Does Your World That Lies Within Agree With What You Project Outwardly?

Image by Caroline Hummels from Pixabay

This week has been a gift of alone time with the kids at their dad’s and grandparents. I love my children, but I do not love my attention constantly focused outward and the endless rounds of chores and commitments required in looking after myself, never mind others. My attention wants to go within and deal with what often feels like the internal carnage that resides there.

So I was doing an exercise where we were asked to depict our inner world versus our outer world in picture form, with a divided ambivalence mask and use it and the space around it. It was an interesting exercise, I drew my outer world as a conglomeration of people and things that require my attention and that drive my outer responses.

These included the voices of my parents and teachers who taught me what is appropriate and acceptable, to the voices of my own children now with their own needs and demands, the voice of media and government who sway the general mood of what is acceptable or not in today’s world, and the friends, clients and other people I interact with day to day.

That side of my mask was painted to look normal, pleasant but somewhat stoic in its lines as I have bent and swayed to people and opinions over the years that really do not always match my internal world. The little lines around my mouth indicate where I’ve remained tight lipped and the crease on my brows is where I’m concentrating on appropriate responses.

This is the part of me that fervently welcomes the work I’ve been doing on personal boundaries, somewhat surprised that such a thing exists but not at all sure it’s safe to attune more to my inner world and to express that outwardly. There is understandable resistance there I have to work through.

My inner world was more complex, and also split. There is the collection of fears and insecurities I inwardly harbour but there is also a separate very contrasting part of me that feels a deeper, more spiritual sense of peace and “okayness”.

Inner me loves time in nature, which I do oblige frequently in my outer world in order to find some sense of equilibrium. What I want though is what I feel inside to be what I express outside so I attract people and experiences that are a closer match to my true self.

I said to a friend of mine, who sees me as the confident one, “Don’t confuse my ability to jump on the train of the now widely used and socially acceptable love you with close family and friends with the ability or confidence to speak to my feelings, I’m sh!t at that”.

That is why I am learning how to express and expand my emotional vocabulary, and it’s quite a process observing the emotions that arise simultaneously within me, where they sit in my body and use this information to speak to my needs and boundaries more clearly.

Briana MacWilliam, one of whose course’s I am taking, said something really well that I think affects all of us and speaks to all our insecurities.

She was talking about how, overall, a child determines that a parent's responsiveness must mean something about their inherent worthiness. Since a child doesn't have the emotional or mental capacity to contextualise their parents and say:

“Wow my parents are generally invasive or dismissive people, which is a characteristic which was around long before me, and probably has nothing to do with me. And, as a result, they clearly don’t have the tools to do this child rearing thing in the way that I need.

But that doesn’t mean no one else in the world is capable of meeting my needs, or that somehow I am not deserving of having my needs met, ever. If I can just wait this out, I know love is out there for me and I am fully deserving of it.”

Of course, as she says, the child is not capable of that and instead assumes they must be undeserving or is too needy. Hence the internal messages we carry into adulthood that we are often not even aware of.

This speaks to precisely why most of us walk around with mismatching inner and outer worlds. I can’t help but wonder how life would be if we allowed the different parts of us to integrate and be more vulnerable and able to speak to our true feelings.

How closely do your inner and outer world’s match? And would you benefit from being able to attract more situations and people who match your inner world?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Expand Your Emotional Vocabulary to Get Your Real Needs Met, What Are Our Thought Patterns Really Doing for Us?, Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Do You Yearn for Better Outcomes? First Commit to Observing Your Reactions, How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns and Put Mature Parts of You in the Driving Seat for Better Results, . To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

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