12/05/2025
Learning about my relationship with CHAOS.
Growing up, I felt responsible to fix the chaos that deeply disturbed people and caused disharmony. When I was 2 years old, a prime time in brain development/ attachments, chaos swept over the life of my primary caregiver. I identified with the responsibility to emotionally buffer and harmonize grief, chaps, and family conflict despite having no resources. As an adult, I find challenge and benefit in continuously questioning my role in the chaos of others, which easily becomes my internalized responsibility inappropriately. Admittedly, it seems chaos benefits from my presence harmonizing and organizing, however, if my presence is fruitless, or burns me out, I recognize this pattern as no longer constructive.
Here are the questions I’ll be pondering:
Where is the line between care and self-abandonment?
What part of this chaos actually belongs to me, and what part belongs to the other person?
Where do I stop, and where does the other person begin?
What responsibilities am I assuming that were never mine?
How do I know when I am crossing from compassion into over-functioning?
Which of my own needs get lost when someone else is in chaos?
What happens in my body when someone else is in chaos?
Do I move into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn?
Is my reaction based on the present moment or on a past wound?
What would my nervous system need to stay regulated in the presence of someone else’s turmoil?
Am I choosing to engage in this chaos, or am I being pulled in unconsciously?
What would it look like to stay present without getting pulled under?
What are the consequences of staying? What are the consequences of stepping back?
If I imagined myself with full agency, what boundaries would I set here?
What version of me participates in this chaos, and what version steps out?
Is this person’s chaos a pattern or an anomaly?
Does this relationship depend on instability?
When their chaos increases, does the relational balance change?
