ACEs: Lived, Not Learned- naming the AIR we breathe
Healing doesn’t start with change.It starts with honesty. Before accountability, integrity, and responsibility become lived practices, many of us are still breathing an older kind of AIR — even today. Avoidance.Inconsistency.Reactivity. Avoidance — because the brain learned survival before safety. Avoidance wasn’t weakness; it was protection. We avoided emotions, memories, conversations, and situations because facing everything at once would have overwhelmed our system. Inconsistency — because survival required adaptation. Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Many of us learned to shift identities depending on the room. Confident here. Invisible there. Capable in one space. Silenced in another. We carried a bag of costumes just to make it through the day. Reactivity — because unhealed trauma lives in the body. Our responses weren’t chosen; they were nervous system reactions shaped by stress, fear, and unpredictability. This isn’t about blame.It’s about naming. Because until healing is walked out, old AIR can still be breathed — and passed down. Naming the AIR we breathe matters because it tells us where we’re starting. And once we know the starting point, we can intentionally move toward new AIR — Accountability, Integrity, and Responsibility — not as pressure, but as oxygen. ACEs are lived, not learned.And healing begins when we name what we’re breathing. 🫁