Showing all posts tagged self-empowerment

Defending Our Limitations

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Defending Our Limitations

Have you ever talked with someone about a problem that they have, and they’re asking for your advice and opinions and every time you make a suggestion they respond with something like, “Yeah, but it wouldn’t work and here are all the reasons why”? And you can “yeah, but” anything- “Yeah, but I tried that and my situation stayed the same.” “Yeah, but she won’t listen to me anyway.” “Yeah, but that would require me to change everything I’m doing.” “Yeah, but if I did that then I would have to go back and fix a million other things that I’ve left unaddressed.”

After a while, it starts to seem like the person whose problem your listening to isn’t really looking for a solution. In fact, it might even start to seem like they’re committed to feeling bad and frustrated and to the problem itself. You get impatient and say something like, “Well, are you going to shoot down everything I suggest?” or “I don’t know what the answer is.” And they say something about how they don’t mean to be contrary and then start the cycle all over again. It almost feels like an argument, and they’re trying to convince you of all the reasons their life will always suck.

Most of us have been on either side of this conversation and understand that both of these roles are frustrating. When we’re the ones acting as the sounding board, we feel like the other person just wants to complain. When we’re the ones complaining, we feel frustrated that we’re experiencing the problem and scared that we will never move through it.

But what’s the deal? What’s happening with this pattern? And what can we do to make it productive instead of self-defeating?

What’s happening with this pattern is that we are arguing for our problem or our limitations. We’re defending them. (That feeling you had about your friend seeming pretty committed to their problem is right on. They are.) We have a lot of reasons to argue for our limitations. Most of them have to do with core beliefs we hold and the narratives we tell about the world and who we are in it.

We pick up our core beliefs as we develop. As we experience the world, we make meaning of these experiences and internalize that meaning. Our core beliefs are born of this meaning. If I grew up poor and I experienced this as lack, I might have started to believe that there is not enough. As I continued to develop, I might have cultivated the belief that, “Because I am poor, I cannot have what I want.” This limiting belief might have prevented me from going to college and setting my sights on the kind of life I wanted instead of the life I thought was available to me in my current state of lack. Maybe my narrative turned into “Everyone else can figure out how to have the life they want because they came from money or had some kind of windfall or are not as challenged.”

I might even go to therapy in hopes of enlisting the help of a professional, but end up spending a lot of my time fighting the treatment and arguing for my limitations. (And if I’ve picked a therapist worth their weight they’ll challenge me on this so that I can get out of my own way.)

Defending our problems is a pretty common behavior and while it takes time and work to change it, we can.

 

Try this exercise:           

1) Assess your narrative: What story do you tell about yourself, about who you are in the world? What story do you tell about the world? What story do you tell yourself about your capabilities, limitations, how you respond to challenges, what’s available to you?                       

2) Assess your current core beliefs: What negative and positive core self-beliefs do you hold?

 

Next time you’re in an empathic space, explore these questions with yourself. No need to connect your findings to any behavior yet. Just be curious about it. Let yourself sit with what you’ve been telling yourself all these years and hold that with compassion.

 

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

Take Some Space

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Take Some Space

“Between the stimulus and the response there is a space, and in this space lies our power and our freedom.”
-Victor Frankl

 

We have so many goals and desires. We want to engage in purposeful, fulfilling work. We want to have enriching relationships. We want to be healthy, financially secure and loved. We want a lot out of life, but we don’t always allow ourselves to achieve it. Frequently, I talk about why we might block ourselves from accomplishing our goals, and today I’m going to talk about how we block ourselves.

And no one wants to hear about the ways in which we get in our own ways or things we do and think to sabotage ourselves. Most people don’t like to think about our part in unpleasant experiences. We like to blame it on other people, things, past experiences. Most of us find personal accountability pretty challenging.

Speaking for myself, I can say confidently that two things are true about myself: 1) I’ve set goals and 2) I have worked really hard to resist making space for myself to achieve those goals. Most of us do it with something. It’s not conscious. We think we’re fighting our hardest and fiercest to get what we want. And we are fighting, vigorously and ferociously. We just aren’t always fighting for ourselves; we are fighting ourselves, everything we don’t want (and sometimes, everything we do want). We get too handsy with the goal don’t allow for what we want to be a part of our narratives. We want to reach our goals, but we fight them.

I’ve heard stories like this from clients and friends for many years. We want something; we go after it, but somehow we end up creating an even bigger challenge. We get frustrated. Sometimes we give up and walk away. And resistance can be so sneaky. It can totally appear to us that we are taking steps toward our goals. But, then why do we feel further away from accomplishing them than when we started?

Take this common problem: “We’re not getting along.” Ok, I get it. We’ve all been there. We’re figuring out an issue with a partner, trying to see eye-to-eye on something, effect some compromise, maybe but it just… isn’t happening. We start talking about it, disagree, fight, and someone either blows up or walks way. (Sometimes both, am I right?) And we think, “But I’m trying to talk about it. I’m trying to help us reach an understanding. Why isn’t it working?” Sometimes it’s not working because we’re not allowing for the change. We’re not making room in our relationship or our communication style to allow anything different to happen. Instead, we are suffocating the possibility for change with a closed mind and heart, forceful confrontation, and poor emotion management. This approach resists the very change we want to see.

When I first started my private practice, I knew that I needed an office to see clients, but I didn’t have any clients, so I wasn’t sure how I was going to pay my office rent. But if I never got an office, how could I see people? And I would just go around and around like that, sometimes for days at a time. Intellectually, I knew it would work out, but my fear wasn’t so sure about it. Eventually, I took the plunge and experienced the change I wanted to see. If I had never made space for this change, I probably would have given up a long time ago. Sure, there were obvious actionable steps I had to take in getting there, but first I had to allow for this thing I wanted by making space for it.

We have to make space to allow for the changes we want to take place. It’s true for any of these pretty common concerns:

“They don’t appreciate me.”

“I can’t lose weight.”

“I’ll never save enough money.”

“How long will it take until I feel better?”

“My life is one big clusterfuck.”

“I’m always so stressed out.”

If you’re finding that you feel you’ve been fighting for what you want and seeing low to no results, try this:

 

Step 0: Look into starting a mindfulness practice (get acquainted with how space feels)

Step 1: Step back from the situation (make space for yourself)

Step 2: Look at your situation (make space for possibility)

Step 3: Ask yourself if you’re forcing an outcome (more space)

Step 4: Extend compassion for how hard it is not to force an outcome (compassionate space)

Step 5: Be interested in other possible responses to your frustration and feelings (constructive space)

Step 6: Try some of them (adventurous space!)

Step 7: See what happens (curious space)

 

Sometimes we have to have a knock-down-drag-out fight for what we want. Sometimes we just have to allow space for it to be.

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

Women: Thank you

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Women: Thank you

“As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.”
-Bell Hooks

 

I’d like to take this time to say thank you to women and girls; everywhere, from every walk, of any and every identity and orientation, of every experience, past and present. Thank you for your fight and your love, for your contributions and your sacrifices. Here’s to you. Here’s to us. To the fed-up and the tired, the scared and the hiding, the activists, to the women and girls who still believe it’s their job to perform conventional femininity and gender in exchange for male acceptance, to the sex workers, the Queen Bitches, the nonconformists, the people-pleasers, to the women who believe that we aren’t supposed to need anything, to the women who provide and meet needs and nurture and care and allow themselves to receive, to the women who provide and meet needs and nurture and care and don’t receive or cannot allow themselves to receive, to the loud and proud, to the silent and ashamed, to the women who have complicated relationships with womanhood, the mentors, the novices, to the women who embrace their sexuality and the women who haven’t felt safe embracing their sexuality, to the women who don’t give a fuck and the women who don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, the leaders and the assistants, the loudmouths, the reserved, the comfortable and the vulnerable, to the women we’ve been and the women we’re becoming, the poets and the engineers, the emotionally unbridled and the emotionally subdued, the women fighting to survive and the women who are thriving, to the ones who have elevated themselves and the ones who are heavy with burden- thank you.

How ever you Woman, I extend to you my deepest and most profound gratitude.

We are courageous. We are stronger together. We don’t always take ownership of ourselves and our experiences; we’re growing. We fight for ourselves when we fight for any of us. We resist. We love. We fight. We create. We push. We are a pantheon of voices. We are a cauldron of gifts and strengths. We expand consciousness. We risk it. We surrender to our purpose, to our love, and to our power. We have the right. We keep going. We are here.

Thank you for doing what you do. Thank you for all the times you have done anything, said anything in support of us living the way we want to live. You provide hope and life and love and light. You are the reason I do what I do every day. You are my inspiration to keep connecting to my power and the reason I fight for others to connect to theirs. You are the reason we’re all still here. You are my favorite part of us. Thank you.

 

“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”
-Audre Lord

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

The Challenge of Change

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The Challenge of Change

“If you could get rid of yourself just once, the secret of secrets would open to you. The face of the unknown, hidden beyond the universe would appear on the mirror of your perception.”
~ Rumi

 

There are a lot of things we tell ourselves all day each day, both consciously and unconsciously. Everything we do and believe about ourselves is the result of a narrative we’ve adopted. And this can present some problems for us, especially when it comes to a rigid or negative narrative.

 

Here’s an example:

 

As a kid, I was always told to go sit on someone’s lap or talk to someone on the phone who had just called my parents or visit with someone because it would “make their day.” My parents’ intentions were good. They wanted to socialize me and share me with others however, the story that was forming was that I didn’t have a choice about who I interacted with, that I must interact with people whether I wanted to or not, and that it was my job to make other people feel better about themselves whether or not that worked for me. I carried this with me for years, and it meant keeping relationships I didn’t want and committing to responsibilities I didn’t want or need. I had identified so deeply with this way of being that I was afraid to let it go. I’d repeated this story for so many years that I’d unconsciously trained my threat response to activate with even the slightest stimulus. For years I had perceived both interaction and disengagement from interaction as dangerous. I conditioned my threat system to see relationships as precarious, and I needed it to be on high alert. I was familiar with this pattern and didn’t question it so, I kept doing what I had always done. When I realized how much it had been holding me back, I wanted to change this narrative/core belief. I had to acknowledge my attachment to the story and identify the other beliefs I’d held that had been bred by that narrative.

 

The more I delved into this work, the more I started feeling more in control of who I invited into my life, which relationships I maintained, and my level of engagement with people. I didn’t feel trapped anymore, and I accepted my limits.

 

Our Threat/Self-Protection System has evolved in such a way that it automatically turns off our ability to take an interest in anything aside from the perceived threat. This is useful when we have to evade a predator or save a life. In fact, it does us one better! It takes over for us, shuts down our executive functioning, and overestimates danger for us. This is how our species has survived for so long throughout so many dangers and threats. The problem is, it doesn’t know the difference between a predator hunting us and a conflict or phobia or anxiety. It only identifies what our brain has programmed as threatening. Many of us get activated around spiders, public speaking, making a mistake, driving, etc. because our brains have programmed threatening associations with them. As if that didn’t make it challenging enough (and then some), since this system only has eyes for the perceived threat, we have to work much harder to shift gears and successfully manage our anxiety. We have to work against a part of our own brains that has had millions of years to become stronger and more efficient if we want to self-soothe and de-escalate ourselves.

 

What we believe about ourselves + our emotion regulation system + conflict = our life patterns   

 

So the longer we tell ourselves things like, “I don’t deserve it,” “I can’t have it because (I’m alone, poor, don’t know how…),” “This is just the way things have always been and the way they always will be,” “This is who I am,” “I deserve love as long as I give more than the other person,” the longer we condition this pattern and the longer we condition ourselves to associate any upset in this pattern with threat. We can literally train ourselves to feel threatened by success. We can also unlearn and rework these core beliefs.

 

Take the first step in changing the narratives that aren’t working for you anymore:

 

  • Train yourself to be more aware of the core self-beliefs you hold by assessing what is going on in your life right now.
  • What patterns do you notice?
  • Can you see any narratives reflected in your patterns or in what is happening in your life?

 

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

You Can Never Get Enough of What You Don’t Really Need

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You Can Never Get Enough of What You Don’t Really Need

“You can never get enough of what you don’t really need to make you happy.”

(Eric Hoffer; longshoreman, philosopher)

 

I’ve felt it. You’ve felt it; that compulsion to eat more, drink more, buy more, acquire more, make more money, set our sights on bigger ticket items. There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to drive a car we like or liking what we put on our backs or aiming to make enough money to live in a place we really enjoy. The problem comes with the meaning we make of all this stuff. And what we hope our stuff means about us.

We all have the same basic need for safety, clean water, food, and shelter. And we all have the same need for love, joy, belonging, freedom, and a sense of purpose. While these are more secondary needs, they’re still pretty basic to our life’s happiness. Once our most basic needs are met, we have the capacity to focus on our secondary needs.

Many of us run into trouble here. It’s easy to see how it happens. Love, joy, belonging, freedom, purpose- all of these things can seem so elusive. What does any of it even mean? And how do we… get ourselves to feel any of it, to be any of it?

We want to feel confidence in ourselves, in our abilities, so we buy expensive jeans or bags or shoes. They make us look the part. It gives us the shot in the arm we’re looking for, so we do it again. We want to feel loved, that we belong so, we use the buzzwords, buy the luxury cars, and redecorate the house. We send our kids to the schools and preschools we think they should go to so that they can belong, too. Some of us aim to buy yachts and become billionaires. Some of us aim to have the “perfect beach body.”

Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with wanting our children to attend good schools or aspiring to see how our bodies could look and feel at maximum fitness or wanting to buy that pair of jeans because we know just how glorious our butts look in them. The problem lies in the meaning we make; that if we can swing this stuff it means we’re lovable, joyful, free, we belong, and that we have purpose.

We end up buying a lifestyle and never really living our lives. We keep searching for ways to meet our needs, so we look for more- more clothes, more treats, a bigger house, a fancier car, more vacations. We feel lost, so we get more. We feel more lost than ever so we turn up our acquisitions frequency all the way up and, you guessed it, get even more stuff.

Those of us who have grown up in or experienced deprivation of basic and secondary needs at some point probably feel even more confusion as we try to navigate our relationships with these symbols. To some of us, it might even have felt like acquiring the next thing, the best thing, more things was a matter of survival.

It won’t shut itself off over night. It won’t shut itself off at all. We have to be the ones to turn the dial back down. It’s a slow and often painful process. But the alternative is profoundly more painful.

I recommend starting at square one. Just notice. Notice when you feel the urge to acquire something or more of something. You won’t always notice right away. That’s ok. Keep plugging away at it.

Then stop. Don’t buy it, eat it, drink it, whatever. Just stop.

Ask yourself:

Do I need it?

How will this enrich my life?

Is buying (eating, drinking, ingesting, acquiring, keeping) this item in direct integrity with my values?

The more we ask ourselves these questions, the more thoughtful we allow ourselves to be about the way we live our lives. We can start to make the critical shift from collecting society’s symbols of love, joy, belonging, purpose, and freedom to actually experiencing these things firsthand. We can live deliberate lives.

 

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie       

How to Stop Living in Scarcity

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How to Stop Living in Scarcity

The feeling of scarcity is alive and well in our culture. Advertisers use it to make us feel like we need their products to be happy. Politicians use it to exploit our fear of not having enough, marginalize us, and look to them to give us more. We tell ourselves that there isn’t enough time and money to go back to school. We tell others that we don’t have enough time to call or see them. We tell ourselves that we have to work more, earn more, do more, acquire more, achieve more.

We are not telling ourselves these things because we feel driven to fulfill our life’s purpose. We’re telling ourselves this because we are coming from a deep place of fear and lack. And we are looking for a way out. We tell ourselves this because we’re afraid we don’t or won’t have enough to be happy- enough money, enough stuff, enough accomplishments, enough praise, enough status, enough respect. And if we don’t have enough of these things we’re not happy; we’re unfulfilled. If we don’t have enough of these things we’ll have to pay more attention to why this feeling of fear and lack is surfacing in the first place. So we run ourselves into the ground trying to get money to get more stuff.

The bummer part of all this is that the more we tell ourselves we don’t have enough, the more we don’t have enough. It creates an even greater imbalance. If I’m afraid I don’t have enough money, I’m going to work more which means I’ll have less time to spend with loved ones and do things that nurture me. If I feel like I don’t have enough stuff, I’m going to spend more money consuming the things I think I need or want. Time spent consuming will also cut down on time I could be spending with loved ones, working on a cause about which I am passionate, or doing things that nurture me. I’ll need to work more to make sure I can both pay my bills and consume more stuff. Pretty soon, I’ll be tired from all this working and consuming, more isolated because I miss my loved ones. I might spend more time watching TV or going online. I might eat and drink more. It’s kind of a rough cycle.

There are plenty of times in our lives when we feel capable and grounded in our ability to manage scarcity, times when this cycle isn’t a problem for us because we can keep our feelings in check. But sometimes we find ourselves more vulnerable, less able to evaluate what’s happening for us. We have more difficulty identifying what we need and the healthy steps it will take to get there.

We might fall into this scarcity cycle when we’re feeling insecure about something- our relationships, our economic status, a failure we’ve recently experienced (or a failure we are trying to avoid), the anticipation of a major discomfort. Sometimes stuff/emotional burden might pile up over time. It’ll sneakily cloud our judgment. We might not even notice we’ve fallen into this cycle until we realize how unhappy we’ve been for the past few months.

Getting out of the pit of scarcity-living isn’t easy, but it’s worth the challenge. People just feel better when we’re not dominated by this fear of not having enough. And it’s much more satisfying to uncover how we came to believe that there isn’t enough than to keep throwing clothes, food, money, substances into a sieve.

I often suggest a slow start:

  • Identify cravings, impulses, compulsions.
  • Identify thoughts and feelings of scarcity
  • Be curious about how you feel before and after engaging in craving/impulse/compulsive behavior
  • Exercise self-compassion. You’re definitely not going to judge your way out of this so, just be gentle with yourself.

This will be a good start. If you need further help, let me know and we will set up a time to talk.

 

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

Post-Election 2016

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Post-Election 2016

The U.S. General Election of 2016 has been stressful for most and torture for many. The months leading up to the disastrous outcome supplied us with vitriolic arguments and constant contention. Some of us have been directly impacted by the state of affairs our nation for years, for generations while others are just now feeling the fire, post-election. Some of us were shocked, others are not surprised but disappointed. Postings on social media and articles in major news publications have called this election divisive. They’re right. But the divisiveness and division plagued our communities for generations.

We’ve always been stronger together and now is as good a time as any to exercise this strength. It’s easy to let our feelings dominate us and react, especially when people’s safety is at risk. And it’s easy to get defensive. Some people deal with this by avoiding all information and actively disengaging from the issues. Others inundate themselves with information, mobilize, and march for justice. Some people are relieved Clinton lost. Others are devastated. Many felt that neither candidate was suitable. Let’s use this process as a way to learn how to be better with and for each other. Instead of avoiding conversations and each other, let’s use this to make us stronger, to help us see what else needs to be done, and to take responsibility for ourselves as part of the solution. Here are a few suggestions to stay grounded and connected to loved ones during this time:

 

  • Put your energy into action to ensure that you’re doing everything you can. If you’re angry and scared, find out how you can translate that energy into something that will make you feel productive and empowered. If you’re tired of fighting, rest and ask your network to hold your torch for a while.
  • Don’t get lost in self-blame if you didn’t vote, if you didn’t participate in activism or social justice activities, or if you don’t live your life in the margins. Instead, educate yourself on what next steps need to be taken and take them.
  • Don’t just apologize to your Muslim, POC, LGBQ, Trans, Undocumented, Migrant, Sexual Assault Survivor, Female friends. Ask what you can do to support them. Fight alongside them.
  • Have conversations about this with others if you feel up to it and give yourself permission to walk away if you don’t.
  • Remind yourself that it is not your job to take care of your friends’ feelings if they are experiencing white guilt, straight guilt, privileged group guilt, etc.
  • Donate your time, your energy, and your resources.
  • Keep talking. Be compassionately curious about other people’s experience. Ask questions and communicate with others about why they believe what they believe. This is to lay the groundwork for empathy and understanding. Both are critical in productive communication and soltution-finding. When we shut down and stop talking, stop listening, we cut ourselves off from finding workable solutions.
  • Educate others where you see a need for it. Much of the research has shown us that our nation is in this position of making hate/fear-fueled choices based on a severe lack of education and lack of exposure to diversity.
  • Respect others’ grieving processes and how they choose to express it. Be sensitive to their needs and experience. Everyone’s process is different.
  • Remember to engage your self-compassion. Check in with yourself and give yourself what you need as you become aware of it. When you need soothing or validation  try repeating to yourself, “Even though I am feeling________________, I deeply and profoundly accept myself.” Self-compassion is a fundamental resource available to us.
  • Identify and surround yourself with whatever and whoever connects you to hope.

 

And please let me know if you need anything. I’m always here.

 

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

What is Your Avoidance Telling You?

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What is Your Avoidance Telling You?

Avoidance isn’t always unhealthy. In fact, there are plenty of times that it’s really adaptive. I want to avoid getting a parking ticket, so I move my car during the specified times. You want to avoid getting fired so you do the parts of your job that you’d prefer not to do. I want to avoid getting scratched by that mysterious cat, so I won’t bend down to pet her.

Sometimes we’ve personally experienced something that has taught us to avoid a certain stimulus and other times it’s common sense or a gut feeling. In my early twenties, I had to learn through a few different experiences that Hot Cheetos should be avoided if I wanted to side-step heartburn and a fairly sizeable stomach ache. I did not, however, have to learn through personal experience that the assignments for my Abnormal Developmental Psychology class needed to be completed and handed in on time. My instincts told me that my professor had zero tolerance for tardy assignments.

And really, it’s up to us to decide what we’re willing to endure. If you don’t mind getting the parking ticket, dealing with heartburn, or getting a bad grade, you probably won’t move your car. You’ll eat that bag of Hot Cheetos while procrastinating your assignments. We all have varying levels of tolerance to discomfort. And we even label discomfort differently. I might experience public speaking as uncomfortable, but you might label it as one of the more pleasurable ways to pass an evening. It really depends on what we tell ourselves about the experience we are having.

Avoidance becomes more troublesome or unhealthy when it gets in the way of our relationships, responsibilities, and the way we want to live our lives when it becomes our thinking-doing pattern. If I think, “Ugh, I really hate this meeting. I don’t want to go. We never get anything done, and it just goes on and on forever,” and then I skip the meeting once to stay back and get some work done, that’s not the end of the world. But I’m definitely going to want to get that thought process under control. If I constantly tell myself how much I hate the meeting and label it as something undesirable, I’m going to believe that it’s something I need to avoid. I’m going to make it pretty hard on myself to motivate when it’s time to go to the meeting. The more difficult it is for me to find the motivation to go, the more I’ll probably find ways to get out of it. That becomes a problem with both my thinking and my doing (behavior).

I’m not saying avoidance is bad or that we need to manipulate or trick ourselves out of feeling it. I’m saying we need to be curious about it. If I’m curious about why I don’t want to go to the meeting, what makes me so uncomfortable, I’ll probably learn something. I might learn that I need to speak up about it. I might learn that I can effect change by using my voice. Maybe I’ll see that I need to talk about it with my boss and we’ll both discover that my time is better spent doing something else. Upon further inspection, I might find that this is a much more chronic problem than I realized and discover that it’s time to look for a new job. If you allow yourself to contemplate why you’re often late with assignments, maybe you’ll discover that it’s because you don’t want to be in the field you’re studying. Maybe you’ll even find that you don’t want to be in school at all right now.

This is one of the gifts of avoidance. “If I don’t think about it, I don’t have to deal with it.” We can just keep skipping the meeting rather than thinking about training and searching for a new job. We can continue not to get credit for late assignments and focus on that problem instead of risking what it might be like to tell our parents that we don’t want to be in school right now. We can come home to our partner after a long day and sit in front of the TV with our phone in our hand and not think or talk about the fact that we haven’t felt very connected lately. When we avoid, we don’t have to do the thing, and we don’t have to think about why we’re not doing the thing.

I like to use mindfulness when I’m dealing with avoidance, my own or someone else’s. Give it a try. Ask yourself what you notice about the situation you are avoiding. What’s it like to do it? What’s it like to avoid it? What are the sensations associated with both? What does it mean to do the thing you are avoiding? And what does it mean to avoid it? What meaning are you making out of the sensations? How are you labeling them?

Bringing a little mindfulness is a good start to hearing what your avoidance is trying to tell you. You deserve to know.

 

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

“How could I not have known?”

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“How could I not have known?”

There are times in our lives when it serves us not to know something, times when it serves us not to know something about what’s happened in the past, what’s happening now, or our feelings and experience. It will upset the status quo, and we are committed to protecting our status quo even when it’s killing us. Eventually, the attachment to not knowing dominates us.

We repress and suppress painful memories, our awareness. We do this for lots of reasons. We try not to know that our partner is trapped in an addiction because we don’t know how we’d deal with it, how our families would deal with it. We try not to know that we’re being cheated on because we don’t want to get divorced or break up and we don’t know how to recover from the betrayal. We try not to know that we’ve fallen out of love with someone or something because we don’t know how to move forward and we don’t want to hurt anyone. We try not to know what happened in our childhood households because if we were to know it, we’d have to rearrange our understanding of life and relationships. We try not to know that we’re depressed because it is so stigmatized and we don’t want to seem weak or sick.

We try not to know that we’re stuck in our own addiction cycle. We try not to know that we’re afraid of expressing emotions like anger, fear, and sadness, that we are ashamed of how we feel.

But one day we’re presented with irrefutable evidence or we feel we just can’t keep avoiding it or someone shines the light on the truth… and the thing we were trying so hard not to know makes itself known.

Sometimes we fall apart with this knowledge. Sometimes we steel ourselves against it. Sometimes we oscillate between the two.

We ask ourselves how this could have happened right under our noses. We wonder how we could not have known. We feel guilt for not having seen it all this time and anger for seeing it now. We blame ourselves for not knowing sooner and not changing courses, not stopping whatever was happening, not getting help sooner. Avoidance is an understandable response to stress. Stress is painful, and our brains are wired to be pain-averse. It’s what’s kept us safe and alive for generations. Some of us experienced trauma during childhood and learned to believe that we are helpless against pain or that resolving the thing that’s causing us pain is just as awful as experiencing the thing itself. Lose-lose.

It benefits us to learn about why we didn’t want to know something, why we fought knowing for so long, what it would have meant for us to know, and what it meant for us not to. When we understand the meaning, we made out of knowing versus not knowing we can have compassion for ourselves. Eventually, we can learn to stop blaming ourselves, figure out why we had to keep ourselves from not knowing and internalize that we can accept and handle the future knowledge that comes our way, no matter how painful. This takes time and practice.

We can also practice asking ourselves what we are trying not to know in our everyday lives. When sense ourselves avoiding something, a feeling, a situation, a person, we can ask ourselves what we are trying not to know. If the awareness of avoidance is still new for us and we don’t quite have the hang of it, we can ask ourselves what we are trying not to know by looking at our behavior. Sometimes the very thought of asking ourselves what we are trying not to know is terrifying.

If this sounds like you, I get it, and I would love to help you with this. Please contact me to talk about next steps. You don’t have to stay stuck in not knowing. You can upset your status quo, address the knowing, and see that you’re ok.

 

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

Radical Acceptance

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Radical Acceptance

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” –Carl Rogers

 

In my work with clients, I often talk about Radical Acceptance. Frequently there is a misunderstanding about what it means so, I thought it would be a good idea to write a little bit about it here. It’s by no means exhaustive, but it’s a nice little foray into what it’s like to Radically Accept.

First, let’s talk about what Radical Acceptance is not. Radical Acceptance is not passively accepting that we are in a challenging situation. It is not avoidance. It is not giving up or resigning to fate. It’s not taking on a victim role. Radical Acceptance is not saying to ourselves, “You know what? I have Attention Deficit Disorder, so I can’t do well in school or perform well at work. It’s just the way my brain works.” Radical Acceptance is not a cop out. It doesn’t mean that we accept abuse or disrespect. Radical Acceptance does not mean that we think, “Yep, climate change is happening. Might as well accept that this is just how things are now.” It does not have the harsh tone of “no one ever said life was easy.”

Radical Acceptance is an empowered way of approaching life. It is a deep, honest, loving, and mindful acknowledgement. Tara Brach, PhD. is a wonderful resource for Radical Acceptance. She refers to Radical Acceptance as “seeing clearly and holding our experience with compassion.” (Check out her website.)

When we employ Radical Acceptance, we turn toward ourselves and our experiences with honesty and love. We acknowledge our pain, discomfort, symptoms, struggle, and experience. It looks something like this: “I know I struggle with escapism. Instead of getting work done, I watch TV and go online. This is causing my work to suffer. I feel guilty and embarrassed. I want to change this, but I’m afraid of committing more fully to my work.” Sitting presently and authentically with our experience is powerful. It creates a safe place for us to face our fear and discomfort and that’s a critical first step.

As we engage in Radical Acceptance, we accept that we are struggling. We accept that it will take work to get through the struggle. We accept the uncertainty of what that will look and feel like. We accept that our changes and newfound knowledge of ourselves might make other people uncomfortable. We accept that relationships might change or dissolve. We accept that there are no guarantees.

In Radically Accepting something, we embrace all of this. We embrace the risk and the fear and the discomfort and the wish for protection from all of this and the impulse to avoid and the change and the work and the struggle. We own it all. We own our experience and our journey through it. The feelings and the circumstances stop dominating us.

Try this exercise. Sit quietly for a minute and just be. See what you notice. If there is anxiety, acknowledge it. If your nose itches, acknowledge it. If there is a loud siren wailing down the street, acknowledge it. If there is a judgment about sitting quietly followed by an impulse to meet a need, acknowledge it. It’s that simple. As you practice Radical Acceptance it will grow and strengthen and shape your life; you will notice that you feel more grounded, present, and empowered. It’s a long, nonlinear, unending, powerful journey.

 

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie