06/04/2026
One of the things I hear all the time in recovery spaces is
“You just have to learn to sit with your discomfort.” And while I understand what’s trying to be communicated, I think that advice has caused a lot of harm.
Because nobody talks about capacity.
Nobody talks about what happens when your nervous system is already overwhelmed. Nobody talks about the difference between discomfort and distress. Nobody talks about the difference between being challenged and being flooded. For someone with a regulated nervous system, sitting with discomfort might mean tolerating an urge, a difficult emotion, a craving, uncertainty, grief, or fear.
For someone with significant trauma, “sitting with discomfort” can quickly become dissociation, panic, emotional flooding, shutdown, or a nervous system that has moved completely outside its window of tolerance.
Those are not the same thing.
And if you’ve spent your entire life surviving trauma, being told to just sit with it can feel a lot like being told to white knuckle your way through suffering.
That’s not recovery.
Recovery isn’t forcing yourself to endure more pain than your system can handle. Recovery is building capacity. It’s learning how much discomfort you can tolerate today. It’s learning when to lean in, learning when to step back, learning when to call someone, learning when to use tools, learning how to regulate before you become overwhelmed.
Because the goal isn’t to prove how much suffering you can tolerate.
The goal is to slowly expand your ability to stay present with difficult experiences without abandoning yourself. That’s very different than just sitting in pain until something breaks. And I think a lot more people would succeed in recovery if we taught that distinction.
