ILYA ROZANOV WEEK: DAY FOUR FAVORITE TRAIT ↪ HIS EMPATHY AND KINDNESS 🥺💕
“When our childhood homes are chaotic and dangerous, we learn that the way to stay safe is to always be on alert — hypervigilant. Our nervous system never calms down because it’s constantly on the lookout for the next bomb that is going to explode [...] As the show goes on, we will learn that underneath Ilya’s extremely hard shell is the heart of a squishy teddy bear wrapped in a warm blanket, but it takes YEARS for Shane to see it. When we look at Ilya through the lens of what he learned as he grew up, it makes sense why he behaves the way he does. We can even have empathy for the level of hypervigilance and fear he lives with. I like to lay things out this way because it’s usually a hell of a lot harder to give ourselves that same grace. We have an idea of who we “should” be in our heads, and when we don’t live up to that we assume it’s because we’re a failure, a useless waste of space. None of that is true: we are behaving in ways that make complete sense when we understand how our nervous system was trained to respond to our environment.” — Reading Ilya Rozanov through the lens of trauma.
