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Anatomy of a Breakthrough
Anatomy of a Breakthrough Disguised as a Breakdown
A terrifyingly real and raw event happened to me recently, one I thought was a full nervous breakdown – a feeling of losing my grip on everything. But what I was actually living through was the anatomy of a breakthrough, the kind that looks like destruction from the inside out because it rearranges everything you thought you understood about yourself. It came disguised as overwhelm, grief, panic, and deep despair. But underneath it was something else entirely. Something clean, sharp, and true, and something I didn’t know I was ready for or could survive until it pulled me into its center and ripped me open.
The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door.
_Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
To my amazement, ground zero of this shattering experience started with a cat. A traumatized cat named Hazel who has been living in a shelter cage for two years. My friend, a dog person – not a cat person – adopted her and asked me to watch her while she was out of town for a couple of days. Then within a week she asked me to watch her again while she left for an extended holiday trip over a period of six days, and I agreed. What I didn’t expect was that Hazel would become a mirror – a living image of the terrified child in me I had never fully seen. Her wide, dilated eyes, her frozen body, her hiding in the darkest corners and spaces of the house. Her inability to trust safety even when it was right in front of her. It makes me cry just thinking about it now. Her fear was so familiar it hurt. It hurt in a way that shot right through the adult me and pierced the deeper part of me – the part I have survived by never letting myself look directly at it because I didn’t know how to hold it or perceive it.
The essence of trauma is disconnection from ourselves. Healing is the reconnection to self.
_Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
Then my friend asked me, on the heels of being gone twice in a short amount time, to watch her cat again while she went away for another six days. I was already unraveling but that request broke me. The trigger wasn’t just Hazel. It was my friend’s unconsciousness and obliviousness. Her inability to see Hazel’s terror and pain for what it was – brushing it off as something the cat would simply get over – echoed something too close to my own history. It was like watching the original wound reenacted in front of me: a terrified small being and the adults around her too self-focused, too distracted, too emotionally unskilled and immature to even register her fear and panic. It’s the dismissiveness, the denial, the casual cruelty of not seeing what is right in front of you. I have lived a lifetime inside that.
I was already overtired, and not feeling at my best. Run down by doing too much, noisy neighbors, and overwhelm. So maybe it was inevitable that the final straw of seeing Hazel and watching her new guardian and carer ignore and dismiss her by leaving her alone again to survive in her frozen state – was the thing that finally broke me. My body went into overload. Shaking and crying uncontrollably. A pressure in my chest so intense I could barely breathe. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t even trust my own decisions. I kept thinking I was falling into a black hole with no bottom, but the truth is I wasn’t breaking – I was being shown what had been frozen in me for decades. The Hazel inside me. The part who learned to hide in plain sight. The one who lived her entire childhood vigilant, terrified, eyes wide open in the dark, trying to scan the environment for danger, trying to anticipate the next blow. The part who survived by separating from herself and presenting the functioning version of me to the world while the rest of me lived in the shadows.
It’s not a matter of letting go - you would if you could. Instead, we let it be. And in letting it be, it begins to let go of us.
_Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
Watching Hazel felt like seeing myself from the outside for the first time. Not just feeling the fear, but witnessing it. Witnessing the whole ecosystem of trauma from every fucking horrifying angle: the frozen, traumatized one, the adult who should know better but doesn’t, the silent scream of helplessness, the moral injury of seeing innocence harmed and ignored. I stood inside all of it and outside of all of it at the same time. That is what cracked me open. That is what shook me to my core.
This experience followed the same reorganization I described in my recent Friday Edition, Trauma Physics > Quantum Physics – the collapse into the particle-state, the rupture, and then the quantum moment when the observer comes forward and the system unravels and reforms anew – simply because it’s finally being seen.
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By Sunny Lynn, OMCAnatomy of a Breakthrough Disguised as a Breakdown
A terrifyingly real and raw event happened to me recently, one I thought was a full nervous breakdown – a feeling of losing my grip on everything. But what I was actually living through was the anatomy of a breakthrough, the kind that looks like destruction from the inside out because it rearranges everything you thought you understood about yourself. It came disguised as overwhelm, grief, panic, and deep despair. But underneath it was something else entirely. Something clean, sharp, and true, and something I didn’t know I was ready for or could survive until it pulled me into its center and ripped me open.
The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door.
_Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
To my amazement, ground zero of this shattering experience started with a cat. A traumatized cat named Hazel who has been living in a shelter cage for two years. My friend, a dog person – not a cat person – adopted her and asked me to watch her while she was out of town for a couple of days. Then within a week she asked me to watch her again while she left for an extended holiday trip over a period of six days, and I agreed. What I didn’t expect was that Hazel would become a mirror – a living image of the terrified child in me I had never fully seen. Her wide, dilated eyes, her frozen body, her hiding in the darkest corners and spaces of the house. Her inability to trust safety even when it was right in front of her. It makes me cry just thinking about it now. Her fear was so familiar it hurt. It hurt in a way that shot right through the adult me and pierced the deeper part of me – the part I have survived by never letting myself look directly at it because I didn’t know how to hold it or perceive it.
The essence of trauma is disconnection from ourselves. Healing is the reconnection to self.
_Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
Then my friend asked me, on the heels of being gone twice in a short amount time, to watch her cat again while she went away for another six days. I was already unraveling but that request broke me. The trigger wasn’t just Hazel. It was my friend’s unconsciousness and obliviousness. Her inability to see Hazel’s terror and pain for what it was – brushing it off as something the cat would simply get over – echoed something too close to my own history. It was like watching the original wound reenacted in front of me: a terrified small being and the adults around her too self-focused, too distracted, too emotionally unskilled and immature to even register her fear and panic. It’s the dismissiveness, the denial, the casual cruelty of not seeing what is right in front of you. I have lived a lifetime inside that.
I was already overtired, and not feeling at my best. Run down by doing too much, noisy neighbors, and overwhelm. So maybe it was inevitable that the final straw of seeing Hazel and watching her new guardian and carer ignore and dismiss her by leaving her alone again to survive in her frozen state – was the thing that finally broke me. My body went into overload. Shaking and crying uncontrollably. A pressure in my chest so intense I could barely breathe. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t even trust my own decisions. I kept thinking I was falling into a black hole with no bottom, but the truth is I wasn’t breaking – I was being shown what had been frozen in me for decades. The Hazel inside me. The part who learned to hide in plain sight. The one who lived her entire childhood vigilant, terrified, eyes wide open in the dark, trying to scan the environment for danger, trying to anticipate the next blow. The part who survived by separating from herself and presenting the functioning version of me to the world while the rest of me lived in the shadows.
It’s not a matter of letting go - you would if you could. Instead, we let it be. And in letting it be, it begins to let go of us.
_Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
Watching Hazel felt like seeing myself from the outside for the first time. Not just feeling the fear, but witnessing it. Witnessing the whole ecosystem of trauma from every fucking horrifying angle: the frozen, traumatized one, the adult who should know better but doesn’t, the silent scream of helplessness, the moral injury of seeing innocence harmed and ignored. I stood inside all of it and outside of all of it at the same time. That is what cracked me open. That is what shook me to my core.
This experience followed the same reorganization I described in my recent Friday Edition, Trauma Physics > Quantum Physics – the collapse into the particle-state, the rupture, and then the quantum moment when the observer comes forward and the system unravels and reforms anew – simply because it’s finally being seen.
Quantum Physics","cta":"Read full story","showBylines":true,"showDescription":true,"showImage":true,"size":"sm","isEditorNode":true,"title":"Trauma Physics > Quantum Physics","publishedBylines":[{"id":44654908,"name":"Sunny Lynn, OMC","bio":"Spiritual counselor, writer, poet, photographer, and meditation guide - a nature-loving soul on a mission to transmute complex trauma through self-love, healing, and heartful connection. Offering balm for tender hearts, everywhere. 💛","photo_url":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/93bb3abc-e3c1-434c-93b2-cee8b23b3dd3_792x792.png","is_guest":false,"bestseller_tier":null}],"post_date":"2025-11-21T18:07:40.851Z","cover_image":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Pzl5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbb55d324-d01a-458d-a3b6-c2844b423a9a_1080x1080.png","cover_image_alt":null,"canonical_url":"https://heartbalm.substack.com/p/trauma-physics-quantum-physics","section_name":"The Friday Edition","video_upload_id":null,"id":179576021,"type":"newsletter","reaction_count":1,"comment_count":0,"publication_id":832613,"publication_name":"HeartBalm","publication_logo_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!qY8Q!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fee2a58f5-34f6-4085-bb7c-1c21077173ef_500x500.png","belowTheFold":true,"youtube_url":null,"show_links":null,"feed_url":null}">Share HeartBalm
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