Why I’ll Never Take The Mundane For Granted

Mental Health & Wellness • May 30, 2021

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

Presence is the ability to fully inhabit and engage with the here-and-now experience without distraction or avoidance. It is not about zoning out, forcing positivity, or escaping hard feelings; presence means sitting with whatever is happening in the moment, even the uncomfortable stuff, with openness. For you, presence is more than mindfulness jargon—it’s a milestone in trauma recovery that rewires your nervous system to trust safety in the ordinary. This skill transforms everyday tasks from meaningless chores into moments where you can rebuild stability, notice growth, and quietly reclaim your life from the long shadow of past pain.

• You carry the quiet weight of relational trauma when everyday tasks—like managing benefits or enrolling a child in preschool—feel overwhelming, because those ordinary moments were once unstable or unsafe for you.
• Presence and authentic gratitude aren’t just feel-good ideas; they are trauma recovery milestones that rewire your brain’s reward and connection systems, helping you reclaim safety in the mundane rhythms of daily life.
• When you stop dismissing the mundane as boring and instead recognize it as a reparative, grounding experience, you create stability that nurtures healing and transforms ordinary moments into acts of resilience and growth.

1. I’ll never take the mundane for granted.
2. Why I’ll never take the mundane for granted.
3. There is nothing particularly special – as some might define it – in what I do.
4. Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma
5. In my first eighteen years, the things many of us gripe about as the mundanity of adulting didn’t exist or existed in some tumultuous, porous way.
6. The point of this essay is, rather, to offer up a reframe.
7. What does a therapist actually do with the story of you crying on hold with your benefits administrator?
8. Wrapping up.

I’ll never take the mundane for granted.

A week ago was the open enrollment period for benefits at the therapy center I own here in Berkeley. 

I sent an email out to my staff letting them know about the week-long enrollment window and also about how I’d expanded benefits this year to include coverage for dependents on our medical, vision, and dental plans.

That same week I spent my lunch break gathering documents for my financial planner to help assess how much long-term disability insurance coverage I need to apply for and how much more per month I can now allocate to my daughter’s 529 plan and to our retirement accounts. 

I completed the intake paperwork for my daughter’s new preschool, found new dentists for all of us, and confirmed our benefits with customer service.

It was a week of full-on adulting and, if I’m being honest, there were a few moments when I felt overwhelmed by it all.

Negotiating with benefits brokers, gathering medical and tax records, trying to decipher insurance paperwork legalese…

But even in the midst of the overwhelm, I felt proud of myself and, actually, so grateful for the mundanity of it all.

For me, what might be viewed as mundane is actually a powerful reparative experience given my personal relational trauma background.

In today’s essay, I explain what made this reparative and more about why I’ll never take the mundane for granted.

Why I’ll never take the mundane for granted.

There was nothing “special,” flashy, or exciting about any of the tasks I completed the other week.

There’s also not anything particularly “special,” exciting, or flashy about the sum of my tasks and to-dos on any given day or week.

Load and unload the dishwasher.

Gather the laundry, wash the laundry, fold the laundry.

Batch cook meals in the Instapot and meal prep for the week.

Book medical appointments, refill the vitamin containers, pay the bills, set up socially distanced playdates.

Go to work (which I love), save money to support our long-term planning goals.

Exercise, (mostly) eat healthy, etc.

Again, nothing flashy. Nothing extraordinary.

There are probably a few billion people on the planet who have somewhat similar daily and weekly lists.

There is nothing particularly special – as some might define it – in what I do. 

But the mundane, the ordinary, is special for me given where I come from.

I come from a relational trauma background where there was psychological pain and often logistical and financial chaos while growing up.

We didn’t have health insurance (though my mom made sure we had medical care when needed). 

There were homemade lunches and some saved money – but that money didn’t go to a down payment or retirement investments or 529’s.

Jobs were worked but no financial security was built. 

There was employment, but no business ownership and no job creation for others.

There was no working with a financial planner, accountant, and attorneys to lay good, sound legal, and financial futures.

One parent was doing their best, and one parent creating a tornado of psychological, financial, and logistical chaos in their wake no matter who and what they encountered.

In my first eighteen years, the things many of us gripe about as the mundanity of adulting didn’t exist or existed in some tumultuous, porous way.

Now, as a 38-year-old woman who runs her own company that employs 12 W-2 employees, who creates jobs and offers benefits to others, as someone who doesn’t often buy new clothes so I can hit our family’s savings goals, to an outsider, my life might look like a big slog of drudgery and routine.

But for me the mundane is reparative.

The regular routines of life and the ordinary of adulting are reparative because I’m doing for myself and my little family what was not done (or done well) for me.

Each month when the money flows to my 401K and gets debited from my paycheck to build my daughter’s 529, a small part of me wishes there were more sushi dinners in my life.

But a greater part of me deeply respects my discipline, ability to account for, and responsibly take care of my future and my family’s future.

Being a mostly good, responsible, and reliable adult – after the chaos, tumult, insecurity, and abuse of my childhood – is a profoundly reparative experience for my adult self and my child self.

Obviously, I’m not a financial planner and I’d never dare to tell others what to do with their money and household logistics – that’s not the point of this essay.

The point of this essay is, rather, to offer up a reframe.

On what can so often feel like the ordinary drudgery, the everyday mundanity of life.

I want to suggest that – far from being ordinary and mundane – that every day, every week choices are particularly important if you – like me – come from a relational trauma background where adult responsibilities (be it emotional, logistical, or financial) were sorely, detrimentally, lacking.

If you, like I, come from a relational trauma background, I want to invite you to consider that part of your healing, part of overcoming your painful past may not just happen in the therapy room.

It may also happen every time you meal prep nutritious food for you and your family.

It may also happen each time you brown-bag your lunch and sock that money saved into an IRA.

Or it may happen on your lunch break while you nibble your sandwich while on hold with your benefits administrator to get an accurate snapshot of the copay for your child’s upcoming procedure.

It may also happen when you build your earthquake kit, stock the cars with first aid kits, book and attend your regular medical and dental appointments.

In the dozens, hundreds, and thousands of adulting moments where you work to create security, responsibility, stability, and safety for you and those you love, I want to suggest that these moments are anything but mundane.

These moments are reparative and potentially transformational, especially when you come from a background of chaos, neglect, or abuse.

What does a therapist actually do with the story of you crying on hold with your benefits administrator?

When you tell your therapist you felt unexpectedly emotional setting up your first employee benefits plan, describing how this “boring” administrative task felt like a miracle given your chaotic childhood, you’re recognizing how creating a beautiful adulthood for yourself isn’t just about big achievements but about the profound healing found in ordinary stability.

Your trauma-informed therapist understands that for those raised in chaos—financial instability, emotional volatility, logistical dysfunction—the mundane tasks of responsible adulthood aren’t mundane at all but radical acts of cycle-breaking. They recognize that your pride in maintaining health insurance when your family never had coverage, your discipline in retirement savings when money always disappeared into crisis, your consistency in meal planning when food was scarce or chaotic represents massive therapeutic victories.

The therapeutic work involves reframing these “ordinary” achievements as the extraordinary accomplishments they are. Together, you explore how each mundane task challenges a trauma-based belief: paying bills on time proves the world isn’t always chaotic, maintaining insurance shows you deserve security, saving money demonstrates you can plan for a future. Your therapist helps you recognize that the emotional weight of these tasks—the overwhelm, pride, sometimes grief—reflects their significance in your healing journey.

Through this lens, therapy helps you understand that building external stability is internal work. Every routine you establish sends a message to your nervous system that predictability is possible. Every responsible choice you make reparents the child who learned to expect chaos. The “boring” work of adulting becomes a living meditation on safety, teaching your body what your childhood couldn’t: that stability exists and you’re capable of creating it.

Most importantly, therapy validates that finding the sacred in the mundane isn’t settling for less but recognizing that for trauma survivors, a stable, predictable life isn’t a consolation prize—it’s the ultimate victory over chaos, proof that you’ve become the reliable adult your inner child always needed.

Wrapping up.

Sit with this reframe and try it on the next time you feel overwhelmed, underwhelmed, or bored by the adulting in front of you.

See how embracing this reframe shifts your emotional experience of the task at hand.

See how this strengthens your regard for yourself and who you have become despite where you started.

And please, if you feel so inclined, please leave me a message in the comments below to let me know what “mundane” adulting task has felt reparative and healing to you lately.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

Both/And: The Mundane Can Be Genuinely Boring AND Genuinely Reparative

Here’s the both/and I want to name explicitly, because toxic positivity can creep into this territory if we’re not careful: not every moment of adulting is secretly healing. Some of it is just dull. Some Tuesday evenings are just Tuesday evenings — not portals of gratitude, not opportunities for reparenting, just ordinary evenings that need to be gotten through.

AND. For those of us who grew up in chaos, where Tuesday evenings were anything but predictable, there is often something genuinely reparative happening in the ordinary moments of functional adult life, even when it doesn’t feel spiritual or meaningful in the moment. The predictability is the point. The routine is the medicine. The fact that you know what tomorrow will look like — and that it will look roughly like today, and yesterday — is not boring. It’s what nervous system safety actually feels like from the inside.

Sarah, who grew up with a parent whose bipolar disorder made every family dinner a question mark, described this to me with a specificity that has stayed with me: “I used to think I was weird because I actually enjoy grocery shopping. Now I get it. Nobody’s going to blow up at me over the wrong brand of bread. The stakes are what the stakes should be.” The stakes being proportionate to the situation — that’s what regulated adult life offers. And for many driven women with complex trauma histories, that proportionality is quietly revolutionary.

The Systemic Lens: When “Adulting” Is a Class Story Too

The experience of finding adulthood stabilizing — of finding the ordinary functioning of daily life meaningful — is more common among people who came from unstable, chaotic, or resource-constrained childhoods. But it’s worth naming that the stability of adult life isn’t equally accessible to everyone.

For many adults managing economic precarity, the “stability of adulting” isn’t a given. The stable health insurance, the predictable housing, the ability to buy groceries without calculating whether the total will exceed what’s in the account — these are privileges that millions of adults, including many who grew up in unstable circumstances, never get to access. The relief of adult stability that I describe in this post, and that many of my clients describe in our sessions, is real AND it’s shaped by class access in ways that deserve acknowledgment.

For driven women from difficult backgrounds who have achieved economic stability, there can be a specific kind of guilt that accompanies the relief: a guilt about having escaped circumstances that family members are still navigating, a guilt about finding ordinary life restoring when others can’t access that ordinary life. That survivor guilt is real and worth exploring in therapy, not as something to be dismissed but as something that contains important information about loyalty, belonging, and what it means to have crossed into a different kind of life than the one you were born into.

The mundane matters. Your relationship to it matters. And the conditions that make stability possible — economic, relational, structural — are worth attending to both in your own life and in your understanding of the larger world. If you’d like to explore your own relationship to stability, routine, and what “safe enough” feels like in your nervous system, individual therapy or the Fixing the Foundations course are good starting points.

When the Ordinary Becomes Extraordinary: The Neurobiology of Safety

I want to say something clinical here, because I think it helps to understand why the mundane is so specifically meaningful to those of us with chaotic or difficult early histories. It’s not nostalgia. It’s not sentimentality. It’s neurobiology.

Stephen Porges, PhD, professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and developer of Polyvagal Theory, describes how the nervous system is constantly scanning the environment for cues of safety — what he calls neuroception. When early life provided chronic cues of unpredictability, threat, or emotional unavailability, the nervous system calibrated to expect those conditions. The threat-detection system stayed high; the capacity for rest and social engagement was suppressed. (PMID: 7652107)

Adult life that is stable, predictable, and emotionally safe offers a different set of cues. And for nervous systems that were wired in difficult early environments, those cues of safety produce something that is often described as almost physically palpable — a settling, a relaxation in the muscles and the breath, a quality of “oh, it’s okay, nothing is going to happen” that most people never notice because they’ve always known it.

If you find yourself moved by your own ordinary Tuesday — by the ability to pay a bill on time, to make dinner in a kitchen that is yours, to go to sleep without wondering what mood you’ll wake up to — that’s not weakness or excessive sentimentality. That’s your nervous system recognizing, correctly, that something genuinely different is happening. It is worth noting. It is worth celebrating. And if you’re still working toward that kind of safety — in your external life or your internal one — trauma-informed therapy is one of the most reliable paths I know toward it.

The Reparative Work Hidden in Ordinary Rituals

In my clinical work, I sometimes ask clients to tell me about the adult rituals that feel most grounding to them. The ones that make them feel, in some wordless way, that they are okay. What I hear consistently from driven women with difficult early histories is: the rituals are almost always ordinary.

Grocery shopping on Sunday morning. Making coffee the same way every day. Paying bills on time and seeing a balance that doesn’t send a spike of fear through the chest. Having a clean apartment. Sleeping in a bed that belongs to them. These don’t sound like healing. They sound like adulting. But for many of us, there is no real separation between the two.

Priya, who grew up with a parent who was often chaotic and sometimes frightening, told me about her ritual of ironing her clothes for the week on Sunday evenings. “I know it sounds ridiculous,” she said. “But there’s something about having everything in order for the week. I never had that as a kid. Sunday evenings were the worst — you never knew what Monday would bring.” Now Sunday evenings are hers. They’re predictable. They’re calm. The ironing isn’t just ironing. It’s a weekly act of reparenting herself — giving herself, each week, the sense of preparation and safety that nobody gave her as a child.

What are your ordinary rituals that carry that quality? What mundane moments feel quietly, unreasonably important? I invite you to notice them — not to overanalyze them, but to honor them. They’re evidence of your healing. They’re evidence that you’re building, one ordinary Tuesday at a time, the life your nervous system always needed. If you want support in this work, reach out here — there’s a great deal more healing available to you.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer