Angie Davenport Counseling

01/01/2026

12/31/2025

A wish for you for the year ahead...

12/26/2025

One of the most gaslighting experiences in dysfunctional systems
is being told you’re the problem for reacting to something harmful
that everyone else is pretending isn’t happening.

You’re labelled emotional.
Dramatic.
Overreactive.
Unstable.

Not because your response is irrational —
but because your response disrupts the illusion.

You’re not reacting to nothing.
You’re reacting to:
• chronic invalidation
• subtle control
• repeated boundary violations
• emotional neglect dressed up as “normal”
• power dynamics no one wants to examine

But here’s the unspoken rule of many families, workplaces, and social groups:

The person who names the discomfort becomes the discomfort.

So instead of addressing the behaviour,
they pathologise your reaction.

Instead of asking,
“Why would someone feel this way?”
they ask,
“What’s wrong with you?”

Because if your reaction is framed as the problem,
no one has to look at what caused it.

Your nervous system didn’t malfunction.
It responded accurately to a threat that wasn’t safe to challenge directly.

And when you’re the only one willing to feel what’s actually happening,
you carry the emotional load for everyone else.

That’s why you end up doubting yourself.
Replaying conversations.
Explaining yourself too much.
Apologising for reactions that make perfect sense in context.

You weren’t “too sensitive.”
You were the only one telling the truth with your body.

And systems that depend on denial
will always punish the person who refuses to numb.

Here’s the part that matters:

Your reaction was not the problem.
It was information.

Information about what wasn’t safe.
What wasn’t fair.
What wasn’t being acknowledged.

And once you see that,
you stop trying to regulate yourself
for environments that refuse to regulate their harm.

You don’t need to become calmer
to make dysfunction more comfortable.

You need distance from spaces
that require your silence to survive.

That isn’t emotional weakness.
That’s psychological clarity.

12/26/2025

One of the strangest moments in healing
is realising how many connections were built
on your dysregulation.

When you were reactive, available, fixing, explaining —
you were engaging.
You were interesting.
You were needed.

Chaos created closeness.
Urgency created intimacy.
Your emotional labour kept the system alive.

So when you slowed down,
when you stopped reacting on cue,
when you chose steadiness over intensity —
something shifted.

People said you’d changed.
That you’d become distant.
That you were colder.
Harder to reach.

But what they were really noticing
was the absence of fuel.

You stopped regulating emotions that weren’t yours.
You stopped playing your assigned role.
You stopped mistaking emotional noise for connection.

And systems that depend on chaos
don’t survive calm.

This is why healing can feel isolating.
Not because you became less —
but because you became unavailable
to dynamics that required your depletion.

You didn’t lose relationships.
You outgrew patterns.

And the quiet that follows
isn’t emptiness.

It’s space.

Space where peace can exist
without explanation.
Space where connection doesn’t require adrenaline.
Space where you’re allowed to be boring, steady, whole.

Not everyone will follow you there.

But the ones who do
won’t need you dysregulated
to feel close to you.

12/19/2025

12/19/2025

When you try to heal and feel yourself pulling back,
freezing, numbing, sabotaging progress,
or suddenly wanting to “go back to how things were,”
it’s not because you’re broken.

It’s because your body remembers.

Your nervous system learned survival in an environment
where softness was dangerous,
where feeling too much had consequences,
where slowing down meant exposure.

So when healing asks you to rest,
your body hears: risk.

When healing asks you to feel,
your body hears: threat.

When healing asks you to trust,
your body remembers what trust once cost you.

Resistance isn’t defiance.
It’s loyalty.

Loyalty to the strategies that kept you alive
when no one else did.

Hypervigilance kept you one step ahead.
Dissociation kept the pain contained.
Productivity kept you useful enough to stay safe.
Silence kept you from being targeted.

Your body doesn’t know that the danger is over.
It only knows that these patterns worked.

So when you start healing,
your system panics — not because healing is wrong,
but because survival is familiar.

This is why healing can feel like loss.
Why peace can feel empty.
Why calm can feel unsafe.
Why your body would rather stay alert than relax.

You are not failing healing
when your body resists it.

You are negotiating with a system
that once saved your life.

Real healing is not forcing yourself forward.
It’s teaching your nervous system
that safety doesn’t have to be earned anymore.

That rest isn’t punishment.
That feeling isn’t fatal.
That you don’t need to stay on guard to exist.

Progress here looks slow.
Messy.
Nonlinear.

And that’s not weakness —
that’s rewiring.

So if your body is resisting healing,
don’t shame it.

Listen.

It’s not trying to stop you.
It’s asking for reassurance.

And every time you meet that resistance with patience
instead of pressure,
you teach your body something new:

That survival is no longer the job.
Living is.

12/18/2025

We aren’t all “Holiday ready” just because it’s the Holidays. Be gentle with yourself.