Podcast Episode #55 - I Thought I Was Coping Because I Was Functioning: When Survival Mode Looks Like Strength
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[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome back to yet another inspirational podcast episode brought to you by yours truly, Carina. I'm your truth speaker, truth seeker, truth keeper, and I am so glad that you're here with me today. Before we begin today, I want to give you a gentle content note because this episode discusses the death of my sister following murder, along with depression, alcohol, smoking, and self-harm.
I promise you I won't be going into any graphic detail about what happened, but I am going to speak honestly [00:01:00] about what that period of my life looked like. And this is also a more personal episode than I usually share. I am quite a very private person, and I don't tell the deepest parts of my life casually.
Not because I believe they should be hidden, but because some stories cost me something to revisit on an emotional level. So I'm sharing this one because it sits underneath so much of the work I do today. So take care of yourself as you listen, and if today isn't the day for this conversation, that's completely okay too.
So let's begin. Let's jump in. After my mum told me my sister had been murdered, [00:02:00] I washed my coffee cup. I washed it, dried it, put it away. Then I started doing all the other ordinary little things I normally did when , finishing work for the day There is something almost absurd about that sequence when I look back at it now.
It's like, "Your sister's just been murdered, but apparently the coffee cup still needs washing." And obviously there was nothing funny about that at the time. My brain had almost frozen. I couldn't comprehend the thing I'd just been told, so I did the things I could comprehend: wash the cup, dry the cup, put it away, finish work, and do the next thing.
I was at [00:03:00] work on a Friday when my mum called me. Even saying what she told me all these years later still feels strange. There are some pieces of information so far outside anything your brain knows how to comprehend that they just don't seem to land properly, and this was one of them. I remember my mum was quite matter-of-fact on the phone, not because she wasn't utterly devastated, simply because she didn't really know what had happened yet either.
Both of us didn't. So she told me that I needed to pick her up because we were going to meet with the police liaison officer. I put the phone down, I washed that bloody coffee cup, finished whatever little things I thought needed finishing, and [00:04:00] eventually I went to my boss and somehow found the words, "My mum has just called.
My sister has been murdered. I have to go right now I got into my car, and it was almost as though my body caught up with what my mind hadn't yet been able to absorb. I started shaking. I actually had to pull over. I called my boyfriend, and we'd only been together for a couple of weeks at that point, and he's actually my husband now.
And that was when I finally started crying, and he came to meet me and supported me through what happened next, and the days and weeks and months and years to follow. But here's the part I have thought about a lot since. [00:05:00] That happened on the Friday, and on the Monday, I went straight back to work, three days later At the time, I told myself I needed routine.
I needed normality, something familiar when absolutely nothing about my life felt normal anymore. There was an open police investigation. There were questions nobody could answer yet. There was nothing that I could fix, nothing I could change, and there was very little I could actually control at that point And I've never been particularly good at waiting when something matters But work gave me something useful to do.
I knew what was expected of me there. I knew what came next. When everything else felt incomprehensible, I could [00:06:00] answer an email, I could pick up the phone, I could complete a task, do my job, and be useful. I could control something when the thing I most desperately wanted to change was completely beyond my control.
And looking back now, I think two things were true at the same time. Part of me genuinely needed that routine. I needed somewhere familiar to stand while everything around me felt completely unfamiliar and was pretty much chaos and collapse. But part of me also needed the distraction, and somewhere along the way, routine became somewhere to hide because if I kept moving, kept working, kept doing ordinary things, I didn't have to sit still long enough to fully feel what had happened.[00:07:00]
I wasn't ready. I wasn't ready to feel that pain. I wasn't ready to fully accept that my sister was dead and she wasn't coming back, so I carried on. For three months, I got up, went to work, did what was needed, kept life moving, and because I was functioning, I thought I was coping. I wasn't. I was surviving the days, but I wasn't processing what had happened, and there is a difference, a much bigger difference than I understood at the time.
So can I offer you another way of seeing that? Because for years, I looked back at that period of my life and thought coping was what I had done. I kept going. I stayed responsible. I functioned. But now I understand something very differently. [00:08:00] Functioning and processing are not the same thing. Being able to continue doing what is required of you tells us that you can function.
It isn't-- or it does not necessarily tell us what is happening inside you while you do it. I wasn't okay. I was operational and eventually being operational stopped being enough. The pain hadn't disappeared because I wasn't looking directly at it. It had simply gone underground. And grief, I learnt, is patient.
It can sit quietly beneath the surface until something else starts speaking for it. For me, that eventually looked like alcohol, smoking, and self-harm. Different behaviors, but underneath them was the same attempt to get some distance from feelings that felt unbearable. When I didn't know how to give my grief somewhere to go, [00:09:00] I found ways to run away from it instead because somewhere underneath all of that was almost, "If I don't fully acknowledge this, perhaps I don't have to accept that she's really gone."
But numbing could only give me temporary distance. It couldn't process the pain for me. Survival bought me time. It couldn't do the grieving for me, and maybe this is where my story starts looking completely different from yours, but the pattern underneath is still familiar. Maybe your life is falling apart behind the scenes, but you're getting everybody to school, still turning up for work, and making dinner.
Maybe something difficult happens, and you immediately become the practical one. You organize, you fix, you make [00:10:00] sure everyone else is okay, or maybe you fill every spare moment because stillness brings you a little too close to something you don't want to meet yet. Some women don't fall apart when life becomes un- unbearable.
They become incredibly good at carrying on, and because they are still functioning, everybody assumes they are coping, including them. And I wanna be careful here because being busy isn't automatically avoidance. Routine may genuinely support us through difficult periods. For me, going back to work wasn't the problem.
The problem was that eventually, what gave me somewhere to stand became somewhere to hide. So perhaps the question isn't, am I busy? Maybe it's, what is this busyness doing for me? [00:11:00] Is it supporting me while I move through something, or is staying in motion helping me avoid what is underneath it? And this is why I don't look back at the woman washing that cof- coffee cup and think she did anything wrong.
She had just received information she could barely comprehend, so she found the next ordinary thing. Wash the cup, put it away, do the next thing. Survival gave me somewhere to stand, to go when everything underneath me had suddenly disappeared. I sometimes think of survival as scaffolding. It can hold us up while everything else feels unstable, but scaffolding was never supposed to become the house.
That's the distinction. The survival response isn't the problem. The question is what happens when something that once protected you quietly [00:12:00] becomes the way you live, and eventually the way you keep leaving yourself Eventually, what I was carrying began spilling into the rest of my life, my behavior, my relationships, my relationship with my partner and my parents, and eventually I let somebody help me.
I went to my GP. I was diagnosed with depression, prescribed medica- medication, and began counseling. That was my path. I'm not saying it is everybody's path, but for me, counseling gave me somewhere safe enough to begin processing what happened slowly at my pace. I wasn't dragged back into the worst thing that had happened to me and asked to tear myself open before I was ready.
We went slowly, [00:13:00] and little by little, I stopped running, and for the first time, the pain had somewhere to go other than straight back inside me. That didn't make my sister's death okay. It didn't turn it into a beautiful life lesson. I'm not grateful for it. Some things are simply devastating because death doesn't only take someone from your past, it keeps taking them from your future.
My sister would never walk me down the aisle. She would never come to Australia. She would never meet her two nieces. There are the endings you know about when someone dies, and then there are the beginnings that they never get to be a part of. The weddings, the babies, the move across the world, the [00:14:00] woman you become.
Life keeps beginning again, and grief quietly reminds you they are not here to see it
Healing doesn't change that. It meant that slowly I became able to live alongside her absence without that absence consuming my whole life, and I think this was one of the biggest shifts for me. I had already proved I could keep going. I had become very good at carrying on. What I hadn't learnt was how to let myself be supported.
Healing wasn't proving I was strong enough. I'd already done that. Healing began when keeping going stopped being the only thing I knew how to do. And I think sometimes we wait far too long before we believe our pain is worthy of support. [00:15:00] We wait for the collapse, the breakdown, the moment we can no longer function.
But why? Why isn't, "This is hurting me," enough? You can be capable and still need support. You can be functioning and still be hurting. Those truths can exist at the same time
So if there is one thing I want you to take away from this conversation, it is this: What helped you survive a moment does not have to become the way you live. Survival knew how to get me through the day. It was never supposed to decide how I lived the years that followed And maybe there are things in your life that once protected you too.
The question now might simply be, do I still [00:16:00] need to live this way? I'm not going to ask you whether you're strong enough to keep going. I suspect you are. Maybe you've spent years proving exactly how strong you can be. I want to leave you with something harder. Are you moving through what you're carrying or staying in motion so you don't have to feel it?
You don't necessarily have to answer today. Just notice what that question brings up. And this week, simply notice where you instinctively go when something uncomfortable arises. Work, cleaning, your phone, food, another task, looking after somebody else. Don't judge it, don't try to fix it, but just ask, "Is this helping me stay with myself, or is it helping me get away from myself?"
That's enough. [00:17:00] More than enough. And if this conversation has you wondering where survival might be showing up in your own life in ways you learned to call normal, I've created a free private six-part audio series called Six Hidden Ways Women Quietly Abandon Themselves. It explores some of the everyday ways survival can become woven into how we live through hyper-independence, overthinking, over-responsibility, losing connection with ourselves, and behaviors we may have spent years calling our personality.
You can listen privately at your own pace. And if today's episode has made you curious about your own patterns, that might be a gentle place to continue. You'll find the link in the show notes. And until next time, [00:18:00] stay curious about yourself. And remember, just because it was doesn't mean it will be. With love, Carina