmed by all that is “wrong with the world”.

As individuals, we get to choose where we want to focus our energy and attention. In my experience being “against war”, isn’t as helpful as being a stand “for peace” for example. We get to choose who we want to be and how we want to show up in the world. I create my life in every moment by how I show up to each moment.

A lot of what Carolyn Freyer-Jones shared in her newsletter resonated, and I had wanted to write to this community about it, and yet there was still something missing for me. Something was gnawing at me, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. Then recently, the lovely Amber Krzys hosted a workshop called Five Ways to Live Your Truth, and the penny finally dropped for me.

Amber Krzys’ workshop focused on nervous system regulation and on tuning into one’s body and feelings to determine one’s truth. She shared that our minds often lie to us. We make up stories that we tell ourselves – essentially, we can create a Permacrisis in our minds. And our bodies don’t lie. Our bodies tell us what’s really going on for us.

I have engaged in a lot of nervous system regulation work this past year, specifically to learn how to regulate my own nervous system. A lot of my hyper-vigilance is as a direct result of my childhood trauma which I’ve recently had to admit is still impacting me to this day. Even though I’ve worked through a lot of it, my body still retains the memory of that trauma, and my brain has wired itself to be on hyper alert for danger. So essentially, I’ve been wired for Permacrisis.

And in working with my coach these past four years, I’ve learnt the distinction between Owner and Victim. I’ve learnt that I get to be the creator of my life and my choices. I’ve learnt how to slow down to the speed of life and love. I feel more empowered to show up the way I want to in my relationships and in my work.

And yet, from time to time, I still react from this place of fear and this place of Permacrisis. My cognitive brain still get’s hi-jacked by my amygdala, and I respond to life as if I’m in mortal danger, even when I’m not faced with mortal danger. People who have lived with trauma can often have an over-exaggerated response to “simple” things in life, in other words, they might respond disproportionately to the situation. And often they don’t intend to do that, they don’t even realise that they are doing it until they have already responded. This is the trauma response.

Our brains do not know the difference between real danger and perceived danger. It simply reacts to protects us against all threats – both perceived and real. So, without intending to, some people may be responding to life as if they are in a Permacrisis, and not even realise that they are doing it. They may be relating to their lives as one crisis after another, because that’s what they are used to doing. It’s what’s familiar. And they might not have the awareness that that’s what’s happening until someone points it out to them, or until they learn the distinction between Owner and Victim, or something similar, that has them see that they have a choice about how they want to respond.

In fact, it can become so comfortable, so familiar to respond to life this way, that we become addicted to it. We actually get some sort of pay-off from relating to life in this way. In his book, Death Wish, Steve Chandler talks about his struggle with addiction, and at one point he quotes Maurice Bassett who postulates that we can also become addicted to familiarity. We can become addicted to what feels familiar without recognising that what is familiar might not be good for us.

So, we tell ourselves we can’t start our day without coffee, because we have cultivated the habit of drinking coffee to wake up. Or we tell ourselves we crave carbs or sugar when we are stressed, and we convince ourselves that we need it, or that we have no self-control, without seeing that it’s a habit that we’ve cultivated and that we have gotten comfortable with. We tell ourselves we don’t mean to yell or complain or blame or resent, and maybe that’s not accurate. Maybe, on some level, we are addicted to it…? It’s all we’ve ever known, so it’s familiar.

The first step is always awareness. We cannot change what we are not aware of. And yet, have you ever tried to change your behaviour, and found it really challenging to sustain? That is because we are aiming to change the symptoms without addressing the real cause.

The other day I was in conversation with a client. One of her complaints – or should I rather say judgements – that she was holding against herself, was that she yelled at her children when she felt overwhelmed. At the start of our work together, she was beating herself up about that, and judging herself as being a “bad mother”. In one session, I offered the observation, that perhaps the part of her that is yelling isn’t “bad” or “wrong”, but perhaps a part of her that doesn’t know how else to respond to overwhelm. I asked her what would happen if she were to bring compassion to this part of herself?

She returned to the next conversation with a big insight. She shared that she realised that the yelling isn’t the problem. The yelling is a symptom of feeling overwhelmed. And the overwhelm was being caused by a lack of self-care, and by the fact that she would not take a break when her body was signalling to her to take one. She would push through and tell herself that she could take a break afterwards, instead of noticing that she was experiencing overwhelm and needed to step away from the situation BEFORE she got to the point where she felt the need to yell.

So, we started to work on prioritising her self-care and helping her create agreements with her partner about what kind of help and support she needed. When she takes care of herself first and ensures that her cup stays full, she is less likely to reach a point where she feels overwhelmed, and starts to yell.

Was this easy to do? Not at all. In fact, it was really hard to prioritise her own self-care. Why? Because on a subconscious level, she is addicted to not taking care of herself. She is addicted to making herself the martyr. And she is telling herself a story that supports that. The story is that it would be selfish to take care of herself. This way, she convinces herself that she is doing “the right thing” and that she is “a good person” for putting others’ needs ahead of her own needs, without seeing what her resistance to self-care was costing not only her, but her whole family too.

Will there still be times when my client becomes overwhelmed and yells? Of course, because she is human. And because this is a process not an event. It takes time to unlearn habits that are so comfortable and familiar. Breaking addiction of any kind requires a life-long commitment to working on it, with a focus on just this moment right now. Because this moment right here is all I have and is all I can do something about.

Worrying about the future, and how I will handle future situations, won’t serve me, because I’m not there yet. And at the same time, I get to create myself in THIS moment and choose who I want to be in THIS moment. So, it will require continued commitment and one conscious step at a time for my client to change the pattern of behaviour that no longer serves her. And she now also has a more compassionate and self-loving way of being with herself when she does forget her commitment, or when she does not honour her commitment.  

Perfection is not required. All that is required is a willingness to keep going. To not give up on ourselves, and to love ourselves through the hardest moments. And as I’ve shared many times, the issue isn’t the issue. It’s how we are being with ourselves as we go through the issue, that’s the real issue.

And so where am I now with my thoughts on Permacrisis?

In a thinking session this week, I discovered that I have another choice available to me. I could choose to see NOTHING as a crisis, instead of seeing everything as a crisis. What would be possible if I could relate to life in this way? What if nothing were a crisis? What if everything that was unfolding was just a natural part of life that didn’t require a hyper-vigilant response? This sounds like a worthwhile experiment.

And perhaps slowly, one day at a time, I can break my addiction to urgency, to drama, to treating my life and the unfolding of it as a Permacrisis. What if it is not one crisis after another, but simply one experience after another?

Dear Reader, where in our life are you seeing crisis after crisis? Or feeling a strong sense of urgency to “fix” something? Can you notice what you are treating as a crisis? Can you notice where you are telling yourself you don’t have a choice?

What would happen if you related to this thing that feels so hard or challenging right now, as just another experience you get to have? What if you were to relate to it as a gift and not a threat? What would be different?