“For Presence to become deeply rooted, it must be tested in the fire of relationships.” Eckhart Tolle

I really have relished this lesson, more now that I am finally getting more successful at achieving it as opposed to when I’m in the midst of the fire. It’s been a bumpy road that was fraught with suppressing my feelings at times, inappropriately expressing them at others and generally leaving trail of carnage either in my inner or outer world depending on how I had dealt with situations.

Listening to Wendy Behary talk to therapists on how to deal with clients who exhibit narcissistic traits this week, I realised that her advice summed up well what I have learned in general about speaking my truth, to anyone.

She talks about developing the ability to stand your own ground with a firm, steady posture and an attitude of “I see you. I know you. I know what you are up to”, rather than a defensive one. She describes the aim as:

To be able to state your truth, be real, in a calm, clear way. And to recognise and connect with that part of yourself that stands to get angry or hurt, feel threatened or incompetent, and to get it out of the room.

That is the bit I used to have real trouble with. I had a pattern of getting triggered and acting from that provoked part of me, rather than taking the time to observe what about what had happened/was happening that was actually triggering me. It wasn’t until I took the time to go deeper, make the links, and deal with my life story that I started to make progress.

I did relate to one case study she shared of a woman who didn’t feel sure of herself. The lady had been brought up to believe she had to forfeit her needs for the needs of others and, if she expressed her opinion, she was at risk of being humiliated or abandoned.

The client did her work to repair the internal damage and re-parent herself to reinstate the bright, capable being that she was. She was able to get to a point of not being so frightened of losing her husband that she was able to choose him. And once she was able to become more secure in her choices, she became more vocal in expressing her needs.

When I am dealing with interpersonal difficulty I always go back to the Teal Swan’s article on Attunement. She points out, “We learn attunement by virtue of other people being attuned to us. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Do I feel like my parents understood me when I was little, or even tried to understand me?
• Did they see into me and feel into me and have empathy for me and adjust their behaviour accordingly or not?
• Did they acknowledge how I felt or did they invalidate it, telling me I shouldn’t feel that way?
• How did my parents treat me when I was cranky, frightened or upset?”

I would imagine as most people read this, they would recognise the lack of attunement in their own childhood, for being seen and not heard and do as I say not as I do have been predominant tenets of parenting for a long long time. Thus, as Teal also points out, dysfunctional relationships are the norm, not the exception.

She says “when our parents were not attuned to us, we went one of two ways to cope with the terror of the experience. We either learned that our survival depended on:
​

1. disconnecting from them and retreating into a narcissistic bubble where all that was real and all that mattered was our individual experience. Or
2. being hyper attuned to the people in our lives so that we could perceive them, anticipate their behaviour and make adjustments to our behaviour accordingly in order to avoid harm.”

I certainly feel the truth of this in my own life, in hindsight I can see I became hyper vigilant to others’ feelings and co-dependent in my relationships. It’s no surprise that each of these coping styles tends to attract its opposite and – while one is good at taking care of everyone else’s needs - neither is actually good at recognising and taking care of their own.

Fighting is just one outcome when I am not attuned to my needs and able to be fully present, what is really happening underneath is a reaction to unconscious memories of those early years, my physiology goes into flight-or-fight mode. As Bessel Van Der Kolk relates in his book The Body Keeps The Score the goal is really self regulation.

It is probably no coincidence that, as I listened to some stories from people around me in the last few days, I began to see how these dynamics play out in all sorts of ways, big and small. I could also see how each of these scenarios could improve hugely by just one of the party’s taking Wendy’s approach.

One man was telling me about the dynamics between his wife, who is a teacher aide specifically hired for her skills in dealing with neuro-diverse kids in the classroom, and the class teacher. The teacher appears to take a very black and white approach and expects the aide to get the disruptive children to behave like every other child.

Knowing a little about the common neuro-diversities seen in classrooms (meaning autism, dyslexia, attention deficit, hyperactivity and so forth), I know a one-size-fits-all approach simply doesn’t work, we didn’t all come out a cookie cutter machine. However, it’s possible the teacher was parented in that way and so it has become her modus operandi and her safe place.

Meanwhile, the teacher aide is well attuned to the diversity she is experiencing in the children and adapts her approach to each child, often – in this case – having to act as a buffer between teacher and pupil. I can only imagine the relationship is rather strained, especially since the teacher apparently sees herself as the person who dictates what happens in her classroom.

So this man was relating to me his wife’s frustration and the interactions that have occurred between her and the teacher, sounding not unlike Wendy’s case study of the woman who was afraid of losing her husband, only in this example it’s a job at stake.

I imagined if his wife were able to approach the teacher with a firm, steady posture and an attitude of “I see you” rather than a defensive one. If she could learn how to be able to state her truth, be real, in a calm, clear way. And to recognise and connect with that part of herself that stands to get angry or get hurt, feel threatened, or incompetent, and to get it out of the room.

I imagine her calmly telling the teacher after lesson how keen she’s sure her little pupil is to learn from the teacher, but how humiliated he had felt when the teacher shamed him for being late, which was the fault of the parent, and further punished him by not allowing him to participate fully in the game the class were playing.

The teacher would no doubt have leap to her own defence, and perhaps started to lash out verbally at the teacher aide, but I could imagine the aide standing her ground calmly and saying “Well, that’s the way I saw it” and leaving the class, no argument, no defence. “Gosh, I thought, what a difference that would make”. It might not change the teacher’s entire behaviour, but I’ll bet she would be more cautious the next time a pupil was late.

Then there was one of our neighbour’s sons who was sitting out in his car at 11.30 at night beeping his horn randomly. He is a teenage boy on the brink of passing his driver’s test, no doubt longing for the freedom of the road. While another neighbour went out, understandably angry, I could imagine myself getting in the passenger seat instead and having a chat about life, I feel like his beeping horn was an outward expression of some bottled up things spilling over.

And, in my own world, I have talked before about the dynamic in my own relationship and how that has improved by learning to stand more calmly in my truth.

But in another realm of my interpersonal relationships there was an issue that came up over the school fair. Only a couple of years ago the school fair was something I couldn’t even think about without getting highly triggered.

Thankfully, after the work I had done to break that cycle of instant anger that arose in me every time I felt like someone was stepping over my boundaries, which usually escalated to some call to arms on behalf of a bigger cause, I was able to calmly articulate how an intended approach was making me feel. This resulted in a genuine interest in my insights rather than a wall of silence, a standoff or a dust cloud from people running in the opposite direction.

What is it that has to happen to allow you to state your truth, be real, in a calm, clear way? And to recognise and connect with that part of yourself that stands to get angry or get hurt, feel threatened, or incompetent, and to get it out of the room? Will you take the time to go deeper, make the links, and deal with your life story so you can start to make progress?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy What Makes You So Afraid of Conflict?, Value Your Unique Perspective – Especially When You Feel Rejected, You See What Happens When You Learn to Speak Your Truth and How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

A very dear friend of mine was here for her annual visit recently. As usual, we were engrossed in our conversation about life at the deepest of levels. She had been musing on what she was here to do in this life, with retirement in sight and with many mokopuna (a Māori word meaning grandchildren) growing up around her, her purpose seemed to elude her.

We had talked about many things. One of the questions she asked was why a person would want to strip away all their layers of life’s stuff, of course I could only answer for myself as it’s the journey I’ve been on.

“It feels lighter, less encumbered.” I told her, “I get less wound up by the same old stuff, less triggered and able to respond more calmly; I can think more clearly and, well, I feel better.”

We also spoke about this idea that perhaps we are all just aspects of the one thing getting to know itself. This led her to question why, that being the case, starvation was something that needed to be repeated over and over in different lives.

It is an interesting question. I’m not sure any of us came intending to suffer in any way, yet there is clearly a lot of suffering that occurs from the ritual beating ourselves up in our own minds (which is likely an echo of a past parent’s words) through to starvation and so many more horrific ordeals.

Perhaps it is more that I came with an intention to gain something new from this life, a new way of being rather than of doing.

My friend told me it was a huge relief to think of life as becoming who she was meant to be, rather than what she was meant to do; it felt far more achievable that this illusory purpose that had seemed to evade her all these years.

Perhaps there is something specific I am here to do, but I suspect that until I become the person I intended to be in this life, the fullest expression of myself, it will not be clear. I also think it’s entirely possible that I may never know what I’m here to do, because it seems that I could have an effect on another’s life without ever knowing it, the way many others have had on mine:

The kindness of my paternal grandmother, her gentle nature and care for me...The belief my first swim coach had in my ability to improve and swim well, and the time he spent helping me do it...That same belief my second coach had in my ability to succeed at a higher level and play an important role in the team...The question posed on how many dimensions there might be, a physicist revealing to me the ten already discovered by scientists in the early 1990’s...

I could go on, these are seemingly small yet seminal moments, times in my life that have retrospectively created a sort of virtual cheerleading squad in my head when I would otherwise have had doubts about who I am and who I am capable of being.

Regardless of the circumstances we are born into, or find ourselves in, whether mundane or horrific, I suspect it is who we are being that carries the most weight.

A starving grandmother can still make a difference in who she is being both to herself and to others, as can the well-fed one. Sometimes those circumstances are extraordinary, sometimes ordinary. Perhaps though, it is in the extremes of life that things that are most important to us come into sharper focus.

I can only attest to my own circumstances; I find myself in the murky soup of western civilisation. I say this not to point to the current global pandemic, I’m pointing to all the modern conveniences and constructs of life that serve to distract me from things that are important.

Like someone talking to me about conspiracy theories the other day. The moment I hear someone referring to something that is conjecture as if it is fact, my solar plexus goes off like a tsunami warning system.

It is not that I disbelieved what was being espoused particularly; it is simply that I was listening to my own truth. My gut was telling me to steer clear and for good reason. Whether some well known historic figure is still alive, or whether a government has a malign intention, or a secret organisation is behind events or atrocities, there is little to be achieved by my dwelling upon it.

The temples on each side of my head start to throb and my mind starts to feels totally congested with information that cannot serve me in that moment except to distract. It brings to mind a statement I heard long ago “if you cannot convince, confuse”. I have a suspicion that is exactly what most of this information is designed to do – both in the mainstream and in social media.

I have done, and continue to do, my personal work; unwinding the unhelpful thought patterns and beliefs that I unwittingly adopted in my childhood. I do this so I can think more clearly, without getting waylaid or triggered by old fears.

In a life where I wasn’t unwinding my trauma, I was distracted going around the same old loops, having the same old arguments, the same old guilt trips, and the same old unhelpful stuff. I spent too much time worrying about what other people may be thinking or worrying about other things that are outside of my control.

This brings me to a conversation with another friend, when I said “I reckon most people have been getting born, then spending their life distracted. This feels like the start of an era of moving beyond the distraction, gaining clarity on who we each really are, our authentic self and who we came to be”.
Who were you born to be this life?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Risk Your Friendships More in Order to Be Fully Loved, What Are the Right Questions to Ask Right Now?, What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances, How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

He arrived home, like a great gust of forceful energy sweeping in the door. “Where is the charger?” he snaps. “You’ve packed the charger when I need it?”

We were going on holiday, I had been packing while my partner had gone to work for the morning, we were leaving in under an hour. I’ve left out some expletives, but suffice to say it was a tirade that was neither respectful nor even rational far less loving.

It’s the kind of thing that happens under stress and, in similar scenarios, in the past I’d have felt the sharp edges of it like a personal sting and lashed out in defence – particularly if I was also under stress. And let’s be honest, life can be stressful.

But I feel like I’ve awoken from a long sleep. Instead of being locked in a cycle of anger and resentment, I’m now able to be an observer more of the time. What I observe can sometimes makes me think “Really? I’ve been putting up with this?”, but on the other hand, I am no stranger to poor behaviour.

Being hyper attuned to others feelings, I have tended to suppress my own until they all spill over and unleash in more of a volcanic reaction. I can be loud; when I was growing up, a parent from a rival swim team once asked my mum if she fed me on raw meat, such was the strength of my voice in leading our team’s chant. When I open my mouth to refute something the indignance in my voice carries force.

The times I have reacted angrily have rarely been in proportion to what has actually happened. It is more like my reaction to the sum of every similar experience I’ve ever had, remembered in mind and body. And it’s fair to say I had never moved far past my teenage rebellion towards the things in my upbringing that constrained me, I just became more refined in how I expressed it.

The term nature versus nurture is commonly used to describe who we were born as (our essential nature) versus who we become (the reaction to the sum of our experiences). Personally I suggest that developmental trauma is probably a more accurate description than nurture.

I certainly come from a time in society where children were to be moulded rather than nurtured to blossom into our full potential. Little was understood about subjects such as secure attachment and attunement, only now am I seeing more discussion about this in the psychology fields. It seems like the general approach to parenting is slowly changing, but there is lack of good education and role modelling.

I heard a description by, I think, the internationally renound family therapist Terry Real, that states the journey of our psyche from the wounded child to adaptive adult (the ‘grown’ rebellious teen also known, in my view, as most adults on the planet today) to the integrated adult, one who learns to take all prior experiences and integrates them in a healthy way.

That has really been the foundation of the journey to me. To give an example I’ll turn again to my favourite document by Claire Zammit and Katherine Woodward Thomas on the self limiting thought patterns people tend to have and the associated gifts those are pointing to.

As a child I felt pretty powerless. I had to do what mum and dad said, let’s face it, they held all the cards. In reaction to that powerlessness I’d aspire to be the leader rather than the follower in life, and I had a hard time being vulnerable, rarely letting people know what I needed.

I’d present myself to others as though I had it all together and didn’t need them for anything, put up an invisible shield against hearing the whole truth, covertly letting others know I only wanted to hear positive feedback, and usually failed to have other powerful people in my life with permission to coach me.

This meant others would not perceive me as having problems or needs, they may have experienced me as unteachable at times and may have had a hard time contributing to me because I already seemed to know everything.

So I’ve had to find the kind of role models I aspired to, and learned to listen deeply to the wisdom of others. I’ve had learn to hold power alongside equally powerful peers, to simply say “I don’t know” and stay open to new possibilities,  and am learning to tolerate uncertainly as one of the most powerful places to be standing.

According to Zammit and Thomas, one of the gifts of having believed I was powerless, and having acted so independently in order to gain a sense of power, is the potential to hold a tremendous amount of power in the field and have the ability to lead others to unprecedented levels of their own empowerment.

The deeper truths, that I recognise, are that I love to learn and everyone has something valuable to teach me, and I am here to serve the full empowerment of others.

So when it comes to hearing something these days from a loved one that is less than loving, less than respectful, and devoid of appreciation, I am able to observe rather than react angrily. I can do this because I have done the work to both become aware of the self defeating beliefs that were invisibly shaping my life and have reshaped these beliefs based on the reality of my life today.

That does not mean I should allow someone to treat me in a demeaning manner, I teach people how to treat me by what I do and don’t accept. But because I can observe what is going on in a more objective way, I am now generally able to talk to my partner – or whoever happens to be the perpetrator - about these little outbursts in a way he can hear me, and he tends then to adjust his approach.

He is not deliberately acting that way to demean me; he is acting that way to gain power because of his own invisible and unhelpful belief patterns. We each have our own work to do.

While my work is not done, I feel well on my way and – more importantly – I have uncovered many ways and methods to help me and others. Instead of lapsing into an angry or depressive state I have learned to welcome these blots on the landscape of my day as they are there to show me the way home to a more expanded version of myself.

​Is it possible you harbour learned but invisible beliefs about yourself and your life that could be holding you back? Are you willing to look at them in order to receive the love, appreciation and respect you deserve? I hope so, because that expanded version of you is the one you’ve been waiting for, and the one our world needs.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy I Am a Recovering Approval Seeker and Control Freak, What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People, What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances, How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I was reading an experienced tutor’s words and he said to his students “The first step of the process (of learning this method) is to respect your own value. Understand that you have skills and talents that can change someone’s life.”

It made me think about the times in my corporate career I’d sat and refreshed my work resume and how much effort it had taken me to really hone in on those things that were unique to me and had created value.

Ordinarily I’m looking at myself from the inside out, not the outside in, and I am acutely aware of my own doubts and failings – far more so than my value.

But there is a statement I read “My very existence in and of itself provides extraordinary value, and is a profound blessing to all” that really resonated with all I have come to believe about life. I can’t imagine why some people would be created as less valuable than others, like a creator somewhere would be saying “Hmm, that’s enough people with value, now I just need some to fill the space around them with useless folks”.

​So, back in the corporate days, I would sit down and start with all the outcomes of my productivity, and the ways in which I could quantify it. Then I’d look at any praise or feedback I’d received and, finally, I’d go through the list and focus in on the things that I had really enjoyed. 

I also remember formulating my elevator pitch, a short description of what I did and the value it added that I could recite casually at the drop of a hat.

Having embarked on a deliberate journey to project myself from the inside out, my pitch has evolved. 
For example, one of my online profiles says:

After years of working with people and cultures in the field of customer experience transformation, I know true success comes from people like you and I being, well, the real us. Figuring out what that means is a process for all of us. Each week I publish articles sharing my own insights and experiences to inspire you to live the life you deserve – and to help you become the authentic person that our friends and family, our organisations and corporations, governments...our world, needs. To find out more visit shonakeachie.com

It’s been a while though since I revisited it, and I’m now starting to orientate myself to what else, beyond publishing my own experiences, I could do to help others on their journey.
I wondered what my pitch would be in ten years time.

This reminded me about what the ancient Egyptian’s call the ren (they referred to five parts of the soul: the ba being the personality, ka the life force, ib the heart or record of good and bad deeds, shuet the shadow aspects and ren the name).

It is said the ren was more than just a name, it was a secret name, a short phrase that depicted the sum of a person’s experiences that only they (and possibly those closest to them) would know. Knowing someone’s ren held power, it is like a concentrated or condensed version of a person’s authentic totality and a hyper condensed version of an elevator pitch.

I admit this idea of a ren is appealing; it calls to my desire to really crystallise who I am. From that perspective my ren feels like a work in progress, yet to be revealed. The most concise statement I have for me right now is something like “Seeking a way to put to good use that which was lost and now is found”.

I suspect there is some gold among the last few years of learning, discovery, healing and child rearing. And, probably like in the days of writing my resume, I could start by casting the net wide and just listing the things I’ve been doing and then start to really consolidate that down into the value I’ve gotten and created. The journey and growth these last few years has been huge.

For example, I uncovered a belief that I felt – to a degree – invisible.

Claire Zammit and Katherine Woodward Thomas outline in this fantastic document the self limiting thought patterns people tend to have and the associated gifts those are pointing to.

As I read through the notes associated with the belief I am invisible, things like not asserting my needs and desires (even when I was aware of them) struck me as true.

It’s no surprise then that others can be completely unaware of my feelings, needs and desires in that context, and can become very self centred in my presence. This could then lead me to believe others are selfish.

In close relationships that could then result in me asking for what I want in ways that are attacking, making an assumption people don’t care about me. Or it could lead to me engaging in selfless service to the point of exhaustion and depletion rarely presencing my needs and desires.

Zammit and Thomas go on to describe the skills and capacities I may want to cultivate to evolve beyond this false belief (that I am invisible) and then go on to describe the gifts it offers and the deeper truth statements that represent more of my authentic self in relation to it.

For example, they write “You possess a deep capacity to see the invisible, the ability to hear what is not being spoken, and to discern that which has never been made known before”.

That one document is abundant with phrases that encapsulate the deeper exploration, learning and growth in relation to the pursuit of my authenticity these last few years.

That one document is abundant with phrases that encapsulate the deeper exploration, learning and growth in relation to the pursuit of my authenticity these last few years. That my inner and outer perceptions are now closely aligned has given me a deeper respect for my value, I no longer feel like some imposter is out there acting as me.

In fact, as I read through the document and recognised many of the unhelpful beliefs about myself I’d uncovered using various methods – many of which were self driven - it gave me a much greater appreciation and respect for the journey I had undertaken and the value those experiences can add to the lives of others.

Perhaps it is time to take a fresh look at yourself and all that you have achieved in order to appreciate your journey and its effects a little more, and start to respect your own value? 

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Value Your Unique Perspective – Especially When You Feel Rejected, What Support Are You Blocking Yourself From Receiving?, How to Live in Conscious Self Awareness in the World and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Image by CJ from Pixabay

Eckhart Tolle, a master teacher on the concept of presence, said “Stress is caused by being here but wanting to be there”. I can relate to this.

When I was at the chiropractor, I asked her what she had noticed in my body this week and she said “It was twisted, it easily untwisted but it was twisted none the less (in my usual left hip to right shoulder pattern) – like you are being pulled in this direction and that direction”.

As soon as she said it I pictured a tug-of-war, rather like Dr Dolittle’s fictional Pushmi-Pullyu animal being pulled in different directions. It made absolute sense to me because it’s how I feel when the family are all at home and I have things I need to do, yet they are clamouring for my attention.

Of course, here in the southern hemisphere, it is school summer holidays, but this year – with so many lockdowns in process – I am sure there are many parents around the world contending with the same issues and on more intense levels.

For my kids I’ve found there is balance needed between planned activities and having enough downtime in order for boredom to kick in.

School takes care of much (often unwanted) planned activity during term time, but during holidays that falls more to me. Though as the kids get older they obviously have more of their own ideas and plans, which can bring about a whole other level of conflict and logistics to manage.

Another of my favourite Eckhart quotes is “Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found”, it has also always been the place in which I am most in touch with my own thoughts and feelings, my sense of self, which is something I desire for my kids also.

When boredom kicks in for the kids, though, I both relish and dread it.

I dread it because it is a temporarily painful experience for me, they start to complain and pick fights with each other, looking towards me as a beacon of hope to solve their boredom and their conflicts. However, I have found that it is often wiser if I avoid doing either, and simply give them each some positive attention before turning my own attention back to whatever I was doing.

But I also relish their boredom because, once they get over this hump – which they do (and they do a lot quicker without devices on the scene), I see the magic of their creativity come to life.

This used to create other issues as, when they were younger, it often involved turning our lounge into some fantastical kingdom, which could look like someone had taken the contents of our cupboards, strewn them over the floor and then stirred with a big spoon. However, as they get older, they get better at tidying up with less intervention.

Then, of course, there are the other things that need to happen, like clothes being washed, food purchased, meals prepared, alongside the support I provide to my partner in his business. And because none of this really floats my boat I heed Annette Noontil’s advice:

“It is best not to do more than 50% for people because it takes away their opportunity to learn and grow. If you have to do 100% for someone make sure you are learning something for yourself from this opportunity.”

Which is why I make it a priority to type these posts each week, it’s my time to really sit down and take in what lessons are presenting themselves.

So when I ponder on what I really need to know when I feel pulled in these different directions, here is my take out:

• I have a tendency towards people pleasing, and the fact I feel pulled in different directions is a signpost to relook at the lessons I’ve learned about what being hyper attuned to others’ needs and feelings has taught me, including defining and asserting my personal boundaries.
• No one will respect my needs and desires unless I prioritise them; I teach others how to treat me.
• In my situation, no one is going to die if I don’t get the balance right between doing too much or too little. But the fact I’m feeling so torn probably means I would more likely benefit from doing less; my expectations of myself are too high.
• Nothing needs to be perfect, whether I get it right or wrong for me, the kids and/or my partner, there are always going to be things I can learn and grow from, so either way I’ll get where I want to go. As my gran always said “What’s for you won’t go by you.”
• Be present to whatever is happening in the moment. Even in the process of typing this up, I’ve had to press pause a number of times and switch my attention to conversations with the kids and with my partner and each interruption provided an opportunity for connection with people I love.

With humanity experiencing so much turmoil right now, I imagine many people feel pulled in different directions. What is your life trying to teach you? What do you need to know right now to feel less torn and more present?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, When the Thing That Binds You is the Road to Freedom, How to Stop Being Triggered by What Other People Think, How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I asked my young niece how she would describe love without using the word love and she responded “it is what you feel for someone who is important in your life and the person/people who you would always want to be around until the very end”.

Aside of being my favourite answer to this question so far, it also made me look at the people I love in my life through new lenses, are these people I want in my life until the very end? Thankfully yes. But there have been times in the past when I’d have said no to that question and, inevitably, these people are no longer in my life, which is why it feels like a good litmus test for me.

But I can’t think about love without thinking about emotional entanglement. At the core of my discoveries about life, is this notion that as I was born into a family with a mother and father who – probably like most parents – loved me and wanted a good life for me, but that meant moulding my behaviours and my thinking, even my feelings, so that I fit in with what they and society expected from me.

Let me give you an example. Just today I watched a little boy (he was about one-year-old) and his brother (who was perhaps around three-years-old), playing with a ball. The infant boy clearly wanted the ball all to himself and got very upset every time the older boy went near it.

The kids were split up, neither allowed to play with the ball, and while the older one was clearly upset, the younger one was totally beside himself. This is a great saying as it reflects extremely well what is usually going on in the physical body; the consciousness is no longer at home. He was crying, loudly, clearly distraught, now well away from the ball and the parent was sternly telling him “no” over and over.

But what does “no” mean in a situation like that? If I project myself into a one year old’s psyche, completely devoid of rational thought, this would hold limited meaning beyond my parent’s disapproval. Of what? Of me. Does it mean I am wrong to be this upset? I can’t help feeling the way I feel. Am I not allowed to feel the way I feel? How the heck do I reign in such huge, overwhelming feelings?

As to questions about whether I’m not supposed to be acting this way, showing how upset I am or embarrassing my parents, or not being selfish with the ball, that is way beyond the realms of my young mind, way way beyond. I just need this adult to be able to handle the totality of who I am and all my feelings, if he can’t, how can I?

But the adult can’t or won’t and, since I depend on him to feed me and look after me, I have to take that part of me that is really upset and shove it deep deep down inside – over and over until I learn to suppress my true feelings with such ease I no longer even identify with them.

So then I grow up and my friend watches someone blatantly step in front of me in a line and I say nothing, even though that person then takes the last – say, soda – that I really wanted. My friend can’t believe I never said anything. I am annoyed of course, but I don’t want to create a scene, it feels wrong and, frankly, a bit scary.

My own kids are a bit older but still at an age where they are dependent on my partner and me for their survival needs, and there have been many moments when I’ve been on the parent’s side of that kind of example, and many moments that I too have not acted the way my kids would have liked me to.

Of course, they couldn’t tell me that, they could only express their big emotions which left me feeling turned inside out, in a tug of war between the child-part of myself that learned to suppress such feelings (and would not have dared embarrass my parents like that in public because it would have had consequences) and this other part of me that wanted to figure out how to let my kids express themselves authentically.

This meant my kids’ experience of me was rather schizophrenic, until I was able to learn new ways to deal with situations like that - both inside and out- more consistently. Generally now, if my kids get upset, I simply acknowledge how they are feeling and how I would probably feel like that in their shoes, it’s amazing how it takes the resistance and momentum out of a situation and calms things down.

Yesterday we visited a park with lots of families around and, aside of being grateful for our relative freedoms here in New Zealand, I watched with interest as children universally mirrored their parents, for better or worse. I could envision fast forwarding twenty years and many of those children rejecting the many parts of themselves that mimicked their parents, and their parents before them.

I find myself thinking “These kids take their cues from us, and we are just screwed up kids in adult bodies, they deserve better. Some wear their broken parts more obviously than others.”

In fact, my daughter asked me today who I liked better when I was growing up, my mum or dad. In the not too distant past I would have avoided answering that, out of some sense of misguided loyalty or fear of creating a rift in their relationship with a family member.

Instead I gave an honest answer and I was very clear that my preference was based on my cumulative experiences of kindness versus harshness.

There is another emotional entanglement when it comes to love. Should love be easy or hard? I think perhaps love it easy when it reflects the authentic part of me. But given I spent most of my life walking around in a skin made from experiences such as the one I described above, I did not spend most of my life projecting the authentic me into the world.

Whether my relationships have been easy or hard, they have all reflected back to me what I did or did not want, and therefore have been enormously helpful in pointing the way towards reclaiming the real me.

I am both the injured person and the person beneath the injury after all, and that does not mean I should stay in a relationship because I can see a person’s potential.

Within my relationship with my partner, after our kids came along we got to a point where we didn’t know if we even loved each other anymore. We were mirroring so many parts of our entangled childhood selves and experiences – parts we had denied, suppressed and disowned. And because we loved ourselves enough, and chose our family over going separate ways, we worked on changing who we each are – the less tangled versions.

It reminds me of a Viktor Frankl quote I heard this week “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” He goes on to say “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

In my case, while I could have changed my relationship status, I have been in enough relationships to see certain thought, emotional and behavioural patterns recurring, and there came that time to look in the mirror and be honest about what I was contributing that was creating those patterns.

So is love an adjective or verb? It’s both a feeling and a action. But because of these entanglements from childhood, until I figured out who I really am and connected with others from that place, it kept creating entanglements in adulthood.

When my niece then asked “So, Auntie Shona, how would you describe love without using the word love?” it gave me pause. I like her definition, especially when I think about all these entanglements created by parts of myself I’d denied, disowned or suppressed; I wouldn’t have wanted to be with that version of me to the very end, I really didn’t love myself enough.

But I also think of love as being our natural state, when things really hum, life happens with ease and I feel good. When I am not in that state it’s a calling card to become aware of what’s actually triggering me, who I truly am, and own it and appreciate it and put it out there.

So just how important is your definition of love? Regardless of what your experiences have been to this point in your life, we each have the opportunity to experience more love in our lives, starting with the way we feel about ourselves.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Risk Your Friendships More in Order to Be Fully Loved, What Support Are You Blocking Yourself From Receiving?, How to Live in Conscious Self Awareness in the World and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

As 2020 draws to a close, I was reflecting on a piece of news an old colleague of mine had posted about a lovely surprise holiday her husband had booked to a tropical location at the end of next year. Probably like many people, I am unsure whether that kind of travel will be possible again by then, but I started to wonder whether that was even the right question to be asking myself.

In his article 15 Great Quotes on the Importance of Asking the Right Question Mitch Ditkoff states how, as a consultant, he continues to be astounded by how few organisations have any kind of process to press pause, reflect and make sure they are coming up with the right questions. 

Setting aside questions about COVID19 itself for now, I started to think back to those early lockdowns, when much of the world seemed to stand still. It was a time when we as a family got to pause, reflect and take stock.

I can understand people wanting to get back to holidays and social activities, but what did that pause shed light on? There were reports of Venice’s canals running clearer, the clearest they’ve been in sixty years. An article in Science Direct sadly concluded (after research looking at the effects on the environment during the first global lockdowns) “Coronavirus itself is Earth’s vaccine and we humans are the virus”.

Talk of holidays and “getting back to normal” evokes in me a sense of frustration. I’m going to ignore the expression “the new normal” for the moment, because that seems to be more associated with control and fear, and that is not the kind of future I’m envisaging. But this idea of life going back to the way it was before the global pandemic seems ridiculous to me.

It has amplified so many issues about our environment and our social, political, economic, technological and personal challenges that it is a time in history ripe for change.

But having witnessed the relatively quick return to a lack of human connection between commuters in London after terrorist attacks in the early part of the millennium, I know how quickly distraction sets in.

During the lockdown here back in March through May, I revelled in being able to stroll out my front door and walk peacefully through our neighbourhood. But as soon as the restrictions were lessened, road traffic increased and the peaceful walks became crowded with road noise and traffic fumes, so now I have to get in my car to drive elsewhere if I want to take a peaceful walk.

I loved that my car did not get its tank refilled for over two months, it weighs on me that I consume fossil fuels. Yet, like many people around the world, I have commitments that would be extremely difficult to meet without running a vehicle. How can I find ways to change this?

How many governments and major political parties right now are even thinking about the lessons this crisis has taught us and have evolution on their agenda?

That said, I know my most effective voting takes place through the money I spend and the things I give my attention to. So where am I placing my attention? What am I spending money on? Am I using my resources in a way that would encourage the kind of change and transformation that could be for the benefit of not just me or my family, but for all of humankind, the creatures and the living planet on which we all reside?

I learned this year that I have white privilege. What other privileges do I hold? How can I give other people the benefit of my privileges? How can I help dismantle the systems of oppression within myself and for others?

I also learned from The Social Dilemma documentary that social media is six times more effective at spreading false news. Since conspiracy theories have abounded in 2020, I’ve watched friends and family become polarized on important topics to a degree that neither side seems able to hear the other.

I’ve had to ask myself, am I using social media as a tool? Or am I letting it demand my attention and manipulate my thinking? And where is my own resistance to hearing others’ opinions?
 
I learned that, in a time when our country faced a health risk, our government cut off the supply to my chosen form of healthcare and made only pharmaceuticals available. What can I do to ensure I maintain a freedom of choice in my healthcare even in times of crisis?

I learned that I was absolutely spot-on in my self assessment that I am not cut out to home school my children. Yet being able to give them and their schoolwork such individual attention led me to asking the right questions that uncovered their neurodiversity, and still more questions to find the right support and training so they can flourish. I wonder how I can support all children in their uniqueness to flourish?

I learned the importance of self sustainability. With panic buying, a lack of groceries and no access to garden supplies, keeping emergency supplies and a variety of fresh things to eat growing in our garden became more important. It highlighted all the problems I had known about with mono-farming and the way we currently source goods and services from around the world. What more can I do with our budget to encourage local and organic businesses?

I learned that reconnecting with my partner and children was simultaneously challenging and liberating. It brought about a huge amount of personal change in terms of consciously shaking off old beliefs and behavioural patterns that weren’t serving us. Where to next on that I wondered?

And then I got one of Claire Zammit’s emails that asked seven power questions:

• Where in your life have you most felt like yourself this past year?
• What have been the greatest challenges you’ve overcome?
• What can you acknowledge about yourself and your strengths?
• What is it time to let go of in your life?
• What is it time for forgive yourself for?
• What is it time to forgive others for?
• What are the old patterns that it’s time to release?

It reminded me that, while I have learned a lot about myself this year, the road ahead lies wide open for me to keep learning.  

2020 is a year that I think of as catalysing. It has led me to ask more questions than it has produced in terms of answers. I’m always impatient for change, and I know as I look back change will probably seem quicker than it feels right now.

Am I asking the right questions I wonder? So long as I keep taking time to pause and reflect on the bigger picture of my own life, I’m confident the right questions will arise.

The question is, with holiday season almost upon us at the end of this landmark year, what are the right questions for you to ask yourself right now?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Change the World One Day at a Time, Want to Make the World a Better Place? Tune In, What Value Are You Adding to the Currencies in Your Life?, How You Are Complicit in the Oppression of Others, You See What Happens When Leaders Are Not Grown Up on the Inside and The Internal Shift You Need to Help Solve the Social Dilemma. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

As I write this, three years have passed to the day since my mother died. I’d like to tell you this article is about her, but it’s not, grief is about the ones left behind. Being the anniversary of her death, I have relived it many times.

It truly was the worst of times. After months of waking up to hear the latest progress and prognosis from the other side of the world, my waking hours filled with thoughts of what I could offer that would help inspire or sooth, I’d finally flown over to say goodbye the month before she died. It was the first time she was ready to admit she might not make it to December when I would arrive with my partner and our kids.

So I left my two young children in the hands of their other grandmother and their father, and flew there and back in five days, it was all I felt I could allow myself away from the children. In those five days, between the jetlag and the intensity of the reason for the trip, I think I only slept a handful of hours.

But I had my time with mum, who by then was a shadow of her former self; skeletal. Her muscles were so wasted away that her last efforts to walk were more a feat of will, balancing the top half of her body on her hip bones while she put one foot in front of the other.

And I watched with morbid fascination every time she spoke. Her face no longer had any proper muscular substance, her jaw would move in a strange motion, more like a skull clattering open and closed, which totally changed the way she formed and spoke words.

After saying our goodbyes, I arrived back in the same country a month later, this time with my partner and children. She died in the early hours the night after her grandchildren all met for the first time, something she had longed to see, yet she was bed-bound hundreds of miles away, having only had brief lucid moments in those last weeks as her body was in the final throws of shutting down completely.

The next day my brother and I drove those hundreds of miles and back again to spend a few hours with my father. And later in the week I drove those miles again with my kids and partner so we could spend a few weeks near my dad and help where possible.

It was a trip to the other side of the world with young children and, while they were upset and overwhelmed, there was also the practical side of needing to fill our days somehow. So we took trips to many of the places of my childhood and then we would head back to dad’s so we could all eat together and I could help pack away mum’s personal belongings and ponder the awfulness of the situation, as life carried on cruelly without her.

Frankly, it was an out-of-body experience. I was there, but my tank was running on empty. The emotional and physical horror of it all took its toll, and I’m sure it was no coincidence my first kidney stone occurred within a few weeks of arriving back home.

Needless to say the three years since have been challenging. That is no surprise I guess when the person who birthed me into this world, and who loved me and shaped me in so many ways, has died. The challenges have not so much been around accepting her death, with a degenerative illness much of that acceptance slowly occurred before her actual passing, it’s more been about facing many of my own shadows.

My mum was, beyond doubt, the single biggest influence of who I became in this world. She played her part beautifully, because I had little idea of who I truly was, what I really believed and wanted and needed beyond what I’d been taught. I don’t mean that facetiously.

Sure, I would be lying if I said there weren’t times in my life I resented my mother, but I never doubted her love nor her intentions. She did her best and was – like all of us –a product of her own life circumstances, parenting in a way that was good in its intention and (as is common) ignorant of the unhelpful beliefs and patterns that shaped who she was and how she shaped me.

When my own kids were born, I had a burning desire to allow them to become who they are, to treat them as a flower that needs nourished and watch in wonder as it grows and emerges, rather than a piece of clay in need of moulding.

Despite my own good intentions, I’m also aware my own kids will have their own issues. This isn’t about me becoming the perfect mum; it’s about me becoming who I intended to be in this life. My mum did not deter me from that; in fact she was the perfect one to help me.

Without feeling an acute lack of not knowing myself, I’d never have felt such a strong desire to get to know me. And in learning how to come home to myself, I now have a wealth of experience, knowledge and a service to fulfill, to help others who are searching for the same. 

In those first years of my children’s lives, the last of my mother’s, I became acutely aware that I had choices to make about who I was being - particularly when my mother was around, which was the real litmus test. Each year my parents would make the trip across the world to see us, and – being such a distance – would stay with us for a prolonged period.

There were certainly battles. As I’ve said before, while I learned early on to hyper attune to others’ needs, there was also a strong voice within me, and so I’d live in this state of speaking my truth in defiance but feeling like a twisted car wreck inside. I spoke my truth at the cost of high anxiety, often in anger, and then frequently compromised out of guilt.

I let go of judging my mum, she was a survivor and I loved her very much. I am grateful that those intense visits brought opportunities for me to finally look her in the eyes and say “I’m doing it my way” and “I love you”.

Before she died a lot of my journey was about discovering the true nature of life and who I am, something on which we did not see eye to eye. Through my experiences, I have come to have very different beliefs from my parents, but I had no doubt they still loved me as I said in Coming Out – Psychically Speaking. That said, I was still looking for their endorsement.

I realised if I wasn’t happy with my life then I had no one to blame but myself. I have spent far longer as an adult making my own decisions than I did as a dependent child. So when I’d get triggered about things in my life I would – and still do – take a good look at what is going on beneath the surface.

There were a lot of beliefs lurking there that really weren’t serving me; this is shadow work (but is called many other things).

As I look back, I really wonder why it took me so long to begin. There was so much time and energy wasted blaming and resenting. However, like grief itself, I also trust it was part of a process. If I’d acted more quickly many of those patterns might not have been as obvious, over time they played out in all the arenas of my life, triggering the same feelings of anger, disappointment, anxiety, rejection etc over and over again.

So many unhelpful beliefs lurked: “I’m selfish”, “I’m a disappointment”, “I don’t belong”, “I’m a burden”, “I’m crazy”, “they are idiots”,” I’m different” and many many more. All of these are rooted in the shame or guilt I felt as a child, and while those were valid fears as a dependent child, they no longer serve me, they are all the opposite of my truth.

Claire Zammit tackles this topic beautifully. She says “When you believe:

• “I’m alone” or “Other people don’t give me what I need” or “Life is sad and lonely”, the underlying lesson is actually “I came to love and be loved and I have the power to create meaningful connections to others.”
• “I’m bad” or “Others are always angry at me” the underlying lesson is actually “I am here to contribute to the evolution and advancement of humankind and I create openings for the flow of life to emerge in new and powerful ways for all.”
•  “I’m not enough” or “Others don’t value me” the underlying lesson is actually “My very existence in and of itself provides extraordinary value.”
• “I’m powerless” or “Other people are incapable and incompetent” or “When others hold power there is less for me” the underlying lesson is actually “I am a powerful leader, here to serve the empowerment of all”.

And so forth.”

But as Belinda Alexander wrote her main character as saying in Mystery Woman “I’ve been afraid for so long I don’t know who I would be without that fear. How could I change that now?”

There are many ways to change the way we look at things and feel about them, and I found different ways worked with different issues. But it has all been a process of unburdening, getting lighter, letting go.

If you are grieving someone who is no longer in your life, whether they have died or not, is it time to figure out who you are in a world with them no longer in it?  For even in grief, maybe especially in grief, there are lessons to be learned.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Rejoicing in Who You Are, Start From Where You Are, Now Go and Be Great, You Are Not as Important to Your Parents as You (or They) Think and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

A wise lady recently told me something I’ve heard many times, that the first law of the universe is to put myself first. “Though” she acknowledged, “your children are not quite at the age yet where you can”.

This cleared up a question that had been sitting with me for quite some time.

Over the years I’ve heard and read a lot in the personal growth field about putting myself first. On the whole, I really get it, in order to take care of anyone else I have to take care of my own needs first so I’m in better shape to help others.

Being someone who had very poor personal boundaries, I’ve often dwelled on the irony of coming to know myself and my boundaries (my wants, needs and desires; the things that define the edges of where I end and others begin) at precisely the time in my life where I have children to raise.

It’s been an interesting journey trying to figure out how to reclaim the sovereignty of my soul while simultaneously helping each of my children on their journeys.

It is fair to say that, when I first had kids, a huge part of me relished handing them over to someone else for most of the day while I dashed off to live the piece of my life that I felt most productive in. That said, I had become increasingly frustrated (over the latter years of my corporate career) that what I was doing lacked meaning for me, still, it was more tangible than my newfound role as a mother.

Sitting for endless hours while a fledgling suckled at my breast, trying to figure out why this tiny fragile person seemed so restless and discontent. I always imagined a baby would feed, need winded, perhaps relieve itself and need a nappy change, and then would nap; and this cycle would repeat maybe half a dozen times in a day. But no, it was more like a half dozen times in a hour.

There never seemed to be time to take care of even the most basic things, like going to the loo, preparing and eating my own food, taking a shower and getting dressed, or cleaning and tidying the house. Far less anything more productive that would require use of the well honed skills and experience I had come to be prized for outside the home.

So, yes, there was a large part of me that was very glad we couldn’t afford for me not go back to work at the time.

Fast forward three years, with another addition to our family in the picture, trying to work full time in a role that carried a lot of responsibility, expectation and reward, yet missed the mark entirely in terms of filling my heart, things looked a little different.

My children were on the move and able to express themselves so much more clearly. I mean, it wasn’t like they were able to say “hey, we need more attention from you, and we would really like to be in our own home each day”, but it was pretty clear they were deeply in need of these things despite the wonderful care they received outside their home.

As I would walk in the door, the kids would melt down, all their pent up emotion spouting forth like a cap popping off a shaken up bottle of soda. This would go on for hours and when, at last, their little bodies would give in to exhaustion and fall asleep, it was short lived, with both awakening multiple times through the night wanting the mummy time they missed during the day.

Suffice to say, things had to change and they did. Making changes in our location and lifestyle, I took on the role I dreaded, being home more with the children. I really felt I had no choice, I simply could no longer cope physically or emotionally trying to keep a foot in both worlds, both of which I was resisting in some way.

The thing I quickly realised was the world I had left behind no longer held any appeal. After a short spell consulting, I knew without a doubt that I was not going to find what I was looking for in the same kind of roles I had been doing. It didn’t take a genius to understand that corporations were never going to transform and change unless the people leading them changed.

And I knew I needed to change too, to go inward and start to live my life from the inside out, more attuned to who I authentically am.

I also started to see more clearly the effects on my kids of my not being there early on, the degree  of attunement and attachment they wanted and needed in those first moments of life had led to anxiety and anger, it took a few years to disentangle much of that.

Each step of this journey has been a challenge. I started as an adult who had really developed a complex, multi-layered persona in reaction to the way I had been parented and brought up, much like most people I guess. But life in our home forced me to look at all that with entirely new eyes, I started to view it as a mirror showing me where my learned behaviours were at battle with my true nature.

In being there to allow for more attachment and attunement to my kids, it’s allowed me to attune to myself and create a more healthy attachment style. I started to realise that, while the domestic duties that go with having family are not my thing, it was exploring the emotional aspects of child rearing that really helped me to find my way back to my own authenticity.

And while I have embraced that, I have also continued in many ways to resist my role, seeing it as something that is keeping me bound uncomfortably. Inside me is a desire, an insatiable wanderlust for exploration to worlds unseen (inside and out). While, at this point in my life, my main focus has to be on the children, it plays an endless tug of war with my desire to let my attention wander as it begs to be. 

As we approach the end of the school year here which, with lockdown measures, was already somewhat shorter than most years, my kids have been at home not feeling great. This was the last full week where I – in theory – would have had several hours in a day that my attention would not be split across three people.

In the past, the need to be fully present at home and waylay my own plans would have twisted me inwardly, like a self torture chamber. Wanting to there as opposed to here creates too much inner tension and resistance, too much stress, and my life is far easier in the moments when I surrender to just being here; even if it means I can’t do the thing I seem to be wired for. That is precisely the tactic I took this week.

I am a phosphorus constitution, my homeopath reminded me. Like my elemental namesake, if left to my own devices, I would consume all the oxygen quickly and – though my light would burn brightly – it would burn out quickly. What a gift to be brought back down to Earth, to be present with the children then, it keeps me from obsessively pursuing my explorations and burning out.

I’ve realised, amid the feeling of being in a tug of war for my attention - a cocoon that has bound me tightly to its child rearing purpose - a metamorphosis has occurred. My change and transformation skills have been applied inwardly, and I’ve shared those lessons in my articles as they have been learned. I now have a vast understanding and awareness of many techniques and resources centred on how to come home to ourselves.

For all its perceived bonds, it has in other ways been a beautifully unencumbered journey. Having been a child of a society that wants scientific proof before anything can be believed, and having followed the traditional path through higher education, it has been so freeing to follow nothing but my own intuition.

I do not require a piece of paper to qualify me to become myself.

Wading into the waters of the metaphysical and the mystical along with the latest scientific understanding has been liberating. What I’ve discovered along the route using these many woven strands has been enlightening. The convergences are many and often, we are truly evolving to a place where science is beginning to understand the nature of consciousness and many other things long ago deemed sorcery.

Despite the perceived limitations of the cocoon, my explorations have been wide and deep. My current intrigue lies with a deeper dive into work on trauma using somatic therapy, but this is one strand among many.

While I have been bound to this life I thought of as highly dissatisfying in many ways, I’ve simultaneously learned so much about the art and science of personal transformation, of becoming the fullest expression of who I intended to be; reawakening.

Forced to kneel at the doorway of my heart, or continue to suffer, this year I’ve stepped across the threshold and now stand in the entranceway and hear myself yell “hello, the house”... I’ve come home to myself at last.

Are you resisting the thing that binds you? What about its bonds could be pointing you straight in the direction of your true freedom?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances, Start From Where You Are, Now Go and Be Great, Life Really Does Support Your Deepest Desires and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Planning who to invite along to an afternoon tea on her birthday, my daughter felt rather crushed when one of her close friends insisted another particular person be invited or she wasn’t going to come. At first my daughter asked me whether we could invite this other person so, as I dug deeper and uncovered the reason, we had a little chat.

I explained that unless she took the risk that her friend might not come, she was going to feel worse on an ongoing basis that she had not spoken her truth and honoured herself. Her truth is that, while she likes this other person, she doesn’t want invite them into her close friendship circle.

Without another word, she picked up the phone, called her friend and told her that she would love to have her come along, but she would not be inviting the other person, it is her birthday and she gets to make that decision. Of course, her friend said she would come along after all.

This is one lesson I wish I had learned myself many decades ago. The fact was not lost on me that it was precisely those early social relationships where I would have started to embed my own way of relating to people outside that immediate family circle.

Instead I was largely codependent in my relationships and had poor personal boundaries, because I was hyper attuned to others’ feelings. I’d learned from the cradle that my best strategy was to anticipate how the people (who were responsible for me) were feeling and adjust my behaviour in order to avoid getting into trouble.

That meant often swallowing my disappointment that how I was feeling had not been considered and then I’d change who I was being in order to fit in. Nowhere was this more obvious than in my personal relationships.

I shared with my daughter how I’d fallen in love when I was younger (in the olden times), and was in a relationship with someone who had ultimately left and broken my heart. I used to idolize him; he was so completely unlike anyone I’d met before.

But, while I enjoyed many aspects of being with him, and was upset for many years after we parted, in truth there were ways in which I didn’t feel honoured. For example, I used to get ready to go out on a Saturday night and be waiting from around 7pm, then he wouldn’t show up until 9pm, and he never used to acknowledge how late it was or apologise for keeping me waiting for hours.

On the other hand, I never used to call him out on it. I remember once his sisters mentioned how awful it was of him to do that, they had noticed it, which made me feel somewhat seen, but I never challenged him on it. More fool me, as my mother would say.

Looking back now, I can see that I was so afraid of losing him, or being seen as less than cool, I never gave him the chance to see and love the true me. That is not to say that he would have, but in the end it didn’t matter anyway.

When we split up, I was devastated and wondered what it was about me I needed to change. I berated myself for being too needy. And I was, I thought I needed him to love and accept me to make me whole, when really I needed to know and love who I am.

Dealing with the things that are unsaid has been my Achilles heel in life. I’m a straight up kind of a person and, because I anticipate others’ feelings, I am usually on the front foot apologizing or explaining. So when I’m caught up in a situation where someone denies, deflects or disowns their behaviour it takes me more than a moment to change gear.

It took me a long time to recognise that pattern with my partner. If something would come up that triggered me, I’d criticize and he would deflect with another criticism and we would go down this rabbit hole of blame that became so out of proportion to the original trigger, we were caught in a spiral of old unhelpful belief patterns.

Thus my adult relationships of every kind have been this intricate and cumbersome tango that have incorporated my own emotional baggage along with that of my friends or partners. There was me simultaneously trying to figure out who I should be in order to be loved and accepted, and at the same time also balking at my own lack of integrity with myself.

Most people may either resonate with my experiences or the opposite extreme; of disconnecting and retreating into a bubble, where all that is real and all that matters is the individual experience. The degree of attunement in infanthood is reason for this, as I talked about in Want to Make the World a Better Place? Tune In .

But as I result, I don’t like to cause damage in my relationships; it feels very unsafe to me. And how to navigate things that trigger me has been one of the hardest patterns to break, moving away from the blame game and into more of an observation mode.

I should confess I am no wallflower. At every step of the way the part of me inside that recognised I was getting trampled upon and carrying too much baggage would protest and I’d lash out in some version of criticism and/or (mostly) restrained anger; with a lot of internal anger and resentment towards myself.

So it is with some relief I’m now at a point in my life that the advice I’ve given to my daughter is the advice I’ve been taking myself in recent years.

After figuring out who I am - what Shona Keachie actually likes and dislikes, needs and desires, and being in loving acceptance of that - the other challenge has been to risk my relationships with others in order to keep integrity with who I am. It has meant some relationships have fallen away, others have deepened, and new ones have appeared.

But the common thread is that I can present myself in relationships without having to wear a mask of some sort, shape shifting to suit the people around me. There is freedom in that, and so much less encumbering than wondering what is wrong with me and why I am not like these other people around me.

Do you know who you truly are? Do you love and accept yourself? Are you willing to risk your relationships more in order to be fully loved for who you are?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy My Needs versus Yours, Start From Where You Are, Now Go and Be Great, Do You Really Know the Different Parts of You? and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

This is a question that came up for me this week, and I will tell you how. But I also thought it was an interesting question to ask given how topical giving and receiving is for many people around the world at this time of year across various cultures.

Of course I am not talking about those horrid itchy socks Auntie sends every year. This is about examining my beliefs so I am open to receive all that is helpful to me on this journey of life.

The question came up when I went to an appointment with a chiropractor I hadn’t seen before. I thought I’d try something new to see if I could get any relief for the tension in my right shoulder that is often there.

I figure that at some point, along my inner journey back to authentic me, I will address the layers that are keeping my shoulder bound. Since there is nothing structurally wrong, it’s more likely related to an unhelpful thought pattern or belief (or multiple layers of unhelpful beliefs).

The chiropractor took one look at me and described what she was seeing: locked up at the pelvis, twisted on my left hand side, and that crosses over in a common pattern of tension up through my right shoulder and neck.

I explained some inner work I had done around my shoulder which revealed some emotional trauma as a baby (having to suck up or rein in my feelings when being weaned onto a rubber teat at two weeks old) and there is some past life memories there that I am aware of relating to being badly beaten for the knowledge I possessed.

This, I guess, made her feel comfortable talking to me on a metaphysical level. She explained her own understanding of the pattern she was seeing. What she told me was that we often receive an imprint of our mother’s nervous system from our time in the womb, and then when we are born our will is usually shaped by the role models around us, so our ideas about masculine and feminine often come from our mother and father, for example.

Metaphysically the left side of the body relates to the feminine and the right side to the masculine. So as she saw my left hip twisted inwards (in a defensive/protective type posture) it’s a physical representation of the feminine blocking the masculine.

The question to ask myself, therefore, is “what do I currently believe about receiving support from the masculine?” and “where am I blocking myself from receiving support?” Knowing, of course that I have aspects of both masculine and feminine within me, and I may be blocking myself from internal support and/or external support that would naturally come to me if I was open to receiving it.

Because I am a writer, I just starting writing out the response. It was fascinating to look at how my beliefs have been shaped through my experiences with my own parents, siblings, partners and other important males like coaches and grandparents.

As I sifted through memories of mum relating to me her opinions and experiences of men, the story of overhearing my uncle’s teenage friends talking about girls, for example, I was aware of little alerts getting flagged in my system. Perhaps I haven’t been as trusting of aspects of masculinity as I would otherwise have been.

I also took a look at the most enlightened and encompassing definition of masculine that I could find, I wanted to know what a fully embodied expression of masculine could look like. Devine masculine represents action, direction, movement, responsibility, strength, focus, fatherhood, the sun, generosity, encouragement, material abundance, clarity, intellect, transformation and growth.

I can certainly see, for example, being the eldest living child in my family, responsibility is something I do well, maybe too well. Maybe I even have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility and don’t always let others take responsibility for themselves. This is especially important for me as my kids grow and I let go.

While there is undoubtedly more support I am blocking myself from receiving, becoming aware of where I’m blocking it is the first step to unblocking it. There are a myriad of way to change the emotional signature of my beliefs by revisiting these early memories, as I talk about in Want More Energy, Clarity and Time? but it all starts of awareness.   

In diving deeper into my associations with the masculine, I also became aware of some of the wonderful support I’ve received from men over the years.

I don’t have many memories of my grandad, he died when I was fourteen, but I do remember him taking my brother and me to feed horses at a local estate. He didn’t have a lot to say, my grandad, but there was a quiet solidity about him, like a space in which I could just safely stand as who I was without judgment of any kind. And his gentle example of feeding the giant horses helped overcome fears I had inherited from my parents’ who were not animal lovers.

There were also my swim coaches, my diving coach and the lovely gentleman who worked with me in the travel centre in one of my student’s jobs. Those guys were in my corner, and my dedication and success was their reward. They were there to show me how to give others a hand up in life, to pass on what I know.

While I feel like I have only just begun my journey of uncovering the helpful and unhelpful beliefs I have around receiving support from the masculine, it also feels like an important perspective to share. In what areas are you blocking yourself from receiving?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy What Value Are You Adding to the Currencies in Your Life? How to Live in Conscious Self Awareness in the World and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

It’s simple; I got more energy, clarity and time by doing my inner work.  While that is a nice neat statement, I can also add that I’m more relaxed, have more perspective, more focus in areas that are important to me, a much better sense of self, my health is better, my body and mind look and feel better and my relationships are better. Honestly, life is just better.

What do I mean by inner work?

Well, I mean that I always felt stressed, tired and unhappy and was always looking to fix the things I blamed – usually circumstances and other people. After years of external change to try and fix how I was feeling inside, I realised it was time to stop running from the heaviness that seemed to lurk there and, instead, shine some light on it.

What has brought this to mind is I’ve been doing some catching up with friends as the year approaches its end, swapping our tales of challenge and triumph for the year.  I had been sharing, among other things, the continuing work I’ve been doing rooting out old and unhelpful beliefs, thoughts and behaviours.

One response was “I’m not quite sure I'd want to think of all the crap stuff in the past, I am sure it would be helpful in some ways but in others, I think ... just bash on with life.  I know I need to chill out a bit and laugh and enjoy life more and will perhaps try and focus on that in 2021”.

That is how I used to feel too, I get it. My life was busy, crazy busy, and hard emotionally, I carried a lot. I felt alternatively like superwoman (I think that was the adrenaline) and anxious and irritable (which was probably the cortisol), and I also felt really weighed down (which, it turns out, was all the unhelpful thoughts and feelings that actually were weighing me down).

I’d sit there at 10pm at night, when my partner would switch off the TV, knowing I really needed to go to bed and get some sleep but simultaneously feeling like I was just being swept away on the tide. Meanwhile it felt like there were better possibilities that existed for my life, but it was as if those were happening somewhere just beyond my reach.

I’d often liken my experience of life (until recent years) to swimming through treacle, but it's getting better as I wade through all my unhelpful thought and behaviour patterns. I’ve found that "all the crap stuff of the past" is really one big generalized bucket. 

There was the first seven years of my life, of which I have little conscious memory, but that is precisely when all the internal wiring occurs, so that is where I've been focusing my attention.

It's fascinating, it turns out my life was basically just a repeat loop of experiences that reflected all these crazy beliefs I had picked up as child, a toddler, a baby, and even in utero – in fact there is also a whole lot of inter-generational and collective trauma in there for good measure. It was all just playing out through more and more exaggerated experiences. 

For example, last week I had been away for a few days with the kids while one attended an out-of-town course. When we got back I was busy and, after saying I would make salad for dinner, I then told my partner I was too exhausted and wouldn’t be making one.

His face fell, he was disappointed, but said he’d make it. His facial response had triggered me though; I was irritated and needled him. To give this context, he had also had an extremely busy week so we were both pretty tired and low on energy.

In the (not too distant past) this scenario may have played out with a lot more intensity than it did, given neither of us was in a good place emotionally. Thankfully however, having both done some inner work around conflict, it didn’t get ugly.

That said, I was still aware of an unhelpful belief that was bubbling up within me, the belief that I wasn’t seen. There was a definite voice of a martyr in my head, and what felt like a swelling or stuckness in my throat.  I worked through the emotional intensity on a scrap piece of paper “I am angry because…”, “I am disappointed because…” working my way up the emotional scale until I reached a point of clarity and even the silver linings.

This perhaps makes it obvious how I’ve gained more energy, clarity and time.

Previously I’d have gotten really stuck on something like this for a good few days, because it would have seemed so much bigger than it actually was, because of all the deeper (and heavy, negative) meaning attached to it. I’d have jumped from recognizing I was too tired to make a salad to questioning the entire basis of our relationship and a minor blip would have become major battleground.

That takes a lot of headspace, a lot of energy and creates a much muddied view of life.

There are so many ways to tackle this kind of work, and gain insights, and start to lighten the load. I have taken advantage of many free video mini-series that teachers and authors often use to launch online courses, read many books, listened to many practitioners from many walks of life share their insights and experiences engaged with mentors and made use of other help; there is a veritable smorgasbord of tools, practices and people to engage with in whatever way suits the situation at the time.

How did I know where to begin? I just started to tune in to that innate wisdom that lies within. The truth is that there is only one person who knows what is right for me at any particular moment and that is me, I am my own unique cocktail of genes, experiences and much more. But I had to become practiced at observing my thoughts rather than totally identifying with them.

The way I did that was to stop procrastinating about meditation and start doing it. Every day I take fifteen minutes and breathe, letting my thoughts drift away like a cloud each time I notice them. Doing that has not only helped my nervous system enormously, it’s helped me to really get this sense of my inner – more objective - observer and the thoughts and feelings I’m noticing.

That has helped me to develop my innate sense of intuition, which helps me make better decisions about how to tackle things in my life. It’s helped me to connect with the various kinds of help I’ve needed along the way, most of which would have previously just been ignored.

In Judith Fertig’s novel The Taste of Lemon, the main character’s dad has been absent from her life for many years after he couldn’t cope following his time in Vietnam. Finally, after getting the help he needed with his trauma, he remarked “I feel terrible. I know that is how it’s supposed to work. You have to feel worse before you get better.”

It’s so temporary though, feeling worse, it really is fleeting. More than that, it is so much better than the feeling of dread and running away from the things I feared for years, not even thinking about them fears or as anything more than a dense mass of shadows somewhere back over my shoulder.

Psychologists are really changing the way they deal with trauma, whether it’s the more insidious common variety emotional trauma experienced by most people though the early years of attachment and attunement, or more obvious and heart wrenching trauma.

Terry Real has a three-part model for thinking about the psyche that can help clients understand the aftereffects of trauma and relate to other people from their most thoughtful, mature self. He says “Oftentimes, patients reenact past trauma in their current relationships. Not only is this heartbreaking to watch, the patterns are extremely difficult for client to change without awareness”.

In Brittany Watkins work, while centring on comfort eating and dealing with the tap roots of where that unhelpful behaviour begins, she powerfully and relatively easily addresses the emotional signature of those heavy feelings people have been carrying around.

Jimmy Davis, astounded by the far reaching effects of her methods, said Brittany had told him “If you have a computer and it’s slow… Usually, that just means there are lots of programs running in the background.  When you get rid of the programs, the computer runs how it was designed to.  Humans are the same way.  Your brain installs software (belief systems) based on traumatic events that happen when we are younger. Usually, they are not positive, so your subconscious installs these programs to protect you. Once you get rid of those programs, you run how you are supposed to.”
He added “I realized in that moment everything I had tried to fix previously was simply managing symptoms rather than the actual root cause.”

I relate to this, I've had this drive to tackle the root cause (or dissolve the treacle, so to speak) as I'm crossing the halfway point of my life and I want my body and brain decluttered. This seems necessary to take on this next part of my life that I want to live from that less encumbered and more authentic perspective.

Anne McNaughton said “There is always the point in any month when you get a chance to exhale, catch your breath and make time to hear yourself think. There is some opposition to this, with life fighting back and (whether real or imagined) a belief that time out to hear yourself think is being lazy or unproductive. However there couldn’t be a more productive use of your time.”

With the end of the year and perhaps some downtime in sight, perhaps it’s time to hear yourself think and start becoming aware of some of those unhelpful patterns in your life so that you can gain more energy, clarity and time?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy I Am Worth It – Are You? Put Money in its Place,  Autonomy – Break Free of Money Fears,  and Profit, Purpose and Personal Fulfillment Can Thrive Together - A Remarkable New Organisational Construct. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

This was a question that really struck a chord with me when I was glancing through a paragraph that mentioned income. Normally when I read about income needs and priorities it doesn’t really strike me too deeply, I have always had faith in that department that things will work out, for which I am truly grateful.

However this question had a twist that called to me, it stemmed from a statement that money is simply a means to an end, and it was more about:

• Looking at my needs and priorities behind money
• What I believe I deserve across all the currencies in my life i.e. how much I value myself

Now that really grabbed my attention, what are the different currencies in my life I wondered?
I set about doing a little research.

Tim Ferris suggests time (in the sense of being time rich), money and mobility (being able to come and go as we please) are the three currencies of life.

Lisa Grace Byrne talks about our five life currencies as inner natural resources: time, thoughts, words, feelings and talents/natural gifts.

Willie Patterson cites four currencies to building a more fulfilled life, and includes a helpful chart of what poor versus wealthy means in each of the areas: money, time, knowledge and relationships.

Dr CH Vikranth espouses the concept of five currencies to lead a well balanced life: physical (body/health), mental (knowledge/skills), social (the people in our life), money/material possessions and spiritual.

And Mary Morrisey puts forward four forms of abundance we need before money flows into our life: ideas, gratitude, space and worthiness.

When I define the term currency, as things I have of value that I can exchange for value, it is Lisa Grace Byne’s definitions that resonated with me the most. To her list I’d add money, ideas and knowledge/skills.

This makes my list of currencies:

• Time
• Thoughts
• Words
• Ideas
• Knowledge/Skills
• Feelings and talents/natural gifts
• Money

I then essentially went through each of my currencies and wrote down my goals preceded by “I deserve”.

For example:

• I deserve time for self care, time for myself to explore ideas, time for relaxation, time with each of my children, time with my partner and time with family and friends
• I deserve thoughts that give clarity, thoughts that are kind, thoughts that will help me go with the flow and thoughts that will help me manifest the life I want.
• I deserve to use words that inspire. I love Jean Houston’s phrase “You speak like angels and use words like wands.”
• I deserve ideas that flow to me easily.
• I deserve knowledge and skills that continue to grow to the benefit of this life and beyond.
• I deserve feelings that I fully connect with, teaching me to navigate the journey to my essential self. And I deserve feelings that vibrate on a high level, attracting my best life.
• I deserve a life where I get to express my natural gifts and talents fully and regularly. And I deserve to use my natural gifts and talents to the service of all in ways that I can see and appreciate.

Once I had defined those it then highlighted to me where I have added value in recent years and where there is still some work to do (okay, perhaps a lot of work to do in some places), but it was gratifying to see how far I’d come in many of the areas in recent years.

However with 2020 almost in the rear view mirror it felt like a great exercise to get clarity on what I’m reaching for as I am moving forwards.

I really liked a statement Anne McNaughton made this week “2020 was the year that the cake came out of the oven and we could see what had been cooking for years, while in 2021 we get to wipe down the bench, get out the recipe book and start cooking something brand new.”

This exercise felt a lot like that process of looking at the cake, wiping down the bench, and starting to get ideas for new recipes.

So what are the currencies of value to you? Has 2020 changed your perspective across some of these? And how will you add value moving forwards? 

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy I Am Worth It – Are You? Put Money in its Place,  Autonomy – Break Free of Money Fears,  and Profit, Purpose and Personal Fulfillment Can Thrive Together - A Remarkable New Organisational Construct. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

She held up a pair of shoes and asked us to imagine that those shoes belonged to our mother or father. Then she asked us to imagine them on their feet as they are walking towards us. “How do you feel right now? What do you notice in your body?” she asked.

This was a talk on intergenerational trauma by Dr Diane Poole Heller. As I imagined this scenario I found myself getting anxious. I found it such a simple and interesting exercise I later asked my partner the same questions. His response was a feeling of fear, of walking on eggshells.

Our bodies seem nothing short of a miracle of cosmic proportions to me, the more I learn, the more I marvel at this vehicle for my earthy ride that I once referred to as a meat suit. Now I see that it is something beyond sophisticated, a kind of intelligence I can’t even explain.

My body can tell me things my mind can’t compute. That one little exercise about how my body reacts to the sensation of feeling like I have a parent walking towards me tells me a lot about why I have always feared conflict.

I’m often taken back to the standard parting comment from my parents in childhood “be good”. Being good was what was important in society in that era. It is something I’m so conscious of, that I’ve deliberately made my parting shot to my own kids “love you, have fun”.

And while this is a personal reflection, I think it does connect into what’s happening right now in the world around me. Out of interest in what was happening in the US election I watched a short clip of Joe Biden saying that after the election was called it was time to “put the rhetoric of the election behind us and (I’ll paraphrase) reconnect with each other”.

Too little too late given that the crumbling seat of power in Western civilisation appears to be descending into polarised anarchy, exactly the kind of conflict we do want to avoid. This seems yet another example of the kind of rot that sets in as discussed in You See What Happens When Leaders Are Not Grown Up on the Inside.

To call the political trash talk rhetoric is to severely downplay the role it has played in political polarisation, realising too late the violence that has been incited and the extreme importance of leading by example.  

Though, as I said four years ago in The Role of Clinton or Trump in an Evolved World?  political game playing is not for those who want authenticity, it’s not for those who want to understand the world through the eyes of another and it’s not for those who want to truly be part of a world more evolved than this one today.

My view then was, whether it was Clinton or Trump was irrelevant, neither represented an evolved world, both represented a step in nature’s death dance of an era. And so four years on, this death dance is still playing out, but certainly further along the track, hopefully the crescendo.

This is the kind of violent conflict that arises, I believe, because we are taught that disagreement and difference is a bad thing, there is a right and a wrong, instead of their being many personal truths. And so, I think, instead of us being able to confront and explore our personal differences one to one, we become this angry, seething, polarized mass unable to engage in meaningful conversation.

Before I dive into this fear of conflict a bit more on a personal level, I want to really query whether conflict is something I should be afraid of? While the aforementioned escalations make it something more than just undesirable, taking it back to conflict between two people, the words of Abraham Hicks are ringing in my ears about contrast:

“Contrast is anything you don’t like, doesn’t feel good, or causes you to be in a negative mood. Identifying contrast is a useful tool to get clarity on what you don’t want.”

Now while there is always the possibility for conflict that is truly life and death, most conflict I face in my life really is not – and yet my body reacts to it as though it is. For example:

• A friend says something that triggers a negative response within in me,
• My partner does something (or doesn’t do something) that triggers a negative response within me,
• Our kids’ school says something (or omits to say something) that triggers a response within me, it’s an everyday occurrence.

This stuff is all too real, part of my everyday reality, part of yours too I imagine. Like the friend who unintentionally stepped on an emotional landmine in conversation about my daughter’s camp, that I talked about in How to Stop Being Triggered by What Other People Think.

Like the parenting conflict with my partner I mentioned in What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People. And like the lack of explanation at our contactless, drive through pick up system at the kids’ school when all the traffic is backed up and there seems no obvious reason as to why we have been sitting waiting going nowhere for ages.

None of these things were a threat to my survival, but they felt like that from the way my body reacted. I recently had a conversation with some friends about getting triggered, posing the question about whether it was a bad thing or not? I’m of the opinion that it is actually great, because it points me to an opportunity to grow out of old patterns and heal old wounds.

In the moment, though, it does not feel good, far from it. When I’m triggered, the chemicals in my brain want conflict; the pull within me is strong. Just as strong as the opposite feeling of being confronted by someone who is triggered when I’m not, and then I want to get away from conflict; unless I’m also triggered and then the lure is back.

My psyche says “I’m not the powerless little child any more, here I am in the ring, bring it on!” which really is more like an angry teenager than what I’d expect from my adult self.

So what is going on? It’s basically my sympathetic nervous system recognising an old threat pattern and triggering my flight-or-fight response. In childhood, like every child, I was dependent upon my parents for survival. I couldn’t get away from the perceived threat, so my body developed defence patterns.

The most well known patterns are flight, fight and freeze, but psychologists are now recognising more complex variations beyond these. All of which are differing ways we learned to adapt to the stresses and threats in our environments.

By threats, I’m taking more here to the emotional threats of withdrawal of love, of facing shame or guilt for not doing as I was told, or breaking a rule, or being bad in some way. When someone triggers me, my nervous system reacts the way it did when I was a child (and the same can be said for anyone who hasn’t done personal work into unpacking all this, including most of these so called leaders).

So while I know people are generally doing the best they can in any given situation, I’ll admit I - at least momentarily - forget that when I get triggered. There is a narrative in my head about what “they are doing to me” and how it is unfair and I won’t tolerate it.

Of course, I now know this is an old voice that I’m hearing, the powerless child version of myself. Whereas, as an adult, I do have different choices:

“We have to start to re-own pain and befriend it, to consciously practice moving towards it instead of away from it. There was a time we felt we could not eradicate an actual threat so we moved our sights to the secondary threat...pain itself. By association we started to see the pain itself as the threat to our life. In reality, pain is not a threat to us at all, it is a feedback mechanism.” Teal Swan

So essentially, although the scenario has changed, my body still reacts to the same old pain, my wiring fires based on the old well worn patterns.

This year has been an interesting journey in particular, as my partner and I have come into conscious awareness of our mutually unhealthy patterns as recounted in How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns.

Now in the moment when one of us is triggered, none of this is fun, but this awareness is helping us to break the chain of pain. Instead of being pulled in, it’s more likely now that one of us will walk away, ready to revisit when the other is not so triggered.

Instead of feeling like our relationship has a fatal flaw because we get into conflict, we now see conflict is not the problem; it’s all our old associations with conflict that are the problem. And this is really the point at which we are able to choose to fully grow into our adult potential.

We can stay locked in our childhood patterns forever, as essentially the human race has done for generations, but it’s a game that has no winners. Instead we have each chosen to embark on a journey of unravelling and being deliberate about making different choices, building new pathways in our brain and nervous system.

What makes me afraid of conflict is really seeing what not doing this work does on a large scale. When we embrace the personal conflicts between us as important indicators about who we each are, we can do the personal work needed to mature into conscious awareness and fulfil our true potential. Now that is the world I want to live in, what about you?
If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How Relaxed About Your Own Differences Are You?, Want Better Health? Be Shrewd About Stress, Let Anger Be Your Teacher While Learning to Become Its Master, What Can Your Anger Teach You About Your Gifts? and What Do the People in Your Life Have to Teach (Good and Bad)? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

This is the question before me this week. As someone who desires to aid in our evolution, it has been thought provoking and uncomfortable for me to confront some of the ways in which I have unconsciously been complicit in the oppression of others.

If asked, I would have sworn I am not intolerant towards any particular group, so it’s been eye opening and refreshing to look at myself from a different angle. Certainly throughout my life I’ve observed the many ways in which people who are deemed different are treated differently and I’ve been thankful not to have faced their particular challenges.

The sorts of things that can divide us are unlimited, but the common ones are gender, race, sexual orientation, existential beliefs, political beliefs, religious beliefs, social class, economic status, physical abilities, mental abilities and so on.

The earliest examples that come to mind from my schooldays are the way people (whose brains don’t seem wired for typical classroom education) got dubbed as unintelligent, disruptive and/or naughty, sensitive people got picked on and those with a disability of any nature were hidden away.

The biggest intolerance I was aware of in my early West of Scotland upbringing was religious. The first question when I met someone new most often being “are you a fenian or a proddy?” (meaning of the Catholic or Protestant faith). There were kids on our street not allowed to play among those of different faiths and there were separate state schools for those of the Catholic faith.

I first noticed my own discomfort when around those with sensory disabilities. Working at the checkout of a drugstore, or on the information desk at the travel centre, I suddenly found myself wondering how to best serve those who had hearing or visual disabilities.

It wasn’t that I harboured any known prejudice towards people who faced these challenges, it was more that I had no experience or education on the best way to assist them, and it seemed rude to ask, especially since the whole transaction was quite time pressured with queues to serve.

I also remember my extreme discomfort when sitting next to people on the public bus who had mental disorders, on the long journey to university each day. I’d often see people getting on the bus and feel my stomach clench and start breaking out in a cold sweat thinking “please do not next to me, please do not sit next to me”, having never integrated with anyone facing those challenges during my school years, again, I was ill equipped.

In fact, last year when our family visited Hawaii, I was again confronted by those old fears when taking the public bus around Waikiki. For those who are unaware, there are a large number of homeless people there, who seem to be a mix of people with mental disorders, people with drug addictions and other people who have fallen on hard times but who are otherwise of sound mind.

Suddenly I wasn’t just navigating life in my own individual experience, I was doing it in the role of a parent, well aware of my desire and the weight of responsibility to be a decent human being and show my kids how to traverse the social fabric of life in a kind and safe way.

If there is one word this comes down to it is fear. I am scared to say or do the wrong thing.

Why? Because that didn’t go well as a child. As I mentioned in How to Stop Being Triggered by What Other People Think being a child of an approval/disapproval, right/wrong and punishment/reward style upbringing, in order to avoid disapproval, rejection and/or punishment, I became a people pleaser and a perfectionist.

There are probably a number of other self limiting behavioural and thought patterns that would play into the root cause of why I might be unconsciously complicit in the oppression of others, but it can definitely be summed up as fear, and mainly through a lack of understanding on my part. 

“Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.” Martin Luther King Jr

“The lesson”, says Layla F. Saad, “is that if you believe you are the exception, you will not do the work, you will continue o do harm even thought that is not your intention.”

Do I want to be involved in any scenario in which I directly or indirectly subject a fellow human – or any creature for that matter – to hardship or abuse? Of course I don’t, but I can think of far too many ways in which it happens, especially now that I’ve started to look through the lens of others.

Perhaps this, more than any other motivation I might have for addressing my own fears and limitations, is the most compelling. If I do harm to myself, that is one thing, but to affect another in such a way is not acceptable to me. I can see that we are all interconnected, that “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” as Newton put it. If I allow one part of the whole to be treated as less than, I diminish the whole.

That is exactly how wars, genocides and other atrocities happen. People allow themselves to dehumanise others in the name of a difference and everyone suffers. People allow themselves to think they are better than for any number of reasons, but I am going to say it all comes down to fear, fear of differences. 

I’ve been reading an excerpt from a paper written by Peggy McIntosh back in 1988, in which she lists fifty ways she benefits from white privilege in her daily life. She tried to choose conditions that, in her case, attach somewhat more to skin colour than to class, religion, ethnic status or geographic location (though notes that all those factors are intricately intertwined).

Some examples are:

• I can go to a book shop and count on finding the writing of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods that fit with my cultural traditions,, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can deal with my hair
• If a traffic cop pulls me over or the tax office audits my tax return I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race
• I did not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.

I have also found Layla F. Saad’s book Me and White Supremacy an excellent read so far. It presents a step by step reflection process as a 28-day challenge to become aware of where I might be consciously or unconsciously supporting systemic racism.

But each step of the way, as she addresses issues like fragility, tone policing and staying silent, I can see the parallels into every other area of human difference and where I may be unwittingly contributing to oppression of those within society.

The obvious area where I have personally felt oppressed within my own life would be related to being female. But I am sure that everybody has experiences of being different on some level and can, if only in a minor way, begin to relate to some of the challenges fellow humans face when subjected to both overt and covert prejudice.

When I read one of Layla’s prompts on “staying silent (or making excuses/changing the subject/leaving the room) when your family members or friends make racist jokes or comments” listed under how white silence shows up, I reluctantly admitted to myself that I have done this on many an occasion.

I wondered why I do that, and find it is because I am not wanting to make waves. This is likely tied into my own anxieties about what people think (as I mentioned earlier), and the associated trauma and patterns there, but there is definitely a patriarchal element too.

I actually don’t trust myself at this stage to get into a confrontation without getting angry. This is one of the key aims of me doing my personal inner work, because I do want to be able to converse on important issues, making people think about their views rather than entrenching them further in beliefs that create oppression.

But I do know how it feels to listen to jokes stereotyping people with blond hair, or Scottish people, for instance, and how those that tell them don’t bat an eyelid to their insensitivity when I’m sitting there. Little do they know the magnitude of how angry it makes me.

Then there’s the objectification of women and the pornographic ‘joke’ videos that get freely sent around on social media. I only have to think of those, and think of my daughters and then I have instantly invoked the wrath of generations of oppressed females in the collective consciousness into my psyche.

I read Thomas Hübl’s story this week and how he found his life’s work in healing collective and intergenerational trauma, I’m looking forward to reading his book on this topic in the coming months. I suspect though the answer begins within each of us and doing our personal work.

A good friend of mine’s daughter does a lot of research and advocacy around the Maori world view, and just this week I saw she has co-authored a new book Indigenous Research Ethics: Claiming Research Sovereignty Beyond Deficit and the Colonial Legacy. The thing I admire most about her, is her ability to challenge people through questions without getting riled. It’s actually a thing of great beauty to watch, and I hold that as my example.

But I also resonate with the chapter in Layla F. Saad’s book about tone policing. I can well imagine how it would feel to hear a racist joke, anything where there is intergenerational trauma and oppression invokes a much greater sense of anger than just a personal affront. She makes the point that telling someone you can’t hear what they are saying because they are saying it in an angry way, is another way to silence those being oppressed.

At first I was conflicted, because it’s true that it is hard to hear someone’s anger. Anger elicits my old self defeating thought patterns and behaviours, meaning that instead of an open-minded adult, some old inner hurt part of me is at the helm. I notice this is often the same when I speak in anger to others, they reciprocate with a hurt part of themselves.

Yet I hear Layla’s words when she says “To be human is to feel. To talk about pain without expressing pain is expecting a human to recall information like a robot. When you insist that a black, indigenous or person of colour talk about their painful experiences with racism without experiencing any pain, rage or grief, you are asking them to dehumanize themselves.”

So I have come to the conclusion that if I would like to make progress it falls upon me at this point to both be able to hear another’s anger in these matters and to learn to express my own anger in a more palatable way.

In the words of Layla F Saad “You do this work because you believe every human deserves dignity, freedom and equality. You do this because you desire wholeness for yourself and for the world, because you want to become a good ancestor.”

It’s important to continue to challenge myself in all the ways I might be unintentionally complicit in the oppression of others, because it seems fundamental to our evolution. If we can accept and embrace our own and others’ differences, this will create strength and compassion within the whole of humankind. This creates a shift from competition to cooperation, fear to love, prejudices to preferences, and can only be to the benefit of all life.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How to Live in Conscious Self Awareness in the World, The Internal Shift You Need to Help Solve the Social Dilemma, You See What Happens When Leaders Are Not Grown Up on the Inside and Change the World One Day at a Time. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I was watching Eckhart Tolle respond to a question from a 46-year old who had cut contact from his mother three years before because of the relentless criticism she had directed at him over the years. But he had found he was still exhausted with pain, fear and hatred about the whole dynamic.

Eckhart’s response pointed to the mother’s criticism as her conditioned mind playing the same old record over and over, perhaps played by her own mother before her and so on, when there is actually no meaning or significance in it; it’s just the noise of her mind. He felt it makes no difference unless you listen to your own mind telling you it’s dreadfully important that your own mother should understand you.

It’s a rather entertaining video as Eckhart goes on to relate his experience of his own mother, who made it very clear she was unhappy with the choices he’d made in his life. At one point, he was already 45-years old, she said “Oh you could have done so much, you had so many chances, and with your intelligence you could have had done so much, but you threw it away. Oh well let’s not talk about it”.

Of course, as humans we are relationally wired and need validation (which is the recognition and acceptance that our thoughts and feelings are real to us regardless of logic or whether it makes sense to anyone else). But there is a difference between caring what another person thinks and letting our whole self concept ride on it.

As Teal Swan explains “when we are children, validation from our parents helps us feel and express our emotions, develop a secure sense of self, gain confidence, feel more connected to our parents and have better relationships in adulthood. But parents who are concerned with approval and disapproval, right and wrong, punishment and reward, are not concerned with validation. Our parents (in their lack of self awareness) really did a lot of damage and now it is up to us to validate ourselves.”

In my own example this week, about a school camp dilemma, I had two things going on that related to this. One was around whether to seek another opinion about my dilemma, the other was about getting highly triggered by a response when I did.

With my eldest child going off to her first camp I had a few concerns. The biggest concern, I decided, was around her difficult relationship with food. This goes right back to weaning and was reinforced by regular stand off’s at preschool around being made to eat certain foods before being allowed what else was on offer.

I remember arriving to pick her up from kindergarten one afternoon and she was still sitting at the lunch table not having eaten anything; she wasn’t allowed any corn bread until she had eaten her soup.

I wondered if the school camp leader would take a similar approach and had visions of her hardly eating a thing, not getting enough sleep or downtime and, as a result, completely zoning out and getting into strife. Actually I’m underplaying this, I had visions of my daughter regressing a few years, traumatized by the experience and refusing to take parts any future events.

Saying that I also realised this is precisely the kind of experience that could build her resilience. So, my dilemma (knowing that the school have, at times, been fairly unresponsive to parent questions or feedback) was whether to broach this topic beforehand or just pack a three-day supply of sandwiches.

I then wondered about floating my thoughts past a couple of trusted friends, my instinct was not to bother but my mind got the better of me. I started to wonder if I was just being an over protective mum, in short, I started to doubt myself.

This falls beautifully under the umbrella of one of those self-limiting thought patterns I talked about in You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. The particular thought pattern I’m referring to is “I’m crazy”.

Being a child of the aforementioned approval/disapproval, right/wrong and punishment/reward upbringing, there are many times I don’t trust my own knowing and can be chronically indecisive as a result. There is an ongoing tussle between heart and mind that often sends me into a spin.

I love Claire Zammit and Katherine Woodward Thomas’s whole definition of these self limiting thought patterns. It outlines typical behaviours and how these affect other people (for example, others might be frustrated with me because I can’t make up my own mind, or dismiss my knowing and tell me what I’m perceiving is not real).

It also suggests what my beliefs about others/life might be, skills to cultivate to move beyond that false identity, gifts, deeper truth statements and my true identity. The true identity of someone with a self-limiting “I’m crazy” thought pattern is “I can trust my knowing. I value my capacity for seeing things differently, recognising my perspectives are to the well being of all”.

So having ignored my own knowing I started up a text conversation with my friends. Now, given the amount of inner work I’ve done, I’d say this underlying “I am crazy” was more of a “am I crazy?” beacon emitting to the energy around me looking for its match. As a result, while the main response was supportive, my little doubts invited a reflective wobble.

Now here is the interesting part. Inner me knows that I know, so there was a part of me that was angry at myself for having gone down this road of explaining/defending my thoughts on this issue, which subconsciously triggered a deep and powerful tap root to childhood.

One of my friends unknowingly stepped on the landmine. I’m sure she in no way intended to come across as sanctimonious, but it is how my receiving signals were set in response to the self-limiting transmission my subconscious was making. The feeling within my body in response to her talking about how she would handle it with her child was like being instantly engulfed by the rage of a tsunami.

I literally couldn’t hear any more, my first reaction was to switch off my phone so it could receive no more incoming messages. It was an intense sensation, and it felt dangerous, I felt dangerous, so I held fire and let it wash over. That in itself is a minor miracle, but a necessary step to changing the pattern, to not react and allow myself to fully feel what was happening.

As the rushing sound in my ears began to settle and the ability to reason returned (this was full blown fight or flight and I was ready to fight), I knew that this had little to do with the actual conversation at hand and I immediately jumped to “when did I first feel like this?”

Because I was so triggered into an old trauma state I actually couldn’t get an answer from within as my body had responded by doing what it had done many times before and dissociated from the part of me that felt that bad.

However, the next day I did embark on the healing process I describe in How to Heal the Past so You Can Live Your Best Present. It took me back to the moment of birth, when I was immediately swept away by a doctor and – wrapped only in a hospital cloth – laid on the metal table top.

Birth itself felt bad enough, these prolonged periods of feeling like the life was being squeezed out of me and my head was going to explode, then that first moment of emerging and those horrid glaring ceiling lights and cold air, I missed my warm and comfy space where I felt held. But the shock to my system as I hit that table was something else.

The whole hospital process was designed for mother and baby to slot into, as though the devisors of it somehow knew what is best for us or did not care. I re-imagined orientating the whole process around what the mother and baby wanted and needed and giving little baby me lots of hugs and attention.

There were many more moments in my life I recalled like this. I found myself asking “why?” a lot: Why do I have to sleep on my own? Why do I have to drink from this disgusting bottle with its rubber teat? Why do I have to wear these scratchy woollen clothes? Why do you have to do my hair? Why do I have to have a bath? Why do I have to eat now? The list goes on, and that was not me even out of babyhood, someone else’s will being forced upon me as though they knew better than me what I needed.

That and numerous examples through life up until the present day, I thought about the kidney stone I had passed in pain in June and the lack of recognition of that pain from those around. The image that kept coming into my head was from a movie I’d seen of a mermaid in tank banging on its walls but no one could hear her.

And, in my regressed state, I am asking over and over “Why? What is the point of being here if I can’t even express myself? If I can’t be seen and held for who I am?”

This gives a glimpse of what kind of memories and experiences lie at the root of these moments of getting triggered. While there are other things that will help stop the way I react to how people think, to stop being triggered by what other people think this emotional healing was necessary.

The crux of all any kind of emotional healing work (I am aware of) deals in exactly this type of exercise; where I re-envisage the scene as one that would make me feel seen, loved and held. This changes the emotional signature of the memory.

As I talked about the “am I crazy?” beacon emitting energy around me looking for its match, this new emotional signature emits a different frequency, attracting kinder experiences.

The other suggestions Teal Swan has on this topic are also fantastic, but that one is the real key. I also liked her suggestions about taking accountability for increasing my self esteem by writing a list of things I approve of in myself and meeting my own needs by asking “what do I need right now?” when I’m feeling wounded by someone’s opinion.

The suggested skills to develop in Claire Zammit’s document are also really useful, I especially resonated with trusting my ability to discern right action based upon the inner guidance I’m receiving, and developing the ability to empower the decisions I make by mentally letting go of paths not taken.

“We learned when we were children that doing something wrong made us wrong. Doing something bad made us bad. So now, we have serious issues with rejection, disapproval and negative criticism because our self esteem was and still is essentially dependant on approval.” Teal Swan

The point is, I cannot just decide to stop taking things so personally, willpower just won’t cut it in this maze of deep emotions within the human psyche. If I care what others think, and try to not care, I’ll only end up feeling guilty or ashamed about feeling bad. Instead I have to work on the reason I care so much in the first place.

Can you imagine a world filled with people who recognise and are working on their self limiting patterns? This would be an evolved world, with grownups making grown up decisions rather than the ones that have been thwarted through life by our earliest experiences. If you want to stop being triggered by what others think, be prepared to get to know yourself in ways that seem uncomfortable and strange, but enjoy the unwinding, it’s a powerful process.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Why Projecting is the Best Tool for Self Awareness, How to Heal the Past so You Can Live Your Best Present, You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough,  and Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

This week I was reminded to keep my toes pointing in the direction I want to go rather than becoming entrenched in old patterns that I’ve become aware of. I can say with no doubt that the kind of relationship I want is one where both people are aware of unhelpful dynamics and destructive patterns and are actively seeking to break them.

In fact, while this is a good baseline, I embrace the idea of being seen within the relationship, having unconditional love for who I am while being supported in who I am becoming, and having intimacy and connection in a growth orientated dynamic.

In What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People I described the narcissistic bubble versus hyper-attuned (people pleasing) dynamic that my partner and I had and, together with other patterns we learned from our early childhood, those fed on each other and created predictable patterns in our relationship over the years we have been together.

Rather than a healthy interdependent relationship, we had been unconsciously mirroring the hurt children within us. This is considered normal in our society, since most people appear to be completely oblivious that it is a factor that even exists (far less one that can be changed). I see it more as a call to action, a call to mature so we can fully embrace the life we came here to live.

I know I did not come into this life to simply get hurt, adapt who I was being in order to survive childhood, and then spend my whole life repeating this inauthentic pattern and attract more hurt. No, I came to use this as a growth point, an enabler, in order to step into the real reason I came, which was to help evolve the outdated paradigms and systems of our planet.

So rather than go through life stuck in this unhelpful relationship pattern, my partner and I have become aware of it and work hard to break the cycle. But it is worth noting that these patterns are like addictions. Breaking the cycle of co-dependency very much means breaking the entrenched behavioural patterns in at least one person in the relationship.

“It is important to accept that codependency is not about how much time you spent with someone or the degree to which you depend on them, it is about the desperate and very real need for needs to be met; such as self esteem, companionship and closeness and the superbly unhealthy ways we go about trying to often manipulatively achieve those needs.” Teal Swan

For me, I certainly find it hard to stay in a corner once I realise I’ve boxed myself into one.  In the past I’ve removed myself from the corner by changing my circumstances, but over the years I’ve come to realise that circumstances tend to recreate themselves when the behavioural patterns endure.

As a child I became hyper attuned to those around me, in short a people pleaser; someone always acutely aware of what others might be thinking and feeling and always worrying about upsetting them. This resulted in having poor boundaries, in knowing where I ended and others began. My typical pattern would be to suppress my true feelings and then explode.

I saw an example of this so clearly in another person last year when we were travelling home from a vacation on a plane with the kids. About six hours into the journey, the guy in front – having had zero interaction since flashing us a smile in the queue at check-in - turns around and barks “that is the final straw, my chair has been kicked one too many times.”

Now, of course, my six-year-old had been unconsciously swinging her legs and it must have been annoying him, but he hadn’t said a word – not even shot a glance - until it had got too much to bear. It was a perfect mirror of my own unhealthy behavioural pattern.

Just the other day I snapped at the family because I had had enough of dishes being put back on the draining board next to the sink when the dishwasher hadn’t washed them thoroughly enough. Generally there are only one or two items, but on this occasion there was a bigger stack of them.

I had been getting mildly irked by this over a number of months. Clearing up after dinner is the responsibility of my partner and kids, and I was annoyed at the lack of ownership when dirty items got left there, taking it for granted they would just magically get cleaned.

Being the person responsible for most of the domestic chores in our house, the idea is that this is the one time I should be able to put my feet up knowing others are making their valuable contribution to our home.

However, like the man on the plane, I hadn’t really raised this with the family when I was only mildly annoyed and could have been calm and rational. It seemed easier to just clean and put away those one or two things than actually have a conversation about it.

I decided what would help is to keep a Things That Irk Me journal, so I can bring things that annoy me into more conscious awareness and remember to proactively raise issues that recur when I’m still at a point of being calm and rational, not at the point of exploding.

It seems like the polar opposite of what a lot of teaching prescribes (like positive affirmations and gratitude journals) but for people like me who have learned to put others’ needs before my own, it is about awareness and taking ownership.

More importantly, I can have a calm conversation and not throw the others into flight or fight mode, which triggers all their unhealthy patterns and defenses. I did realise this when my partner, who had had a hard day, demanded “What have you done today, mm? Tell me, what have you done?”

Sound familiar? This was enough to jolt me into recognizing that we were slipping into a well worn path. Neurons that had fired together and wired together in the past were all being activated. This was the juncture at which I’d normally then become activated around not being seen nor appreciated (having had a busy and stressful day myself).

Becoming aware of it in the moment gave me power, the power to make a different decision. My internal chemistry was begging me to unleash the insulted defence. I knew if I did, in the terminology of the American Military defence system, we would move into DEFCON 2, next step nuclear war. And really, to give this perspective, over six or seven dirty utensils?

As I said in Change Unhealthy Reactions, every time something comes up that triggers me, whether into an addictive habit, an angry outburst, a place of terror or a depressive spiral, there is a moment in which I can choose a different path.

This was that moment. It felt not dissimilar to the cravings my partner described when giving up smoking. And to take that a step further, this isn’t just about willpower, it’s about healing the emotional signature of the early memories that started the pattern. If I was to rely on willpower alone it would leave me feeling like I had this constant cloud hanging over my head, that at any moment I might succumb to that chemical craving to just lose control and let the old familiar patterns take their paths.

I was reminded of that just yesterday when I saw a video of Brittany Watkins talking about her revolutionary method for overcoming emotional eating. Phrases like revolutionary method usually turn me off as it sounds gimmicky. But I was curious as it had been recommended by The Tapping Solution, who normally have their feet firmly planted in the ground.

It turns out Brittany uses a mix of tapping and a practice that facilitates a change in the emotional climate within us, which I know to be the real key in breaking free of any unhelpful pattern of behaviour. I liked her approach, it is simple and I can see that it would work. For an example of this type of work have a read through How to Heal the Past so You Can Live Your Best Present.

With a mix of conscious self awareness, willpower and a willingness to heal, I am quite certain that breaking free of addictive relationship patterns is not only possible, but it’s our responsibility. Moving past the necessary dependency of childhood into the adult co-dependency that reflects back some things we need to change in order is just a process of maturing and claiming our best life.  

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How to Heal the Past so You Can Live Your Best Present, What Addiction Has to Teach Us on the Pathway to Joy, What Do the People in Your Life Have to Teach (Good and Bad)?, Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries? and I Am Worth It – Are You? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog. 

I was reading some of Dr Ellyn Bader’s work recently on how, when and why to confront narcissistic behaviour; Dr Bader is a couple’s therapist who trains other therapists. She makes the point that narcissism exists on a continuum from the narcissistic features we all have, to a narcissistic style to narcissistic personality disorder.

Now I’m not talking about the extreme end of the scale, which tends to the more psychotic behaviour. My experience relates more to the middle ground, which I suspect is more common.
Dr Bader says narcissists emanate “I don’t need anyone. I am great, special, important etc, but I need you to tell me I’m okay and not wrong. And I won’t let on how important you are to me and how much you mean to me.”

In my experience, this is how narcissists often show up under pressure, sure. There is also the flip side: the magnetism, charm and lovely feeling when basking in their sunshine.

But I like Teal Swan’s explanation on how this type of behaviour arises to begin with - from a lack of attunement; it helped me to soften my approach. To recap from my deeper exploration of attunement in an earlier article:

“Attunement is the process by which we form relationships” Dr Dan Siegel says. “When we attune with others we allow our own internal state to shift to come to resonate with the world of another.”

As Teal then points out, “We learn attunement by virtue of other people being attuned to us. Ask yourself the following questions...Do I feel like my parents understood me when I was little, or even tried to understand me? Did they see into me and feel into me and have empathy for me and adjust their behaviour accordingly or not? Did they acknowledge how I felt or did they invalidate it, telling me I shouldn’t feel that way? How did my parents treat me when I was cranky, frightened or upset?”

I would imagine as most people read this, they would recognise the lack of attunement in their own childhood, for being seen and not heard and do as I say not as I do have been predominant tenets of parenting for a long long time. Thus, as Teal also points out, dysfunctional relationships are the norm, not the exception.

She says “when our parents were not attuned to us, we went one of two ways to cope with the terror of the experience. We either learned that our survival depended on:

1. disconnecting from them and retreating into a narcissistic bubble where all that was real and all that mattered was our individual experience.

Or

1. being hyper attuned to the people in our lives so that we could perceive them, anticipate their behaviour and make adjustments to our behaviour accordingly in order to avoid harm.”

I certainly feel the truth of this in my own life, in hindsight I can see I became hyper vigilant to others’ feelings and co-dependent in my relationships. It’s no surprise that each of these coping styles tends to attract its opposite and – while one is good at taking care of everyone else’s needs - neither is actually good at recognising and taking care of their own.

Dr Bader talks about how limitations show up in intimate relationships when narcissists are asked to be collaborative or extend themselves in a giving or nurturing way. And how they want to be adored/respected without doing much and put a major emphasis into career to protect their self esteem.

I definitely observe these traits. In my experience, narcissists:

• Lack empathy and compassion
• Like to be in control
• Are not great at teamwork

This doesn’t make for the easiest of relationships, particularly when children come along and more empathy and teamwork are called for if we want the children to flourish.

I also agree that a narcissist “rarely expresses hurt feelings directly in a vulnerable way, but instead expresses their pain in a hostile or brutal manner. Their defensive angry response becomes so offensive they many frighten or annoy a spouse who then withdraws or disengages.”

I personally have a tendency to get annoyed and withdraw to a point before eventually exploding.

It is clear from Dr Bader’s work that even many therapists tend to shy away from dealing with narcissistic behaviour, as the narcissist “likes to be in control and will often try to outwit the therapist and stay dominant.”

She therefore teaches how to confront undesirable behaviour in order to achieve breakthroughs and reminds herself “I know there is more to them than this angry, demanding criticism. I know inside there’s a part of them that doesn’t want to be so lonely”.

I find, though, that it is hard to feel sympathy for someone who’s constantly gunning at me, blaming me, and completely blind to any kind of struggle or challenge I have, never mind able to sympathise or appreciate what I’m going through.

But I’ve also found there is certainly a silver lining in being in adult relationships with people who display these behaviours.

As Dr Bader says “many people are stuck in symbiotic relationship patterns that impede the growth of each person and yet that is exactly where tremendous growth potential exists.”

What I’ve discovered with my partner and I, who have this narcissistic bubble versus hyper-attuned dynamic, is other patterns we learned from our early years then feed on this and have created predictable patterns in our relationship over the years we have been together.

For example, when our kids are told no and then go ahead and do what kids are meant to do and continue to push their boundaries, persistently challenging that no, it brings up an intense feeling of discomfort.

I wonder how many people heard “Because I said so!” when they challenged a no as a kid and then experienced their parents getting angry as a result? As Dr Gabor Mate says, it’s not our kids behaviour that causes a problem, it’s the anxiety it elicits within us in the form of these old ingrained emotional (more so than cognitive) memories.

In both my own people-pleasing case and my partner’s narcissistic one, it requires becoming more comfortable with feeling bad. Instead of me seeing these uncomfortable moments as a stick to beat myself up with or, as in my partner’s case, a burning hot potato to quickly pass on, we have the opportunity to really shine the light on our internal anxiety and grow past it.  

It’s taken me a lot of hands-on hours as the primary caregiver for my kids to work through that to the point I can now remain much more detached and objective when this happens. I’m usually calmer in the process, simultaneously holding a no while being compassionate towards their disappointment (I’ll add a disclaimer here though as I’m no saint and do crack under pressure now and again).

For my partner however, whose primary focus is usually outside the home, he’s not yet practised at this and – when challenged by the kids – gets frustrated. Simultaneously to whatever I have got going on in the moment I’m then also hyper-attuned to his discomfort and what’s going on emotionally for the children.

In typical narcissistic fashion, he then often expresses his pain by blaming me. Now, as a child, it was drummed into me to be a good girl and to always tell the truth, which I duly did, so when I get unfairly blamed for something I then get triggered. And if I’m getting blamed in the hostile manner of a narcissist... kaboom!

This well worn path becomes ever more intricate in its dance as one event triggers another, and we step on one emotional landmine after another. It is laughable when we have enough distance from it (which would be somewhere out in the stratosphere) certainly not anywhere near home anytime soon after one of these incidents have occurred.

There is a stigma attached to the word narcissistic, which is a shame because it’s unhelpful in owning and addressing the behaviours that alienate the people who display them. The same can be said of my own tendency to be hyper attuned to others and, as a consequence have poor boundaries.

In our case, it is something we now thankfully both recognise and own. For many years patterns like this have – as Dr Bader says – impeded our growth. But we have begun to discover that this is where the gold is, where the potential for our personal and relationship growth lives.

Just as I can learn to attune to my own feelings and develop healthy boundaries, so can someone with narcissistic tendencies. Teal mentions the potential is also there for them to notice others’ feelings, at first more intellectually, but over time more empathetically. This can then open the gateway to fruitful collaboration and teamwork.

There is also the potential in our parenting to break these patterns for future generations, a key driver for us, instead of blindly passing them on as they have existed for hundreds (if not thousands) of years.

I often reflect on my complete lack of awareness about my own poor boundaries for so long, or even an understanding of what that meant. What I did notice though, was the appearance of more narcissists in my life. I’d obviously been missing the signs for a long time and the universe decided to up the ante and send in some more blunt and brutal players and scenarios to get the point across.

I’m not saying I enjoyed the lessons - they felt brutal – and I’m not saying anyone should put up with a partner, friend, family member, colleague, boss etc who treats them badly. But I love what it’s taught me, I love what it’s shone a light on in terms of my own authentic growth.  

Just the other day a friend was talking about how she gets really upset when people are thoughtless. She was giving me an example where someone hadn’t turned up for a game at a club and hadn’t bothered to text. While there was no personal commitment to turn up, the previous week it had only been the two of them who had, so in those circumstances she would have thought to text the other person.

It took me back to that moment in my twenties when I was learning about different personality styles and I really started to understand that not everyone thinks and feels the way I do. Being wired to recognise others feelings in order to avoid bad feelings is very different wiring to disconnecting to avoid bad feelings. The chances are it would not even have crossed that other person’s mind to send a message as there was no firm commitment.

Because the interaction with narcissistic people can run so hot and cold depending on whether one is in their favour, it can be an emotional rollercoaster for all concerned. I know firsthand there is the potential for growth into something more mutually fulfilling, but I also know that unless the narcissist is self aware and willing to do this, the onus is on me to set more healthy boundaries.

I saw a post on Tiny Buddha this week that speaks to this. It says “Family does not mean: keeping secrets, walking on eggshells, lying to keep the peace, pretending others are healthy when they are not, tip toeing around the truth, attending events that derail my healing process, defending poor choices, engaging in toxic behaviour, remaining loyal to destructive patterns, or sacrificing my needs in an attempt to fix or save others.”
 
Whatever your experience with narcissistic people, I hope you have set healthy boundaries (or will make it a priority to learn to), because this is the silver lining I believe. With each of us being called into the fullness of who we are, aware of and attentive to our own needs, this world has the potential to really evolve.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Value Your Unique Perspective – Especially When You Feel Rejected, You See What Happens When You Learn to Speak Your Truth and I Am Worth It – Are You? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

When I watched Tristan Harris in The Social Dilemma documentary recently, recommended by my partner, it had a similar impact as watching Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth back in 2006. While I already had a little insight into the additive quality and manipulative effects of social media across the various sectors of our society, I learned a lot from listening to those who created today’s popular platforms as they voiced their grave concerns.
 
Through a series of interviews with Silicon Valley engineers and executives who designed the technologies they now fear, the documentary explores this topic in an eye opening way, taking us through exactly how these platforms make money. As the documentary makes evident, it’s confusing because it’s simultaneously utopia and dystopia, trapped by a business model and shareholder pressure that makes it difficult for these companies to do anything else. 
 
The answer therefore lies outside of these companies. While introducing better laws and regulations, adapting the technology and the economic incentives seem obvious answers, there is a long way to go to catch up and I’m not yet seeing the sense of urgency and scale of action to achieve this in the near future.
 
On a personal level though, there are some immediate actions anyone can take, the most important of which is an inner shift to help navigate these sometimes treacherous waters. Firstly though, it’s worth understanding just what the real issues are. For this I highly recommend watching the documentary and doing some research.
 
But given the little understood and perhaps unintended consequences of social media, I decided to include the key take outs I got from the documentary as I believe it’s one of the most important issues of our time. If you have watched the documentary, feel free to scroll past the sets of bullet points and article continues below them.  
 
To start, here is an outline of the social media business model and how it works

• The three main goals of a social media platform are engagement, growth and advertising; the first two powering the potential for the third, which is where the money is made. All three of these goals are powered by algorithms that are designed to keep the numbers going up.
• Algorithms are optimized to some definition of success, in a commercial enterprise that is usually profit, they are designed to learn/change/improve/adapt as they receive more data
• The images we look at, for how long, what we are doing at any particular time. Data comes from everything we do online being tracked/measured/monitored and stored.
• Lots of data is great for making predictions, which is great for feeding you more to increase engagement, which means more targeted adverts and feeds, which brings in more revenue. It’s not the data that is sold; it’s the predictions that attract the best advertising dollars.
• These systems know more about us than ever imagined. All that data gets fed into systems that have little human supervision and are getting better and better about predicting what we are going to do and who we are.
• “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”. Though Jared Lanier says it’s not as simplistic as aiming to get as to spend as much of our attention as possible on these platforms “it’s the gradual, slight imperceptible change in your behaviour and perception that is the product.”

 
This leads to a number of key points around the unintended side effects regarding our self esteem created in the bid for our attention:

• Social media taps into our biological imperative to connect with other people, giving us the dopamine hit to keep us coming back for more. In effect, they are deliberately designed to be addictive.
• Edward Tufte said “There are only two industries that call their customers users: illegal drugs and software”
• Online connection, especially for the young, has become the primary form of connection, yet it’s financed through these sneaky third parties (advertisers) and we’ve put brutal popularity and manipulation (more about this in a minute) at the heart of human connection.
• We used to protect kids’ viewing, by regulating what they watched and what could be advertised at kids’ viewing times. Those protections and regulations do not exist within social media.
• This stuff is not designed by child psychologists; it’s controlling their attention, self worth and identity. In correlation with the introduction and widespread use of social media platforms, anxiety, depression and suicide have increased significantly, particularly in pre teen and late teen girls.

 
And now that these platforms have our attention, this has lead to perhaps another unintended and insidious threat, the potential and ease for manipulation:

• YouTube Recommendations’ algorithm, for example, is extremely efficient at keeping you online. It’s designed to feed you more of what you want and take you down rabbit holes that are powerful, so it’s trying to find out which rabbit hole is closest to your interests.
• A rabbit hole means that a person is caught up in going deeper and deeper into a particular subject and, at some point, making a detour to other places that are completely unrelated to the first thing you were looking at, but look and sound cool.
• Since there are many trillions of articles, videos and data in general available, and all of them are interlinked, you can spend literally days, months and years of your life researching a topic. For more on rabbit holes read here.
• MIT did a study that determined fake news spread six times faster ion Twitter than true news.
• Systems bias towards false information because it makes more money than the truth (something we have known for years through our other forms of media). The truth is often boring.
• It’s a disinformation for profit model. The system allows unregulated messages to be read by anyone for the best price. Facebook has trillions of these newsfeed posts, they can’t know what’s true and what’s not true.
• Because the platform knows so much about you (your likes, your triggers, your interests, even whether you’re introverted or extroverted etc) newsfeeds give you this sense, over time, that everyone agrees with you because everyone in your newsfeed thinks like you. Once in that state you’re easily manipulated.
• Others then think “How can they be so stupid? How can’t they see all this information that I’m seeing?” Well, they can’t, they are seeing their own unique feed.
• When that happens at scale, we’re no longer able to consume information that contradicts with the world view we’ve created, meaning we are not being objective, constructive individuals.
• “As a tool of persuasion it may be one of the greatest things ever created.”
• Shoshana Zuboff, a professor at Harvard Business School, shared that “Facebook ran an experiment using subliminal cues to see if they could get more people to vote in the mid-term elections, they succeeded. We now know we can affect users behaviour without them knowing.”
• To manipulate an election, you could go into a conspiracy theory group on Facebook, for example, and find one hundred people whose attention is gripped by the Flat Earth topic, or discussions on why we never landed on the moon, and say “give me one thousand users like that”, or one million, and you can feed those people more conspiracy theories to undermine politicians, parties or even systems of government.
• The manipulations by third parties is not a hack, they’re using tools built for legitimate advertising for nefarious purposes.

 
What perhaps struck me the most is that the inherent design of social media makes addiction and manipulation not only likely but necessary based on today’s business models. Here’s the final wrap up and conclusions:

• There’s no regulation, no rules, no competition, and the companies are acting like de facto governments saying “we can regulate ourselves”.
• Given the topics touched upon and the real world examples highlighted in the documentary that I haven’t gone into here (but everyone will recognise when they see), the technologists who created social media are perhaps not so silly to be worried about its ability to create civil war, to send democracies into autocratic dysfunction, and the failure to meet the challenges of global climate change due to its distraction, the collapse/ruin of the global economy and perhaps even an existential threat.
• It’s not that highly motivated propaganda hasn’t existed before; it’s that the platforms make it possible to spread manipulative narrative with phenomenal ease and relatively little money.
• It’s ability to create chaos, outrage, instability, lack of trust in each other, loneliness, alienation, polarization, populism, distraction, an inability to focus on the real issues; these are all issues we contend with today. Certainly its ability to bring out the worst in society is the real threat.

 
When I thought about all this, I realised my own experiences with my children and the sheer pervasiveness of YouTube, not to mention its inappropriate content and addictive nature, were just the tip of the iceberg.  
 
My kids used to watch YouTube Kids, but it was just too easy for them to interconnect with YouTube at so many turns. For those who think there are parental controls for Youtube, there are not. YouTube has one restriction mode and that is it, and it basically is an 18 and over restriction that you can click on or off, and all videos on restricted mode cannot earn money on You Tube, so it's basically only effective for porn type stuff.
 
Other than that the options are to sit with them and watch everything with them, or continuously go through and delete history, unsubscribe etc; there is also a complaint button. To block channels you have to create your own channel, and none of it is straightforward. How did we go from a society that only allowed mature content after 9pm and all content was screened to be age appropriate to this monster of a free for all?
 
My kids started to watch YouTube for EllieV and her lego building, which had mysteriously vanished from YouTube Kids for a while, and from there they discovered YouTube family channels i.e families that post fun games online, like their family navigating obstacle courses etc.
 
However, then it took a more sinister turn. The YouTube families (there are probably hundreds of them, but my kids liked to watch three or four in particular) started doing these Dollmaker videos, where they received a doll that seemed to come from a mysterious Dollmaker and took on a life of its own. Some dolls were good, some were just weird and creepy.
 
So there were my kids, age six and eight at the time, watching good clean, healthy family fun, then suddenly these weird creepy dolls turn up and the families play along like they are trying to get rid of these dolls but can't, then a member of the family gets possessed by a doll and will become a doll, and my children are wondering "is this real?"
 
I could not believe the blatant manipulation, nor the fact that I had no reliable way of allowing my kids to watch any of the content they enjoyed without falling prey to scary nonsense like that. Since then we decided no more YouTube. But its not easy unless they have zero access to devices, which they both use for listening to audiobooks and playing games for a couple of hours on the weekend.
 
I have had to go into the administrator function on our modem and block every conceivable YouTube web address I can find on their particular devices, and the devices only connect to the wifi while I download new audio books or games for them, so I am constantly having to connect/disconnect the devices. It requires a lot of hands on management to regulate their viewing, something I could rely in being regulated through TV or movie theaters.
 
I also thought of a good friend of mine saying one day during our lockdown that she’d “swallowed the red pill”. I vividly remember that she had then spent the best part of the night way down deep in a rabbit hole, over her head in conspiracy theories about COVID19. Ever since, through her, I have become more aware than ever of the conspiracy theories that exists and the lack of trust and fear they perpetuate.
 
It is easy to see the division and polarization that is happening; vaccines are a case in point. That I might question the efficacy of a vaccine all too often results in an automatic and derisory label of being an anti-vaxxer.
 
Knowing how sublimely our immune systems work when supported by the right diet and lifestyle, the fact that my kids had twenty vaccines by the age of four as a matter-of-course should be something I’m encouraged to investigate and question; it seems like a lot of intervention for burgeoning little bodies. But instead there appears little objective welcome on either side of the debate, there is however a lot of anger and fear.
 
So what is the answer?
 
The advice of the technologists is to uninstall apps that are wasting our time, turn off all notifications on anything that is not timely/important right now, and not to accept recommendations on Google search but to scroll down and choose your own and to think twice, three times, before hitting emotion buttons, likes and shares.
 
Reflecting on these recommendations, these were actions I’d already taken some time ago.
 
I don’t generally tend to participate in media of any kind, except when using it as a tool, because I know I can lose hours of my life. I know there is as much misinformation out there as there is information (although this documentary has perhaps taught me there may well be a much greater proportion of misinformation), and I only want to be sifting my way through all that when I’m actively interested in learning about something.
 
Even knowing this I still catch myself checking for new email or messages often.
 
The key question I began to ask myself with my device is “Am I using it as a tool? Or am I letting it demand my attention and manipulate my thinking?”
 
But why is it that I had come to those conclusions already I wondered?
 
Well, in part, I had learned the lesson about not engaging in media decades ago when I was self employed. Because it’s designed to be sensational and pull me in, I decided it was a time waster. I want to stay positive and focused on my own goals in life, not pulled into dramas I have no direct control over.
 
The other thing that has really helped me navigate the fears (of 2020 in particular), which are being fed by and prayed upon by social media in my opinion, is quite simple. It is an internal shift, the practice of observing my thoughts.
 
This has allowed me to notice when I’m thinking things that are putting me in a fearful state, which then empowers me to take action to bring myself back into balance. It’s like the game of hot and cold, the more fear I feel the colder/further I’m getting from my truth. The warmer/closer I am to my truth, the more peace I feel.
 
Examples would include topics like vaccines, or government conspiracy theories. As I sit here typing this I am aware through others that tomorrow is the date banded about online by which New Zealand would come under martial law, and a separate theory that it is also the day on which we will plunge into darkness as planet Earth shifts on its axis.
 
Now, if you are reading this it means we are past the date and we will either be in apocalyptic chaos or, well, we will be trucking along in the more chronic kind of chaos already well outlined in here. I do know someone though who is stocking up their food reserves just in case, and who urged me to do so because they do genuinely care about me.
 
How do I navigate situations that? I can feel the tension and fear in my body rise when these conversations are broached. I have to take some time to myself afterwards and really sit with the feelings and sometimes do a little research to figure out whether there is something I need be concerned about or not.
 
I wish to remain objective, and I know that to do so I have to work hard at creating space between me and the hype. So when a documentary comes along like The Social Dilemma, I have the head and heart space to take it in.
                           
To achieve this I meditate daily. As I discuss in Meditation – the Cornerstone to Your Success, it’s a practice of noticing when I’m thinking and letting those thoughts go, in short I become the observer of my thoughts rather than completely swept up by them.
I also make sure I take regular walk in nature to clear my head, practice yoga for my mind and body also, go for a swim to help me defrag, and so on. Actively making regular space in my calendar for these things gives me space on the inside.
 
Making that internal shift gives me perspective, keeps me objective, able to explore alternative views, and helps me maintain focus on the bigger picture of not just my own life, but life here on Earth.
 
As Jared Lanier wisely comments in the The Social Dilemma, even if only a small percentage of people change their social media habits as a result of the documentary, it’s at least creating space to have a conversation about how we navigate our future. Will you make the internal shift and join the conversation?
 
If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Your Answers Are Within, What Do You Want The Prevailing Global Culture to Look Like?, Stand in Your Own Truth and How to Be True to You When Life Pulls You in Different Directions. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.
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Whether as a politician, parent, teacher or someone’s coach, manager or advisor, if you are an adult you are a leader; our future generations are watching...

Part of me wanted to post a few pictures of many of today’s leaders to highlight my point, but it is more pervasive than that, and I wanted to look at what could be done to evolve us past this point of blatant immaturity.

I’ll tell you some examples of the kinds of things I’m seeing; examples of what I’ll call unconscious leadership.

Given my belief that I have not only the right, but the obligation to question decisions our government make, when I started to wonder about the rational for our current government’s decision to maintain an elimination strategy for COVID19 in New Zealand, I began to search for some answers.

Now, this article is not about challenging the efficacy of New Zealand’s current response to COVID19, it’s not about COVID19, the global landscape on this issue of whether and how to control the virus is complex and constantly changing.

However, in my bid to understand why we are where we are, I came across an article by Bridie Witton quoting Professor Michael Baker (one of the main advisors to the government on this matter), Dr Rod Jackson (a professor of epidemiology at the University of Auckland) and Dr Simon Thornley (a public health physician at the University of Auckland) who – like many – is questioning whether elimination is still the right strategy.   

Keen to hear responses to the valid points Dr Thornley raised I was appalled to read Jackson has little time for Thornley’s arguments and says “they should not be given any oxygen”. He says “Thornley is the only dissenter in the epidemiological community. We are all advising the Government, and we speak with one voice. And you have got a junior epidemiologist who is presenting a different case.”

Not exactly mature.

The same could be said when I watched footage of Nicola Willis (a Member of Parliament in New Zealand’s main opposition party) make a speech to Parliament in August questioning the Government on how the recent COVID19 outbreak had come about.

While she hit home on some key points, her speech ended in a way that – to me – is indicative of what undermines confidence in politicians. It was the “on this side of the house we would do it better” argument. Honestly, it is like listening to a school playground. I want to say “Grow up, make your points and work together.”

The same could be said when I noticed that another national politician - whom I knew from my time in local government, and worked with about a decade ago – had left his position as Chief Whip in the opposing party’s office and continued as an independent. He had done some whistle blowing and, of course, the political party came at him.

They deflected by focusing on his extra marital affairs. Again, this is very tit for tat playground behaviour.

I was then personally quite disappointed in the Member of Parliament’s response to his affairs in a radio interview. He said “the rules of the game have changed; we are now looking under the bed sheets”. The assertion he made is that affairs among members of Parliament are rife and part of the culture, but there has always been a tacit agreement they remain secret.

I mean, really, this level of maturity is not what I am looking for in those vested with the job of making critical decisions for our country.

All of this seems to get amplified within the realms of social media, as our viewpoints are being increasingly manipulated to a degree never seen before, as eloquently described in the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma.

It’s little wonder that there is so much polarisation and confusion and, ultimately way less progress (on key issues that affect all of humankind, the creatures on this planet, and the planet itself) than is possible if we were all pulling in the same direction.

What does it mean to grow up? To me, it means self responsibility, to take deliberate action to mature on the inside as well as the outside.

I am talking about taking responsibility for that part of me that reacts when I get triggered. I do not mean that I take steps to behave in a more polished way, like media training.

In the examples I’ve given above, it is clear to me that Dr Rod Jackson may well be considered a loose cannon for making such obviously derisory statements about another colleague. I know from my own media training that there is a certain way I should respond to the press so I don’t embarrass myself or the organisation I represent.

The same could be said of the Personal Development training that many executives undergo. The best of this usually at least achieves one of the prerequisite steps in maturing on the inside, and that is self awareness. I found the better training and coaching an uncomfortable unfolding, and witnessed the same in my colleagues, to see ourselves as others perhaps might; the good, the bad and the ugly.

From there I have observed that many just get better at magnifying the good and hiding the bad and the ugly. There are few I have witnessed really doing the internal work it takes to recognise the roots of these internal triggers that set off the immature behaviours and heal them.

As I said in Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation, aside of the trauma we all experience to varying degrees in our life, there are also the inherited patterns of behaviour in our parents that we react to, and unwittingly develop patterns in response to. These are essential for our survival in childhood but become unhealthy patterns later in life, and will certainly pass on unless we take action.

James Redfield describes these control strategies quite succinctly in The Celestine Prophecy. They sit on a scale of aggressive to passive and he describes four archetypes; it’s often easiest if you start by taking a look at which strategies your parents employed:

• Intimidator’s threaten verbally or physically and come on too strong, making others frightened. They are so wrapped up in their own anger they don’t care what is happening inside the other person.
• Interrogator’s constantly question, criticize, nag and find fault, making others self conscious and eroding their confidence.
• Aloof’s shut down when confrontation happens. They often withdraw physically or verbally, forcing others to struggle and dig to find out their true feelings.
• Poor Me’s tend to guilt trip, projecting themselves as the helpless victim in need or care and attention. This makes others feel guilty even if they know there is no real reason to feel this way.

Each of these are linked with the corresponding strategies that created them, and that they create.

For example, Intimidators create Poor Me’s appealing for mercy, or, the child will endure until they are old enough and big enough to fight back, creating another Intimidator, and so the cycle continues.

It is not just in politicians I see this level of immaturity, it’s everywhere I look: executives playing one-upmanship in boardrooms, teachers shaming kids in order to control the classroom, parents repeating the same cycles of shame, guilt and fear over and over. I know, I’ve been on this journey, pointing fingers at others and – most destructively – inwardly, berating myself for not being better.

To move past this, in every walk of life, starts within each individual taking self responsibility to mature on the inside; I have to take responsibility to become conscious of the damage I do, to myself and others.

Imagine a world where leaders have healed their negative patterns, where people are not denying, suppressing or disowning their authentic self, and are free to fully express the best of who they are? That is the world I came to live in, and it starts with me. What about you?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Leadership: Why Trust Leads to Better Business Outcomes, What Do You Want The Prevailing Global Culture to Look Like?, Stand in Your Own Truth and How to Be True to You When Life Pulls You in Different Directions. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I was reading some statements related to people who feel they are wrong or that they are invisible, and I really liked “I am here to make visible that which has, until now, been invisible. My gifts of insight and perception are a profound blessing to the entire world.”

Oftentimes as I was growing up and expressed my opinion on something, my family and friends would look at me as though I were from a different planet. And as I matured into an adult I continued to attract many scenarios that made me feel rejected.

Even recently as my partner exclaimed how I “take things to an extreme” around my food choices and healthcare, I realised that – on some level – I have still been attracting rejection. Sure, it’s healthy to question myself and, as another person pointed out, how extreme is defined depends on who is interpreting it.

For example, I know people who are exclusively raw food or vegan in their food choices and wouldn’t dream of purchasing anything that wasn’t organic, but I also know people who eat take-out daily, and people whose grocery choices are based purely on cost. Given I purchase groceries for people other than myself I consider my approach to be rather moderate; there is something for everyone.

What was also interesting was that this opinion about my choices was expressed on the back of a conversation about the state of food production today. We had been discussing, and agreeing on, all the issues with mono farming and the use of chemicals and hormones in the food chain that eventually ends up on our plate.

While I appreciate we all have a budget to work within, and for some people it’s more desperate than others, given that some of our most insidious food options are those most heavily subsidized globally, I consider how and where I spend money far more powerful than any vote I might cast in a political election.

And it’s for this reason I believe we are seeing many changes. Thirty years ago when I decided to cut refined sugar and flour from my diet because of a health issue I was having, the only place I could obtain alternatives were the aptly named health food shops. I obviously wasn’t the only one seeking alternative choices because these days’ supermarkets stock a wide variety of options, and even roadside fruit and vegetables often sport signs saying “spray free”.

It’s not just food production, but also health care options, education options, constitutional options, options for contributing to society while being able to provide for our families and so on. I see many opportunities for people to reclaim their personal power and contribute their unique gifts and talents as, I believe, we all intend when we are born into this world.

So as much as I still attract strange looks and opinions that make my feel rejected, I know that my ideas are usually pretty sound, and the world is slowly changing around me. This then tells me I still have some work to do in terms of healing this feeling of rejection.

Having gone on to discuss this with my partner, he realised that his own comment was most likely rooted in some of his old stories. He does in fact support the evolution of our global food production systems and choices, though is still somewhat entrenched and addicted (as intended by the manufacturers) to those foods that are not serving his health.

I then witnessed my daughter’s feelings of rejection this week when she was not invited to a friend’s birthday party. She and her friend, to all appearances, seemed to be getting on as well as ever, so she was a little blindsided by the whole thing. As I helped her work through it, I realised that she was mirroring the same rejection I was feeling.

I shared with her “it’s us who decide how we are treated. While we don’t get to make decisions about how people view us, or feel about us (and whether they want to be in relationship with us), we do get to decide what we accept from them in terms of the way they treat us ongoing”.

That friend would have been one of the first on her list if she were having a party, because she considers that is how you treat a good friend. So, since her friend does want to retain their friendship, it’s really up to my daughter to show her friend how she expects to be treated through her actions and reactions.

Whether she reacts in anger, or states her expectations and feelings calmly and firmly, and whether she acts in kindness and congruence with her own values moving forward, or acts in spite and revenge, will all determine how she gets treated in future.

It is a lot to take on and learn in those younger years, but it makes me realise exactly where we lose our personal power through ill advice and cowardly actions (the win-lose kind) in those early interactions and relationships. This is what I’m working to reclaim, years of trying to please others in order to avoid being rejected, in a way that is empowering, and I’ve found the only approach that works well in human relationships is win-win; cooperation rather than competition.

That also means taking ownership of identifying and expressing my needs, desires, opinions and perspective, rather than shying away because others might see me as different. Doing this with open, active listening, calmly asserting my ideas and opinions, and – as I’ve been reminded of recently – being kind, appears to me the best way to go.

I’m not talking about the ideas and opinions that get unwittingly passed generation to generation, my perspective – my authentic perspective – comes from challenging those ideas to really see whether they fit with what I truly value and believe.

I saw an excerpt from a TED talk this week where the lady was talking about a flight she had been on and, when she heard the female pilot make an announcement, she thought “right on sister, we (females) are rocking it”. An hour later when they hit some turbulence the first thought that crossed her mind was “I hope she can drive”, revealing a bias she did not know she even had.

These are the kinds of bias and ideas that, once I bring them into the light of conscious awareness, I can shift perspective. That is why I also think one of the wisest statements I ever heard was “Showing someone their resistance is a greater gift than persuasion.”

Owning my own story, my own feelings, rather than projecting it on others, requires practice and perseverance. Why is it especially important when I’m feeling rejected? Because rejection is a strong and negative emotion, it has a lesson for me, and that lesson is the mirror opposite to the rejection itself, its calling me to embrace and value that which is unique to me.

Having my perspective rejected just means I have a perspective different to the one held by another person, this is a good thing, this is how we evolve. Rejecting me or rejecting another because my opinion differs to theirs is the opposite; it is unhealthy and rooted in old hurts. 

When I read statements like “The full expression of my gifts, talents, brilliance and knowing is necessary for the well being of all” I hear the call and realise it’s time to consciously step up and be seen. I also realise it’s not a statement that is aimed just at me, its universal.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Base Your Actions on Love Not Fear, There is Nothing to Fear, Heal Your Past Hurts To Help You Fulfill Your Potential and Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I’ve spent a lifetime subscribing to the “feel the fear and do it anyway” mantra, now so ingrained in my psyche after Susan Jeffers’ first published a book by this name back in 1987. I even bought a copy of that book in the 1990’s but, if I read it, I absorbed only what I was able to hear at the time, unable to see certain truths about myself at that point.

Another quote by Susan Jeffers that I read today tells me I definitely missed the deeper meaning. She said “the less you need someone’s approval, the more you are able to love them”. Now I realise it’s a quote about having a healthy sense of self esteem and being able to communicate my boundaries with ease.

Back then I had no clue what a personal boundary was, I’d never been allowed them in the traditional do as I say upbringing. All I would have taken from that quote would have been a further affirmation that I needed to do what I must to ensure I was not reliant upon anyone else’s approval. That meant becoming highly independent, self reliant and extremely resourceful. 

Having decided no one was ever going to intimidate me, I grew into a woman who was fiercely independent and who spoke truth to those in any kind of perceived hierarchical power. Given this, I would not immediately resonate with a fear of speaking my truth.

Yet alongside my speaking truth to power persona, sat a hypersensitivity to how others feel. This resulted in a temperament that was outwardly confident, aggressive if pushed, yet full of internal anxiety.

Being hypersensitive to others’ emotions, I am fully aware of the huge spectrum of emotions felt and expressed, but it was Gary Zukov who first introduced the idea to me that there are only two types of emotion, those based in love and those based in fear.
 
As Kryssie Thomas says in Fear and Love are the Only 2 Emotions You Have to Work With “Love is what we were born knowing, feeling and expressing, fear is what we are taught and learn from outside sources.”
 
This simplification helped me to see that fear was something I have felt in many different ways in my life; I am certainly no stranger to stress, anxiety and tension.
 
Currently I’m learning to calmly and confidently express my thoughts, feelings, needs, desires and ideas with a newfound awareness of the need to speak my truth and express my personal boundaries upstream (rather than downstream when they’ve already been crossed).

Having had a heavy conversation with someone this week in an attempt to practice this, I was aware that my neck was extremely tense and sore afterwards. I sat in silence and closed my eyes to inwardly observe the pain I was feeling, it is the kind of pain caused by the muscles on either side on my neck really tightening up. I was curious to see what it had to teach me.

From an energetic standpoint, the neck sits in the area of the throat chakra, and one of the things that can cause a blockage in that area is a fear of speaking.

The heavy conversation I had just had was with my partner. Over the course of this year, between him being incapacitated for a while after breaking his leg and then having had the COVID19 lockdown, our relationship has had a thorough spring clean and is in pretty good shape.
 
Given this, and my newfound awareness of the need to speak my truth, I felt it was time to tackle a few of the niggly things that come up now and again.
 
This was not an ultimatum type conversation, nor was there anything that was in current contention, so there was nothing obvious that would make this conversation heavy. That was the part that made it curious, why did I experience such a high level of anxiety about speaking my truth?
 
Of course I recognise my own childhood patterns, I know that – like all kids who are literally dependant on others for their survival - this is where it has its roots. But I am no longer that child, I now have the choice to live in ways that continue to suppress me, or to act differently.
 
I’ll put it simply, I felt vulnerable, and – in a way – I did feel as though my life (as I know it) was in danger. It triggered my flight or fight response as I struggled to stay present in the conversation when it was taking place, rather than descending into defense mode.
 
On the face of it, our relationship is one that could be described as healthily interdependent. Our roles and responsibilities allow each of us to contribute our gifts and to fulfil our roles in a mutually satisfying way and to the benefit of our family.

But it’s also kind of scary to a person like me who is fiercely independent. That reliance on another for my survival is what makes anything I or they might perceive as rocking the boat dangers waters for me.
 
Looking at that word survival, I’m not talking about physical life or death in this context, I know I’d survive. In fact, given my belief that everything that happens in my life happens for a reason, I even have faith that all would be well in the longer term.
 
In the short to medium term, however, the whole construct of our day to day life, including that of our children, would turn upside down if the relationship was to hit the rocks.
 
It is this that made the conversation heavy. It wasn’t about the topic at hand, it was the weight of the decision to step outside my lifetime pattern, to take a risk and speak my truth without it being fuelled by the anger and indignation of a boundary long overstepped.
 
Looking back on our conversation, I watched my partner’s body language change from easy and relaxed to the boat being rocked as I delved in and he endeavoured to take in what I was saying. As I replayed the scene in my mind afterward, I became aware of underlying tension in my body the moment I’d finished talking and awaited his reaction.
 
Of course, as I’ve said, this was not a make or break type conversation, and after he had time to process things, it later led to a useful and supportive discussion. This was the reward I was seeking and, as clunky as it might have been speaking my truth, my courage had paid dividends and led to more authenticity in our relationship.
 
But the space in the middle, the one in which I was observing my neck pain and he had gone about the rest of his day, processing what I’d said, I can now see was fraught with anxiety as I reflected on the wisdom of speaking my truth.
 
Now that I can see all of this so clearly, I can also see the many times in the past I’ve failed to speak my truth upfront in a situation and understand why my needs have not been honoured. Instead I’ve hinted at them or gone about expressing them indirectly, hoping the other person would get it, and getting angry when they did not.

The voices in my head that would keep me from expressing myself upfront were not explicitly voices of fear in the sense that I feared that person, but I most definitely feared their reaction. In a subconscious bid to gain their approval and maintain the relationship, I had never learned to assert my feelings, desires or needs in a healthy way.

This would apply in all relationships, personal, professional or transactional. My need to maintain calm on the surface would lead to turmoil beneath and sudden raging storms when it was all too much. In this way the other person could rarely hear me because my anger would trigger their flight or fight response and we would butt heads or they’d run scared.

It is not enough to feel the fear and do it anyway when it comes to speaking my truth, I have to identify what my truth is and cultivate the habit of expressing my views, needs and desires upfront – long before I get so angry that no one can hear me.

If you’ve spent your life putting others first and not wanting to rock the boat, perhaps it’s time to find the courage and figure out how to express what you want, think and need? Once we can each do that, we can live in authentic relationship with the people and world around us, something that creates a win-win for everyone.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Base Your Actions on Love Not Fear, There is Nothing to Fear, Heal Your Past Hurts To Help You Fulfill Your Potential and Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I’ve had a sense of bubbling euphoria this week as I’ve been moving through day to day life. It comes from some work I completed over the weekend that really helped me to crystallise where I am on my journey, with a definite sense that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

The journey to me has been a deliberate and painstaking pursuit, taken in small steps over a number of years. But I get the sense that the metaphoric dark night of the soul is drawing to an end, it is the dawning of a new day.

Along the way there has been a diverse range of literature and teachers whose work has provided much needed guidance, most of whom (if not all) have been mentioned in my weekly musings. I am nothing if not resourceful, and on each part of this rushing river downstream it has seemed that the right thing has appeared just at the right time to help me navigate whatever tumultuous waters I was in.

Claire Zammit’s work on self actualisation, the latest piece I’ve been diving into, ranks among my favourites for its ability to capture and and categorize (into eight distinct areas) what aspects of life one might have deeper yearnings for, not feel fulfilled and want to evolve in. Her work in recognising why this is the case and how to break through the barriers is well thought out; and a blessing for those of us who are really serious about realising our full potential in any area of life.

Being asked to talk about self awareness last week gave me the opportunity to review the stages of the journey. First there was a desire to develop and succeed in a more unconscious state, then there was an awakening to the bigger context of life. This illuminated the burdened state in which I was attempting to move through each day, so there then came the more deliberate reclamation of my authentic self.

Don’t get me wrong, do I think this is the end of my journey? Heck no, more of a breakthrough, moving onto the next chapter. It will be interesting though, each week as I sit down to write these and reflect on what I’ve learned, to see if and how the flavour changes.

So back to the breakthrough, it came from going through a 73-page document that Claire Zammit co-authored with Katherine Woodward Thomas; it goes through the twenty one self-limiting thought patterns that create our more burdened identities, outlining the common thoughts, beliefs, gifts and so on, that comes with each.

To be clear, I’m not saying you can just read this document and – whoosh – you’ll have the same epiphany. It’s possible, but bear in mind there are many roads to the same end, and each journey is unique. This happened to be the one that, for me, was the perfect tool given the culmination of everything I had experienced, read and learned to that point.

In fact, I’d been subconsciously searching for this list. Ever since I’d heard Teal Swan talk about Fragmentation, referring to the parts of us that fragment off in relation to our essential self. An example she gives, from memory, is about being brought up in a family where it wasn’t okay to express your anger, and how that might affect who you show up as in the world over the years; perhaps even to the extent that you become a person who doesn’t recognise you ever feel anger because it has become so denied, suppressed and disowned.

Anyway, in her various talks on the subject, Teal mentions that with each fragment we each split into many parts (she has seen as many as over eighty), with a minimum of twenty two. It struck me as a very specific number. So when Claire Zammit mentioned the twenty one thought patterns she had identified, I immediately connected the dots (21 parts plus the essential self being twenty two).

I have no idea if their lists are the same, but the point for me was this represented more of a totality of what could be at play within me. For the last few years I’ve been healing patterns that reveal themselves through whatever is triggering me in the moment, and it has served me well, but I was wanting a litmus test of how far through that dark night I was.

So I went through the 73-page document highlighting every single statement that resonated and looked at where the clusters were. What became very clear was that my two main themes were in relation to my own feelings, needs and desires and my uniqueness, calling and contribution. Specifically how to name them, assert them in a way that garners support and maintain a healthy balance between giving and receiving.

Having done a lot of work this year on healing my boundaries, and recognising my people pleasing and co-dependant tendencies, it made a great deal of sense to me that being able to fulfil my potential in the area of clearly and confidently expressing my thoughts, feelings, needs, desires, ideas and visions to others, has been a key step towards fulfilling my potential in terms of being able to recognise and contribute my gifts in ways that are meaningful and have a positive impact.

Knowing that I had already begun working on these things, I realised this was my sense check that the change in light was indeed the dawn of a new day and not an oncoming truck about to hit me square in the eyes. I also checked in with another lady I know, and who knows me well, whose chosen field is in helping people work through these barriers who affirmed I am well through the continuum.

What has made the most difference, in my little bubbling, euphoric state, is recognising how l feel when someone else around me is triggered. I was at lunch with some friends, one of whom gets really triggered on certain issues, and I accidentally stumbled into one of those particular topics. Even though she knew we were each well aware of the issues on both sides of the fence and hold the same vision, it was as though all the oxygen had been sucked out the room as a tirade ensued.

It was an amazing experience of having a mirror held up. I am no stranger to these tirades; I too have been a tirade queen on many issues that are important to me (just ask the kid’s school). What I have been able to see clearly now for a while though is that my anger is only spinning my wheels in the mud on any topic. Other people can’t hear me because my anger instinctively makes it unsafe for them, triggering those around me into flight, fight, freeze or fold.

Also, what lay at the heart of my anger was something else entirely, in my case it was the childhood pain of my opinion not mattering, among other things, and I came out fighting, determined no one would put me in the corner again. It was that I had to work through so that I could begin to communicate more clearly and calmly.

Claire’s core message in unlocking our potential is:

• You absolutely cannot fulfil your potential if you have inner blocks or barriers (like my anger, for other examples look at How to Live in Conscious Self Awareness in the World)
• But you don’t need to be perfect... to create a breakthrough you only need to break the biggest pattern standing in the way of the main area you’re yearning for (for example, purpose and calling, but there is a free questionnaire in here that will help you identify yours) and this will start a chain reaction.

My bubbling euphoria isn’t because I feel entirely clear of my past, it’s because I’ve now got awareness of and am working on the biggest pattern that has been standing in my way. As I recognise and work to integrate those parts of me I’d denied, I can feel a seismic shift in my own energy as it starts to orientate itself towards the very thing I’ve been yearning for, my contribution and calling.

Do you feel a deep yearning for something more in your life, an elusive potential within? Perhaps you’d like to more clearly express your authentic self? Or contribute your gifts to others in ways that are meaningful and have a positive impact? Or feel safe, valued and supported in your romantic relationships to become the best version of yourself? Or feel you have all the resources you need to thrive? Or feel connected to your creative expression? Or to your deeper knowing? Or feel energized, well, healthy, at peace and at home in your body? Or to make a difference in the lives of others?

I want all of these things, and what I’ve discovered is – while I need to recognise there’s work to do, and do it – I don’t need to be perfect to make a breakthrough, and neither do you, you just need to begin.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy I Am Worth It – Are You?, Why Projecting is the Best Tool for Self Awareness, Honour Your Story but Free Yourself of Its Shackles and How to Heal the Past so You Can Live Your Best Present. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

This week I was I asked to talk to staff at an organisation about self awareness. Now the very definition of self awareness is conscious knowledge of one’s character and feelings, but I am using the phrase conscious self awareness here very deliberately.

I do believe most people have a modicum of self awareness, but when I think about the degree of my own self awareness, I can see that I was pretty unconscious of lots of aspects of myself in the many seasons of my life to this point, I can also see that my self awareness is still unfolding.

In hindsight there is a great divide between conscious awareness versus unconscious or subconscious. I was aware of myself in many basic ways, I was aware of myself as a physical entity, and I was aware of some of my character traits, values and beliefs. But I was almost completely identified with my thoughts, I was not aware of myself from many other perspectives – including a more conscious awareness of myself.

The process of conscious awareness really began in the kind of self development work that has become common in many corporate type workplaces; the aim was to understand my traits, styles and preferences. This was in search of career and personal success.

As I began to understand myself more in relation to others, I realised I couldn’t just be categorized neatly into a personality style or a Myers Briggs profile, and my personal inquiry moved into more probing questions like:

What is it like to work for me? Have me work for you?
What is it like to have me as a customer?
What is it actually like to live in close quarters with me?
What is it like to share responsibilities with me?
What is it like to have me as a mum? What is it like to have me as a daughter?
What is it like to have me as a neighbor? As a member of the community?
What is it like to have me as a friend? As a relative?

The more I looked, the more confused I got initially, a big warning sign that I was not living authentically, but I had no idea who the real me was.

Since success did not bring the happiness I thought it would, with an unfulfilling career, lack of energy and clashes in relationships disfiguring the landscape of my life, then began the search for meaning.

I began to ponder questions like Why are we here? and What is the meaning of life? Like a fish swimming in the ocean, who sees only the water world before it and knows nothing of the existence even of a world above, that is how equate my own perceptions of life until I started to learn about the nature of our existence.

As I began to see my life and our world through an entirely different set of lenses, a much broader part of me began to awaken and ask “who am I?”

This led to questions like:

What would it be like to be free of the cumbersome impossibility of trying to control people and circumstances?
What would it be like to look at everything in my life as helpful, prompting me to look at myself, others or situations with curiosity rather than defence?
What would it be like to feel myself as an essential part of a perfect whole?
What would it be like to feel connected to everything else?
What would it be like to sense the universe within, the collective individual consciousnesses of the thirty seven trillion cells of my body?
What would it be like to feel an intrinsic part of our cosmos?
What would it be like to truly know that I am master of my own destiny?
What would it be like to co-create with the very imperative for life?

With a broader perspective on life itself, I started to see how interconnected everything is.

This question of Who am I? is one about my true nature.

I can look in the mirror (literally), and see all that my mind tries to hide from me. My soft sensitive skin tells me what my mind and experiences cannot, it displays my essential self. But the set of my jaw and lines on my face tell me about the harshness of the journey.

When I observe what is going on in my body, there is much more to be revealed about the emotional waters upon which I sail.

When I look in the mirror figuratively and see what is being reflected back to me from other people, all the things that trigger me, and the things I admire, there is a wealth of knowledge to be uncovered.
Claire Zammit talks about this process of discovery as the old stories, old patterns that halt us on the way to self actualization. These lie at the deepest level of self awareness, and they arise and get set in motion from our earliest childhood years, long before our conscious memories begin.

The kinds of mantras going on (unconsciously) within us are things like I am not worthy, I’m powerless, I am not enough, I’m a failure, I’m alone and so on.   

She gives some examples of how these halt our progress towards the things we really desire in our life, and stop us from reaching our full potential:

• “You cannot attract love and an extraordinary partner on top of an inner sense of being unlovable. You could meet the right person but you can’t receive their love so you push them away.”
• “You can’t magnetize support on top of a belief that you’re alone. Because you have ways of being where you’re hyper self sufficient so there is no room for anyone to contribute to you.”
• “You can’t generate success on top of a deep feeling of being unworthy because inside (this feeling of being unworthy) you don’t really invest the amount of time or resources that you would need to do a good job/to create success, and you use that as evidence you don’t have something of value to contribute.”
• “You can’t discover your purpose on top of a feeling of not being enough because you won’t show up for opportunities or take the next steps as they come to you.”
• “You can’t make lasting changes with your health if you believe that you don’t matter. Your self care practices are not going to stick because you will habitually turn your attention back to taking care of everyone else because you feel so anxious when you shift your attention towards taking care of you.”
• “You can’t make an impact on the world if you secretly feel you have nothing worthwhile to contribute, because even if you met that marketing genius who could help you launch, the chances are you’d create something that doesn’t produce value for people – which would be more evidence of I don’t really have anything worthwhile to contribute.”

Probably like you, I have a lifetime of hurts, I decided to let them mean something and propel me towards more joy. Everything before this level of inquiry on the journey to conscious self awareness is simply scratching the surface.

My old stories and patterns were so entrenched that this slow unfolding was probably necessary to get me to even see them. The level of pain derived from being separated from my essential self generally has to be pretty intense for me to take action, after all, perhaps like you, I learned to be someone else to please everyone else from the starting gate.

Despite all that, I don’t believe life is ever done pointing me in the right direction. When I say right direction, I don’t honestly think any one of us can get it wrong. It seems more like a game of snakes and ladders where we might go forwards a few steps and then slide backwards, but eventually we end up in the right place.

Will you take the risk to look at your own inner stories and patterns? Because the truth is, when we are held back by an unhelpful belief that is a sure indication that the very opposite of that belief is the one that will unlock your potential.  Stepping into conscious self awareness at a deeper level, is about fulfilling our potential; our potential to feel joy and feel fulfilled and to make a positive impact on the people and world around us.

If you want to dive deeper into conscious self awareness there are many roads that can be taken. In my articles I often refer to those resources I’ve found helpful; there is an abundance out there taking many forms from self help to online courses and working with various practitioners. The work of looking at our subconscious inner stories and patterns is often referred to as just “the work” or “shadow work”, as well as many other names like parts work, fragmentation/completion process, Internal Family Systems, Inner Child Work, Jungian Psychology, Freudian Psychology, Inner Shamanic Journey Work and the list goes on.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy I Am Worth It – Are You?, Why Projecting is the Best Tool for Self Awareness, Honour Your Story but Free Yourself of Its Shackles and How to Heal the Past so You Can Live Your Best Present. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Since I rather spectacularly injured my toe on a wooden pallet last month, which would not have happened if I hadn’t been rushing, I have been reminded to give myself more space between things I want to achieve in a day.

I had been too keen to try to fit in a walk at the beach between commitments and, while it had been great to feel my feet in the warm sand, it had meant rushing back to get the kids’ afternoon tea ready for school pick up. As a consequence, I then found myself blocked in by a delivery when I was already running late.

Each week when I sit down at my keyboard to help crystalise what I’ve learned, there is most often an obvious theme that arises. This week, like many others, has brought mixed blessings; swinging between moments of kindness, insight and serendipities, and frustrating misunderstandings, delays and (to first appearances) blocks.

I wondered what the common thread was between them, because there is usually an ah-ha moment in there somewhere. This week I reflected on the gift of time, or allowing myself more space between the lines as I like to call it, and how small changes have had a major impact on my life.

For example, the kids needed an extra day at home after the weekend; they were far from recharged and one had been unwell, and I was glad to be in a position to give it to them. Though part of me breathed a heavy inward sigh, realizing the things I had planned would need to wait, I enjoyed sitting by the stream in the sun in the local reserve while the kids built a magical paradise for themselves from branches, stones and leaves.

The next day I was thankful to have gotten through my only appointment for the day when I got a call
from the school to pick one of them up. Again, part of me sighed as more plans were waylaid, but nothing critical and I enjoyed some one on one time with my oldest child. The day after, I prioritized a yoga session straight after school drop off, needing to find my equilibrium, and (literally) just as I finished the phone rang again, to go and pick up my other child from school. I was deeply grateful for the timing, and spent some wonderful one on one time with my youngest child.

Life can be like that with kids, especially at the moment with our winter weather and COVID19 restrictions. The kids are tired and schools are cautious, and I’m grateful to be able to accommodate it all with relative ease because I’ve stepped back from continuously having my foot full down on the throttle.

In contrast, if I look back on my early life, I can remember the constant feelings of anxiety attached to the need to get somewhere; to keep up with mum’s walking pace, to catch a bus, to get to the pickup point for swim training in the mornings, to get to school afterwards, to get home in time to eat lunch and get back to school before the afternoon bell… the list goes on.

Growing into adulthood, I took that ethos into my career. As I was climbing the corporate ladder, I had many operational tasks and targets to deliver on, and people to manage, but I also had to make time for the more strategic thinking and delivery, which is where my natural aptitude and focus were and, ultimately, where I wanted my career to head.

I worked long hours and they were jam-packed. Then I had babies, and there was hardly a minute of my life left unscheduled, and that which wasn’t became open season for the kids to get in their mamma time, which they naturally wanted and needed. 

I was great at multi tasking if you were to look on the surface; I could tick a lot of boxes on the to-do list. But where was the space in between to actually process the events and interactions of the day in relation to my own journey here on Earth? My adrenaline and cortisol levels were so high my mind was constantly absorbed in basic survival, in flight or fight mode, there was no space to process anything at a deeper level.

While I’m pleased I at least stepped off the corporate wheel, it is fair to say that old habits die hard. Dialing back on commitments has been a long and painful process, especially with children in the picture. Their dependence on an adult, me in this case, creates all sorts of new and seemingly unending commitments that are no more attractive than the array of dull weekly meetings I was obliged to attend in corporate life. Learning healthy boundaries and how to assert them has become a priority.

Still, I notice I have a propensity to load up my days too much on occasion, and life delivers me a swift and painful reminder (like the toe incident) to leave myself some space.

A few weeks back I was doing an exercise, led by Dr Jean Houston, on subjective time. She gave us one minute of clock time to go and explore something we have always wanted to do – one suggestion was a trip around the world. In my case, I decided to imaginatively take the trip to visit my family in the UK that we had to postpone last month due to current travel restrictions.

In that one minute I was able to imagine: my partner taking the kids and I to the airport, both legs of the flight (even the change-over’s in Los Angeles and London), arriving at our destination, the car ride back to my dad’s new house, looking around the house and garden for the first time, and even some of the people and places we might have visited; all this while also imagining some of the little parent-child moments I might face in escorting the kids on such a trip.

It’s amazing what can be achieved in the mind alone when I’m in a relaxed and focused state.
Yesterday, as I drove to a long awaited appointment with a doctor across town, I found I was aiming to be early so I would feel relaxed and more likely to take in the details of our meeting. I had also gone prepared with a list of things I wanted to discuss.

Afterwards, with no other commitments planned, I drove to the pool thinking through everything I had learned as I swam. Then I went home and made notes as a reminder, something I would previously have made no space for and then would likely have woken in the middle of the night recounting the conversation – or a month later some important information might have worked it’s way back to conscious memory.

In fact, that particular appointment was one in the private rather than public sector, and the glorious difference in the doctor-patient interaction was the gift of time in the consultation; time to explore the issues more on both sides. Straight away I felt the difference; it did not feel rushed so, as well as the things I had wanted to convey, I was also able to ask the questions that arose in my mind during our
conversation.

Unlike in the exercise with Jean Houston, one minute of clock time would not subjectively equal all the time in the word in a rushed doctor’s appointment. In fact, the feeling of being rushed evokes that flight or fight response and tends to freeze my brain so is counterproductive. In the public system I too often think of the questions I want to ask long after I’m out of my appointment.

I wonder how much time and money could be saved in the public healthcare system if a little more care was spent upfront simply to allow for a more relaxed doctor-patient interaction?

For me it’s not about finding hours and hours of time in my calendar, it’s about taking a bit more time upfront with things, being smarter in relation to when and what I schedule, and consciously including all the things that I used to just try and fit in somewhere.

All this is to say I don’t need a lot of clock time in order allow myself the gift of time. The gift is more about a focus on:

• exposing the list of things that don’t always require a specific clock time but do need my attention; like paying bills, grocery shopping, washing, preparing food, weeding and so on
• leaving deliberate space between calendar commitments so that I’m not rushing from one thing to the next, and I actually have time to take care of my other responsibilities and process what is taking place in my life  
• making deliberate time for the things that nourish me, including regular meditation, time in nature for appreciation and contemplation, swimming, yoga and writing
• dropping into my heart space around issues that trigger me to ensure I am acting from a place of authenticity and not mounting a full scale defence or attack that perpetuates things I don’t want in my life – this is an amazing time saver, when I think of all the hours/days/weeks/months/years I used to ruminate on what had happened or what I thought should have happened or what might happen in the future, not to mention how much worse I always felt

There was a particular misunderstanding this week that sent me into a bit of a tail spin. Previously I’d have mounted a defence and gone in guns blazing. Given I hadn’t planned to see that person until next week, the issue would meanwhile have dominated much of my thoughts as I stewed.

Instead I took time to notice the rant in my head, and drop into my heart to figure out how the issue was really making me feel and why. I explained my fears and concerns to other person as concisely as I could, seeking clarification. She understood and, to my relief, there was more to the situation than I was aware of (as is often the case) and we were, in fact, aligned in our thinking.

Allowing myself the gift of time also means allowing it in others; to allow them the space to consider things I’ve asked or said before responding. It means I allow things to unfold in their natural time, like allowing my body time to heal without the compulsion to act now and intervene.

The more I give myself that kind of space, the more I notice I allow it in others. I notice too the difference in how my body feels, more relaxed, like it’s not fighting itself, nor fighting with others. The quality of what I get done is better, and the quantity strangely hasn’t suffered, everything seems to still happen, and more easily.

When I look back on that constant compulsion I used to have to do everything now, I can easily remember how stressed I was. Now I realise I will never be done, so I may as well increase the quality of my interactions with others and situations by allowing myself and them the gift of a bit more time. Do you allow yourself the gift of time?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Get out of Your Head and into Your Heart, Kneel at the Doorway of Your Heart to Usher the Dawn of a New Era, Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.