Lily Nguyen

About

What this work has shown me most clearly is that the symptoms people are most ashamed of are usually the ones that once kept them safe. Nobody develops these responses at random. Every one of them was, at some point, an entirely sensible adaptation to the circumstances a person was in. Hypervigilance is the clearest example: exhausting now, and once the reason someone made it through. We start by giving the response its due rather than treating it as a malfunction to be eliminated, because a strategy that saved you tends to resist being argued away. It relaxes when it becomes unnecessary, not when it is criticized. University and school counseling was my first setting, where I met a lot of young adults being told to simply calm down. Nobody has ever calmed down on that instruction. If you have been told your reactions are excessive, get in touch.