Showing all posts tagged self-awareness

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

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