Posture & Collapse
When stressful news hits you, when the pressure is on and you feel like you must act right now, your brain generally falls back on one of two automatic reflexes. You either posture or you collapse.
Posturing is that stanch response in which you stand aside, plant your feet and dictate exactly how it is going to be. The conscious mind is taking over and you’re forcing yourself to feel strong. Here, you’re reminding yourself you know exactly what to do. Perhaps you are choosing to challenge someone you consider to be more intelligent, more powerful, more capable. Maybe it’s that locked jaw of determination that you posture toward: “I’ve got this.” It feels also strong, but there is often a lot of fear driving the bus.
Collapse is the flipside of that coin. This is when you get emotionally flooded as the situation becomes too much for you to hold. All those feelings of overwhelm pouring into your mind haphazardly with no solution. It’s “Oh no! I can’t believe this is happening!” The resulting cycle is unconscious, and it places you in victimhood instead of as someone who is competent to figure things out if they had to. No clarity here, just reactive emotional flooding.
Both of these reactions may sound mechanical because they are. Your nervous system is just trying to help you, but neither of those responses really serve you well. On the side of defense, you can end up rigid and aggressive, dismissing and pushing against prospective solutions; on the other side, instrumental acquiescence, a helpless and disarrayed reaction that smothers solutions. One option, which a lot of people miss, is that there are a third possibility.
Composure.
Consider someone attempting to rescue a drowning person. If this rescuing person panics and frantically jumps in and thrashes around in the water, then both people can drown. On the flipside, if this person remains standing still on the shore muttering that they know exactly what to do but never budging an inch, nobody gets saved. But if this person does this with urgent composure, methodical and clear eyed, calm but decisive action, then that is when an effective rescue process is engaged.
This is where God meets you. Not in the frantic posture, or the helpless frozen collapse, but in that poised, composed space where you are fully there and can thoughtfully choose your next action. Don’t get me wrong, God can work miracles despite fear, but God He wants you to not fear and will enable you to move forward with poise and composure. You can be urgent but not frantic. You can choose to move forward with the a desirable outcome fixed in your mind.
The question is, can you maintain composure when everything inside you wants to clench or decompensate? Because if you can’t maintain your composure, all that’s left are those two competing emotions. Posture or collapse. Control or chaos. Neither one leads anywhere good.
When you learn to recognize the pressure as it arrives and pause just long enough to locate your center, you open possible solutions to relieving the pressure. Instead of letting your old reactive patterns take over, you can make space for the Spirit to guide your responses. Everything you do from that place of written is more purposeful, more intentional, more accurate to who you really want to be.”
If you are weary of oscillating between rigid control and emotional flooding, let’s talk about how to build that third lane. Book a session and we’ll get to work on training your nervous system to find composure when it matters most, so that you can show up as the person you actually want to be when pressure hits. There is no question of willpower or trying harder here; this is about identifying the patterns that hijack your presence of mind. Also, you will learn ways of establishing new neural pathways, so that poise composure becomes your default response.
