The Armor Behind My Smile

Me on a solo trip for my 45th birthday at Moab Utah.

I used to think the calmest person in the room was the most powerful.

Turns out, I wasn’t calm.

I was stonewalling.

I’ve always had a big smile. Heck, I even won best smile in high school eons ago. It's the kind of smile that softens people. The kind that makes everyone feel comfortable around you. What most people didn’t know is that behind that smile was an armor.

If you had met me six years ago and conflict showed up, a few things would happen. I would look at you straight on with no emotion. I might leave the room without saying a word. And if it got heated enough, I would grab my keys and drive off.

At the time , I thought this made me powerful. A display of badassery. I thought I was the calm one. The one who couldn’t be rattled.… and that I was unfuckwithable.

In my desperate attempt to "fix myself" before ever dating again I dove into learning about relationships especialy if there was statistically sound research. I know, nerd aler LOL. I remember watching the Love Doctors, the Gottmans, on Youtube talking about something called the “Four Horsemen of relationships”. One of them was stonewalling.

I thought, Wait… what? That can’t be bad. I wasn’t yelling. I wasn’t escalating. I was the calm one.

But the more I listened, the more uncomfortable it got. Because what they were describing sounded a lot like me. But if I was honest with myself, there was something underneath that calm. When I shut down, I felt powerful. And once I saw that, it hit me. That’s kind of messed up.

That moment started a process for me. I became determined to look at my own patterns so I wouldn’t keep repeating the same relationship dynamics. Up until then I thought it was always them. Funny how that works.

Once I saw the pattern, I went all in on healing. I worked on my deepest heart break, trauma tried everything under the sun. You name it I've tried it...KAP, CIMBS, EMDR, EFT and energy medicine from tuning forks to body code to mystics to shamans. At one point I joked that I had tried every acronym in the healing world.

Honestly though the tools helped. It gave me the language. Awareness of my patterns. It was my willingness to finally look at myself with honesty. My patterns and my operating system running beneath it.

What I once thought was strength was actually disconnection. What I once thought was control was really protection. The real power came later, when I learned how to stay present instead of shutting down. I learned how to surrender what no longer works, align my energy, my emotions, and my awareness instead of hiding behind armor.

That part of my journey eventually became the foundation for the framework I now call PEACE - Personal Energetic Alignment and Consciousness Expansion.

And ironically, the peace I was looking for all along didn’t come from being untouchable. It came from surrendering the baggage and finally letting my heart stay open.

I wonder how many of us learned to call our armor strength. What is your armor?