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Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
People who have lived on high alert often start grieving once the danger stops, and it can look like going backwards: more tears, more fear about the future, pulling away from the very support that got them there. Withdrawal at that point is not ingratitude. It helps to say plainly that this happens, to keep the door open without requiring anything, and to keep offering ordinary contact rather than the big conversation.
Among the provisions named is 'safety to ward off fear' (Quran 106:4). Safety is a provision in its own right, and provision is where a person begins rather than where they finish.
قريش
ٱلَّذِيٓ أَطۡعَمَهُم مِّن جُوعࣲ وَءَامَنَهُم مِّنۡ خَوۡفِۭ
who provides them with food to ward off hunger, safety to ward off fear
Qur’an 106:4read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta analysis of chronic stress and the stress hormone system found that cortisol does not simply go up and stay up. The pattern depends on the kind of stressor and how long it has run, and prolonged stress often ends in flattened output rather than raised. Long stress reshapes the system rather than only loading it, which is one reason recovery is not a neat reversal. That work is about hormone patterns, not about what people feel when they reach a refuge.
Miller GE, Chen E, Zhou ES. (2007). If it goes up, must it come down? Chronic stress and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis in humans.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Being on constant alert takes up the room that grief needs, so grief turns up when the alert finally drops.
Try saying it plainly, out loud if you can: my body did what it needed to do, and I am still here.
You will stop doing this once you feel better. Write it on your list of things that help, so it is there next time instead of forgotten.
People carrying long term trauma often show low stress hormone levels rather than high ones. Flat and exhausted is a stress presentation too.