Do you ever lay in bed at night and feel like you’re living someone else’s life?
Do you ever replay conversations you’ve had where you KNOW that you didn’t say what you were really thinking or feeling, and wonder why you couldn’t just express yourself honestly?
Do you ever feel like there’s some major flaw in you that whenever you get around others you seem to transform into what you think THEY would want you to be, vs. being able to be what feels true and right to you?
Do you ever get the sense that if you were to expose any of your weaknesses, flaws or shortcomings to the people in your life, that this would most certainly lead to being abandoned, shamed, blamed or otherwise rejected and so it feels like even if you WANT to be authentic, this fear is constantly there holding you back?
Do you get the sense that there’s a ‘real you’ inside that you KNOW is there, but that you have a really hard time accessing or bringing to the surface?
Have you ever been told by a self help/spirituality guru that in order to live a good life you have to be in a place where you’re expressing as your genuine self - and that if you aren’t doing this that you simply need to start, as though it’s a super easy thing to simply change about yourself?
Do you consider yourself a people pleaser, someone who is constantly changing themselves to match whatever you feel is the expectation/mood of the people around you - leaving you feeling that you’re constantly in a state of projection and thinking of others rather than being grounded in your own experience?
Does any of the above make you feel flawed? Does it turn you in on yourself, making you feel like you’re doing something wrong, making the wrong choices or like you must simply be weak?
Do you blame yourself for this? Are you in a place where you feel like you really SHOULD be able to just be yourself and you don’t know why you’re choosing not to be?
Do you feel like you must be a manipulative person who’s just lying to everyone all the time?
Do you feel like you’re weak and bad for being a people pleaser, like you should simply know better and should be able to do better - and in this you find that you’re constantly battling with yourself when you feel yourself shifting to match expectations instead of being honest and truthful?
Do you find yourself engaging in habits and activities in order to go along with the crowd - like consuming substances, engaging in gossip or negative talk, participating in certain social norms and stopping yourself from doing the things and saying the things you really want to do - noticing that this feels TERRIBLE - but then noticing that you struggle to make any kind of change that you think would feel better for you, which then again leads to believe that you’re broken, weak or lazy in some way?
Do you feel ashamed that you’re not able to be authentic, or embarrassed that you don’t even really know who you are and what being authentic would even look like?
If so, I want you to know that you’re not alone, you’re not broken and there’s nothing wrong with you.
You’re not manipulative, mean, evil, lazy, broken or weak-willed.
You’re a normal human being who’s expressing in a very normal, natural way.
The Roots Of Self Suppression
The truth of the matter is this - we all learned on some level that there are parts of ourselves that are unacceptable - that there are parts of ourselves we must hide, change, manipulate, change or otherwise alter in order for us to be ‘good.’
We all learned on some level that there are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to be - and depending on how close or how far we are from those ‘right and wrong’ rules, is the degree to which we’re going to feel free to express ourselves as our genuine, true selves.
For most of us, this education started very early on in our lives.
The roots of our lack of capacity to be our true selves, for most of us, lie in our early childhoods and teen years.
These formative years where we were being given the ‘codes’ for proper living and right behavior from our caregivers and other authority figures that were around us.
You see, as small children, we didn’t have the capacity to ‘stand up for ourselves’ and express as our true nature if that true nature wasn’t being loved, respected, honored and supported by those around us.
We didn’t have the capacity to understand that there are different ways of being in the world and that that’s an ok thing or even a good thing. We didn’t have the ability to see that our caregivers weren’t always going to be in control of our experience. We didn’t realize that our caregivers and other authority figures around us could be wrong about what was ‘right and wrong’ and that we could live in ways that they didn’t approve of and still be ok.
Rather, we were fully dependent upon our caregivers to see us, love us, understand us, approve of us and believe in us in order to be safe, secure and ok.
We were fully dependent upon our caregivers for everything, and any amount that they weren’t able to be there for us was going to feel like an existential threat to us, because we weren’t capable of being there for ourselves.
We NEEDED them to love us and approve of us in order for us to feel SAFE.
It was in this time that we learned that if caregivers weren’t taking our pain away, if they weren’t giving us what we wanted or needed, if they were abandoning or rejecting us in our expression, if they were telling us in any outright or subtle way that who and what we were naturally wasn’t ok - that this must mean that WE were doing something wrong.
Because to us at the time, it appeared as though our caregivers were the source of all things, and that they were capable of all things. It appeared to us as though they were ‘god like’ beings who possessed full capacity to provide for us and so on - and from our perspective as children, the only reason that they would fail to do so, was because WE were doing something wrong.
We were learning deep in our core that if caregivers didn’t love us, approve of us, save us from pain, give us the things we wanted and needed to take away what was harming us that this meant that we were behaving in some ‘wrong’ way.
We learned to mold ourselves to what they wanted us to be, to what they expected us to be, to how they expected us to behave and to how we perceived they wanted us to be in order to try to keep ourselves SAFE.
THIS is the key that we have to remember whenever we are looking at WHY we now, in our adulthoods, have those deep instinctual patterns of self rejection and changing ourselves. This is the key thing we have to remember when we consider why we may have self sabotaging behaviors, why we may be people pleasers, why we feel like we can’t fully express as who we are and why we feel like we MUST be certain ways in order to feel like we’re good enough.
We’re doing what we are because we learned deep in our nervous systems that this is what was required of us to be loved by our caregivers - and that love was the prerequisite for us to being SAFE.
Thus, the degree to which our caretakers were able to meet us where we were in terms of our authentic expression, our emotional needs, our physical needs and our mental needs, is the degree to which we were going to feel safe, and the degree to which we were going to perceive that it was safe to be ourselves.
The degree to which our caretakers couldn’t meet our needs, the degrees to which they were actively telling us that we couldn’t be a certain way, the degree to which they were pulling away from or abandoning us and the degree to which we were feeling that our expression was the reason our caregivers weren’t showing up for us is the degree to which we learned to abandon ourselves.
Remember - we were learning this stuff on a nervous system, survival level.
This wasn’t logical - it was experiential and it was coming through the filter of our childhood brains who couldn’t conceptualize anything other than the idea that if we were in pain, if caregivers were abandoning us or harming us for any reason or if we weren’t getting our needs met that this meant we HAD to be doing something wrong.
We couldn’t blame them or understand that they didn’t have ultimate power - we could only blame ourselves and believe that we were the cause of whatever pain or separation we were experiencing.
Looking Back To Understand Our Present
So when you’re now looking as an adult at your ways of self suppression, rather than believing you’re simply choosing to act in a way that isn’t authentic to you for no reason, can you take a step back and start to consider where you may have learned in your childhood that your authentic expression wasn’t allowed/safe? Can you start to see where you were either directly or indirectly told by your caregivers that it wasn’t acceptable to be a certain way?
Can you look back on the ways you expressed yourself emotionally and how that was received? Can you see that if you experienced being abandoned in your negative emotions, shamed or blamed for them that this would have taught you that you can’t express those feelings in that way and still be ok?
Can you look back at where your caregivers failed to meet your needs and see where you may have blamed YOURSELF for that, even if you can look back now as an adult and see that it wasn’t your fault? Can you put yourself back in your CHILDHOOD perspective?
This is often the hardest part of this work - putting ourselves back in our childhood view.
You see, most of us look back on our childhood and project our current, adult perspective onto what we were experiencing back then.
We look at the ways our caregivers harmed us, abandoned us, couldn’t show up for us or otherwise didn’t meet our needs - and we think that what we went through ‘wasn’t that bad’ or that the rejection or abandonment wasn’t a big deal.
We may look back on all the times we spent alone in our sadness or anger because our caregivers told us it wasn’t ok to express those things, all the times we were scolded for liking what we liked, all the times we were made to do things we really hated and we think that was just normal.
What we’re not seeing is how deeply these experiences actually affected us and our capacity to express authentically.
What we’re not seeing is the fact that as CHILDREN we didn’t know we were going to grow up one day and have autonomy. We didn’t know we were going to grow up one day and not need our caregivers. We didn’t know that our caregivers could be wrong or incapable.
Again, we only knew that if we were being harmed, unsupported, not met in our needs and not loved that this meant we were broken and we needed to fix and change ourselves.
We learned that in order to get our needs met, we needed to be loved, seen, understood and accepted by those around us.
THAT is why we now abandon ourselves, people please and act in ways that aren’t authentic.
That’s why we now reject ourselves when we are in certain emotional states.
That’s why we have these rules about what we have to be and what we have to do in order to be ‘good enough’.
That’s why when we’re hurting we have the instinct to blame ourselves and look for where we’re doing something wrong.
Because in our childhoods it was the love and approval of our caregivers that was our ticket to everything - and their abandonment, abuse, harm, disapproval, rejection, or even genuine incapacity to care for us was the biggest threat to us.
So again, I really want to encourage you to slow down when you’re looking at all the ways you people please, all the ways in which you abandon yourself, all the ways in which you hide your emotions, all the ways you suppress and deny your true feelings and then cope with them through substance or self harm, all the ways you reject yourself and all the things you expect yourself to do even when you hate them and they hurt and ask yourself:
Where did you LEARN that this was how you had to be in order to be loved and therefore SAFE?
THAT’S how you’re going to figure out WHY you do what you do. Why you are how you are. Why you act how you act and why you abandon yourself where you abandon yourself.
You’re doing it in order to PROTECT yourself.
So What Do We Do About It Now?
First things first, unless and until you get to a place where you can have total compassion for yourself in all the areas where you’re not able to show up and be authentic, where you people please, where you hide your emotions, where you suppress yourself and then cope with that pain in some way - you’re not done investigating into the true cause yet.
If you still have a feeling that you’re just choosing to abandon yourself, that you’re bad, wrong, shameful, weak, lazy or otherwise broken for not being able to be authentic, for not being able to set clear boundaries, for not being able to ‘hold your own’ in social situations - you’re not seeing the whole picture yet.
When you REALLY understand WHY you are how you are, you’re going to see that it’s TOTALLY innocent. That you are doing what you’re doing to try to keep yourself safe and you are doing what you’re doing because deep down you believe that in order to be loved and thus in order to get your needs met, you HAVE to do what you’re doing.
Then you must remember that we are absolutely social beings. That not only did we learn in our nervous systems that our caregivers love and approval was tantamount to our being able to be ok, we’ve also grown up in a CULTURE where we feel the need to be liked and loved in order to be safe.
We have taken that childhood idea that love = survival and we’ve used that as a template for our adult experience as well.
We learned to go along with the crowd, to care deeply about what others think of us, to seek the approval of others because we’ve taken the idea that love = being safe that we learned in childhood and we’ve expanded upon it - we’ve taken it from being something that only applied to our caregivers into being something that applies to most of the people who are around us on a regular basis and sometimes even to society at large.
This feeling that we need to fit in in order to be ok is not something you invented, it’s something you were taught.
We’ve all been conditioned to fit in with a certain amount of cultural norm - and again the degree to which that is different from our authentic expression is the degree to which we are likely going to struggle with being our true selves.
Learning that we can now be an adult who can be rejected, misunderstood, told we’re wrong and bad and STILL be ok is a HARD thing to learn.
Learning to shift our nervous systems out of that ‘survival mode’ that tells us that we HAVE to be approved of in order to be safe isn't something we just decide to do.
Rather, it’s going to be something we slowly process over time.
For most of us, we’re going to have to start with that awareness phase. Every time we notice that we have shame, blame and guilt around how we are acting - either feeling like who and what we really are is bad and that we can’t be that, any time we blame ourselves for being people pleasers, any time we have emotions or feelings that we think we must hide or get rid of, any time we are down on ourselves for NOT being a certain way - we have to start to question where we learned these rules and we have to start to QUESTION those rules.
Check out this video for more help on that.
Then, we are likely going to have to go through a phase of grieving. Of being upset about how much we were taught to abandon ourselves, how much we were abandoned and how painful it was to learn that we weren’t allowed to be ourselves and still be safe and loved at the same time. This is a hard process but it’s important. I talk about it more here. Also in this video.
Then, we are going to have to go on a journey of self discovery where we slowly but surely learn to express ourselves in more authentic ways - knowing that this is going to trigger our nervous systems and our survival instincts, and that we are going to have to learn to regulate ourselves through this.
We are going to have to PROVE to ourselves that we can be authentic and still survive and be safe - and this is going to be a PROCESS - one that takes most of us a long time.
We will have to take small steps towards authenticity, and we will have to just see step by step how we can be our true selves and still be ok.
This will take time.
I can’t emphasize that enough.
The main point here is this - you aren’t choosing to suppress yourself for no reason. You’re doing it to try to keep yourself SAFE.
THAT is the key to connect with before you can really make progress with learning to express yourself authentically.
So please, take whatever time you need and use whatever tools you need to use to help yourself see WHY you suppress - so that you can then deal with the ROOT vs shaming and blaming yourself for what isn’t and never has been your fault.
THEN you can start to empower yourself to step into your truth.
In that order.
One step at a time.
<3
Want more tools like this?
Check out The Mystery School Here
