The Hermit Crab Quandary: When Our Old Safeties Start to Threaten Us
What do The Clash, The Rolling Stones, and hermit crabs have to do with trauma repair? Besides the fact that they all rock, they also illustrate one of the most painful moments of the trauma healing journey. Developmental trauma (or C-PTSD) often shows up as stuckness: wanting to move forward, but feeling paralyzed in place by fear.
In this post, we’ll go over: what makes us feel stuck; how we got this way (and why it’s so scary); how the stuckness is rooted in survival; the connection between shame & hope; what your nervous system sucks at (this one is surprising!); and how we can get unstuck and start to move forward.
Stuck Between A Rock And A Hard Place
Every story of a hero’s journey has one: the moment when the protagonist cannot go back, but moving forward feels impossible. It’s like that old chestnut that bartenders used to yell out at closing time: “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”
You’ve probably been in that spot yourself, where what used to feel safe and comfortable now starts to itch and strain, and you know in your bones that you can’t remain where you are, but the very thought of taking the first steps that will lead you to the next place makes you feel like you will for sure die. Call it the point of no return, call it a rock and a hard place, but if you’ve been there and you know what I’m talking about, you know one thing for sure: that place hurts like hell.
Each of us is driven by two diametrically opposite and inescapable motivations: the drive to expand and explore, and the drive to stay safe and the same. Oftentimes, these two radically different drives feel like they’re going to pull us apart.
If this is you right now, pulled between the too-small life you’ve always known, and the big scary life you know you’re meant for but are afraid of stepping into, you might be doing everything in your power to escape the pain, but I’m here to tell you that that would be a mistake. This is one of the most important moments in your life, and I invite you to slow down (yes, I know it hurts, but bear with me here) and look at what’s going on a bit more closely. Because this moment has the potential to change everything.
Snug As A Bug In A Rug
I call it the Hermit Crab Quandary. Hermit crabs are soft and squishy on the outside: they need an external shell in order to keep them safe from the elements and predators. Hermit crabs will select a shell that fits their current size, Goldilocks-style: not too big, not too small, just the right amount of cozy protection.
Picture our pal Hermie the Hermit (I just gave them a name! Maybe they also wear a bowtie? Weirder shit has happened!) snug as a bug in their shell. They’re putting macrame hangings on the wall, they have a shelf for their crystals and a favorite burner on the stove. They are home.
Hermie would probably like to stay in this here shell forever because, let’s face it, moving is a pain in the ass, especially the way the housing market is these days, except for one problem: they keep growing. The cozy protection of their starter shell has fulfilled its purpose beautifully: it’s provided a home that felt safe and snug, where Hermie could grow, mature, deepen, and really express themselves through eclectic but tasteful home decorating.
But they’ve grown so much that now the snugness is starting to feel like a squeeze. The shell that was once life-giving has now begun to be life-threatening. If Hermie stays put, not only will they no longer have room to grow (or buy more houseplants), but they will actually die.
Should I Stay Or Should I Go?
So now Hermie is facing a Big Dilemma: either they stay put in the home they’ve always known, where they are cozy and safe from the outside world, but where the walls that kept them safe will eventually squeeze the very life out of them, OR they take the brave, bold step to venture out, all squishy bits and bowtie exposed and vulnerable, in search of their next shell-home, one that will fit all the growth and expansion they’ve done (and also one that has more room and better light for all the houseplants they’ve accumulated.)
Aren’t you just ROOTING for Hermie to make a break for it? Haven’t we been conditioned by a lifetime of movies, comic books, and novels to know that this is when the story gets good? Isn’t it clear that when Gandalf “asks” Frodo if he’ll carry the ring, it’s not an ask so much as a must?
Most of the clients I see in my trauma coaching business are finding themselves at a Hermie-style inflection point: their past shells are squeezing the life out of their true selves, but they’re scared that if they venture outside of the safety of the known-but-too-small walls, they’ll die.
While the risk of death for a shelter-seeking hermit crab is very real, us humans will often judge ourselves for this fear, saying we’re being too dramatic, all the while remaining stuck in place. We come by the judgment honestly: most of us have been gaslit at some point in our lives, been told that we’re too much, that we’re being silly, that it’s not that bad, that we just need to toughen and buck up and stop having feelings that are so inconvenient to everyone around us.
But the truth is, we’ve been carrying shells for a long time, too, and what we found refuge from in those shells would’ve actually, for real, killed us dead if we’d had no protection. As it turns out, we’re not being dramatic when we’re afraid that venturing out into the unknown will kill us: we’re being dead-on accurate.
And this is the point that I don’t want you to miss, this is why I’m inviting you to slow down with the squeeze. Your nervous system has really solid data to back up its perception that the mortal threat is real. The only slight problem is: your nervous system has no idea what year it is.
Let’s back up a bit, and examine why we needed shells in the first place, and what those shells are made of. Then we can explore what it means that our nervous system can’t tell time, and how we can go about finding our new shell-homes without feeling like we’re going to die.
Why Did We Even Need A Shell In The First Place?
If we’ve been carrying shells around to protect our soft, squishy bits, it makes sense to ask what we needed protection from. Developmental trauma occurs when our fundamental, biological needs for safety and connection are not met by our early caregivers and/or environments. More precisely, trauma occurs when, as infants or children, we are left alone with our pain.
Children are small and defenseless. (Kinda like a hermit crab without a shell.) They don’t yet have have access to a prefrontal cortex in order to make logical sense of the world around them; they don’t have the ability to self-regulate and self-soothe (no matter what the so-called sleep training experts would have you believe); and they don’t have the agency to make changes in their circumstances.
What this means is that, when children get hurt or scared, they are entirely dependent on the grown-ups around them to help them feel safe again.
Gabor Mate, physician and well-known trauma expert, writes: “Children are not traumatized because they are hurt, but because they are alone with that hurt." If there is no one to help, or if the grown-ups who are around are either not regulated themselves, or don’t take our pain seriously enough to tend to it, we’ll be left alone with our pain, and to a child, this will trigger a sense of life threat. We simply cannot survive without co-regulation, and to feel alone when we are hurt or scared is the worst pain that a child can endure.
Too many of us have had this experience: to be left alone with overwhelming pain, feeling that we will for sure die. (This experience can be imprinted in our nervous system even though we don’t have any kind of narrative memory to back it up.)
Too many of us have had the experience of growing up without safe, regulated caregivers, without safe and nurturing environments. How do we account for the fact that the pain cannot be endured or survived, and yet we are still here to talk about it?
This is where the first instances of shell-building occurred. In order to survive the unsurvivable, we did the only thing our defenseless, non-regulation-skills-having bodies could do: we exiled our unwitnessed feelings, and the grief of our unmet needs, and built protective shells around ourselves so that the overwhelming pain could never reach us again.
Shame Was The Most Hopeful Option
The shells we’ve been relying on for safety are survival strategies that are rooted in shame. A child cannot conceive of themselves as a good child in a bad environment. If the caregivers or the environment around them is bad and their needs cannot be met, then there would be no hope that the child could survive. So the only possible way for the child to survive that situation is to believe that they are bad for having needs, and that if they feel bad, it means that they are bad.
Strangely, this belief that the child themselves is bad is the most hopeful position to take, because since they can only have control over themselves, the belief that they are bad allows the child to hope that they might make themselves good. If they can make themselves good, they can secure the belonging with their caregivers that they need in order to survive.
In NARM (NeuroAffective Relational Model), the model for working with developmental trauma that I study and practice, shame is regarded as a process, not an emotion. This shame (the belief that if we feel bad, we are bad) is the raw material that makes up our shell, and the attempt to make ourselves good (in the hope that we can secure the belonging we need to survive) is the glue that holds it all together.
The thought of leaving behind our old shell built of shame and hope feels so deathly scary because it’s precisely this shell that allowed us to survive an unsurvivable environment. And while one part of us is really committed to staying safe, there is also a part of us that longs to break out of the shell. Our instinct to survive by being safe is matched by our desire to thrive by expanding and exploring. All the time we’ve spent in the shell, all the growth we’ve done inside, has prepared us for the moment when we would finally be ready to leave the confines of the trusty survival strategies that we’ve long outgrown.
Your Nervous System Can’t Tell Time
Your nervous system’s threat detection apparatus is very sophisticated in some ways, and very much not in others. One critical way this shows up is that your nervous system cannot tell time, as in, it doesn’t know what year it is.
The lower brain, which is responsible for processing sensory input (sight, smell, sound, taste, touch), does so without any input from the higher, thinking brain. In “What Happened to You?”, the book he co-wrote with Oprah, Dr Bruce Perry explains it this way: “This means that before any new experience has a chance to be considered by the higher, ‘thinking’ brain, the lower brain has already interpreted and responded to it [but] the lower part of the brain can’t ‘tell time.’
So sometimes its interpretation of the incoming input is inaccurate. If any of the input is a match to a stored memory from past experience, the lower brain reacts as though the past experience is the one happening now.”
In other words: your nervous system (and the lower part of the brain that it’s connected to) doesn’t know that you are no longer a child. It doesn’t know that you are now a grown-ass adult who pays their own bills, who makes their own decisions, who has access to agency, self-regulation skills, and a higher-functioning prefrontal cortex to help make sense of the world.
If it receives sensory input that something new is about to happen–say, that you’re trying to break out of the safety of your shell to take a leap into the unknown–your nervous system might well react with the same level of system-wide panic as it did when you were a defenseless infant who needed connection with their caregivers in order to survive, even though you are decidedly not.
So while our pal Hermie will likely face real threat when they finally break free of their old shell in search for a new one, when it comes to us humans, it is more than likely that the perceived threat that triggered the kind of nervous system response that keeps us stuck and stops us from moving forward is actually in the past. I mean sure, there’s always some risk involved in any new venture, but it’s unlikely that we will immediately die, even though our nervous system is screaming at us that we absolutely will.
Breaking Free Of The Too-Small Shell
So, how do we break free, both of the old ill-fitting shell, and of the outdated, knee-jerk nervous system response? One word: safety. Your nervous system needs to feel safe in order to move forward. In this case, safety will mean tapping into your sense of agency.
The biggest difference between you as a defenseless infant, and you as a grown-ass, bill-paying adult is agency. Agency means having the ability to act on your own behalf, to be able to affect change in the world around you.
By tapping into your own sense of agency, you can let your nervous system (and your scared, scarred inner child) know that you no longer need the protection of your early caregivers, because there is a new safe caregiver in town: your own self. By claiming agency, you can let your nervous system know that you’re all grown-up, that we are no longer in the past, and that it can call off the dogs of all-out life-threat panic mode.
I call this building self-trust. Self-trust means knowing that we can feel safe with ourselves, with our bodies, our feelings, and our needs. It means knowing that we have our own back and we can return to safety through self-regulation.
As we build self-trust, we learn to become a safe caregiver for our inner child, the one who felt so scared because they were alone with their hurt. Self-trust is what we reclaim for ourselves when we work to repair our trauma.
Self-Trust 101: Safe Witness
One of the simplest and most effective ways we can build self-trust is to offer ourselves safe witness. Earlier I mentioned that it’s being alone with our pain that made the pain life-threatening when we were little, that it was the lack of witness that made an event encode in our system as trauma. By the same logic, offering safe witness to our inner child is one of the primary ways we can repair trauma.
So when you’re on the edge of your old shell-home, ready to leap towards a new world, but your stomach is in knots and your heart is in your throat, and you feel like you’ll maybe die but that you’ll definitely throw up, remember this: put a hand on your own heart (or elsewhere in the body that calls to you) and say to your inner little one:
Sweetie, I see you. I see how hard this is and how much it hurts to be in this place. And I got you. You are not alone anymore because you’ve got me. I’m in charge now, and we’re safe together.
This shell has gotten too small for us, and while it’s served us well, if we stay here we’ll get the life squeezed out of us. It’s time to make a bold move. It’s time to take this leap together.
And while we don’t know what awaits us, what we do know is that we have the ability to create safety for ourselves. So let’s get curious, go out and explore, and find out what else the world has to offer us. I’ll be here with you no matter what.
What do you say? Shall we make a break for it?
I’m rooting for you to make a break for it. Hermie is rooting for you to make a break for it. There is so much more waiting for you out there than the small, cramped world of your outdated shell.
And now that you know what’s been holding you back, and how to address that obstacle by creating safety for yourself, nothing can stand in your way anymore.
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