Warped Peace

I spent a long period of time being a version of myself that was efficient, but mostly absent and going through the motions. I was like a beautifully tailored coat with no one inside.

In the world of sewing, there’s a delicate balance called tension. If the tension on your machine is too tight, the thread can snap. If it’s too loose, the stitches bunch up to create a bird nest. But sometimes, when the tension is just “wrong” enough, the machine keeps running. And you don’t notice anything is amiss until you realize the fabric is pulling, bunching, and distorting.

When the tension in your life is wrong, it will either break you, or create a “warped peace.”

Have you ever driven home and realized you don’t remember the last five miles? Or been in a meeting and realized you are watching yourself from the ceiling, or feeling as though you are watching the room as though you are the chair you are sitting in? Or overall have a sense that the world around you feels unreal? This is a survival mechanism, designed to help us power through difficult moments. It’s a skill we learn how to do early in our lives.

Dissociation lives on a spectrum, from the quiet hum of a daydream to the profound disconnect of losing touch with your own identity. It’s the ultimate “adjustment” to internal and external tension.

In trauma work, we often talk about the “fight or flight” responses. But there are actually four different ways we survive high-stakes situations. The other two “F words” are “freeze and fawn.”

Freeze is the mental escape when the physical body cannot leave. It’s the “pedal to the floor” while the sewing machine isn’t plugged in.

Fawn is sophisticated survival strategy where we navigate a “beast” (whether chronic stress or impossible workload) by becoming exactly what is needed to stay safe and survive. Like Belle in Beauty and the Beast, we merge our needs with the needs of others to keep the peace.

For many professionals, these strategies are how you maintain an appearance of stoicism. You fawn to put other’s well-being above your own. You freeze your own emotions to make deadlines. It’s a strategy of leaving yourself behind so the job can get done.

But while it is an effective strategy in the short-term, it becomes a hindrance when you forget how to come back. You find yourself living in a state of “warped peace": you are calm only because you aren’t actually there.

In this state, we are go through the motions of our lives, “mending” or “creating,” but we’ve forgotten to thread the machine. You are sitting with the pedal pressed to the floor. You see the needle moving and feed-dogs pulling the fabric through. It looks like progress. It feels like productivity.

But when you lift the presser foot and remove the work from the machine, you realize there was no thread connecting the pieces. You’re left with disconnected scraps and a row of empty needle holes.

High-achievers become masters at sewing without thread. We do the work, attend the meetings, “care” for families, but there is no internal thread connecting us to the action or ourselves. We are moving, but not connecting. We have achieved a quiet, efficient life, but it’s a warped peace—one where the fabric of our existence no longer lays flat, and the real us is nowhere to be found.

What do we do when we’ve realized we’re sewing without thread?

We don’t need a new manual or a more complex machine. We need to take our feet off the pedal, take a breath, and look at the fabric. We need to find the courage and gumption to re-thread the needle, even if it means facing the tension.

In my practice, we don’t just talk about warped peace. We help you get back in touch with yourself, using sandtray and deep, present connection to help you feel at home in your body again.

If you’ve realized your peace feels warped or thin, you don’t have to navigate the mending alone.