Reinforcing Your Freedom to Express Yourself

This blog is best experienced by starting at the beginning.

In engaging with the exercise of establishing one’s definition of freedom, as outlined in the previous post, most of my patients arrive at a definition that involves connection to one’s body. For many, to be free to live authentically would mean following joy and bliss as one’s principal motivators rather than what society dictates they should do. Most patients engaging in this exercise describe the permission to attune to one’s inner compass of how to live life, and when pondering this concept further, they arrive at the explanation that this compass would be an intuitive felt sense of inner knowing. When we go beyond just associating “freedom” with joy and bliss to pause to consider what these concepts would look like enough in action, we slow down enough to embody them, and thus to actually feel our bodies. It is this embodiment that affords freedom from the past.

Our automatic mind tends towards the familiar, locking us in the stories we have historically told ourselves and leading us to feel stuck in old schemas and routines. But when we ask the question “what would freedom feel and look like,” two really important things happen. The first is that by framing our goal as a hypothetical, we trick the intellect, our ultimate defense mechanism, and bypass the doubt and negativity biases that often arise when we try to change our mental maps. We feel safe enough to really conceptualize our goals, rather than avoiding potential sources of disappointment, internal or external, that we typically associate with going to the depths of our true desires and dreams. This question could also be framed as “what would it be like to trust yourself,” because this is what is happening in the brain — we feel safe enough to imagine a world in which we were the intuitive author of our own story.

The second thing that happens when we ask the freedom question is that by transcending typical structures in such a way, we experience expansiveness. Ruminative thought loops and fears take us out of our senses and disassociate mind from body. We get stuck in our heads and can’t ground into who we are. Thus, we don’t experience ourselves as a person capable of living a life of mattering enough to pursue our goals. We don’t experience ourselves as a substantive person at all, but as a stuck thought loop. We loop further and further out of reality, creating the sense that these patterns are monsters that would be impossible to overcome. By tasking our minds to conceptualize and feel into overcoming these patterns, we orient ourselves back into our bodies. And not just any old body, but a body that is not reliving trauma-informed thought patterns manifesting themselves physically because we are imagining being in a free body. This body would be one made of mattering in every sense; it would be made up of matter — substantial and real, grounded in the here and now — and it would be steered by someone who recognized their intrinsic sense of mattering.

The reality of course is that our issues live in our tissues — our traumas live on physically in our bodies. But we are authors over this story as well. If we fixate on what hurts and feel powerless in changing it, we won’t, just as we will never feel free if we attach to the identity of being broken and in need of fixing (especially if we believe this fix must be external, as discussed in previous blogs). But when asked what feeling free would feel like, we remember that there are so many other parts of our bodies that feel good and are healthy, and we feel our whole, expansive bodies. We broaden our lens on our bodies beyond the trauma-driven spotlight (this thing hurts and is limiting or fear-inducing in some way) to that of a floodlight (but woah, my body is so much more than just part). When our vantage point expands in this way, it is like seeing our lives in color rather than black and white — everything around us looks vivid, non-threatening, and even beautiful, and the opportunities for what we could do with the rest of our day (or tomorrow, or next week, or the next five years) come soaring in. We can conceptualize feeling healthy, whole, and complete, and we can then turn this into reality. Invariably, all my patients, myself included, report that freedom would come with feeling free to be present in one’s body, without resistance to pain or afraid of what skeletons we could dig up with idle time. For everyone, freedom would involve moving slowly and taking in life with carnal pleasure and mindful awareness.

We all already have the freedom to live this way. Yes, we have pain in our bodies, but we also have access to many, many other sensations, and even pleasure and joy. If we slow down enough to really listen, and then to really see, then to really smell, then to really taste, then to really experience touch, and then to really hear, we can experience a free body. This doesn’t necessarily even have to be a body experiencing pleasure, but a body that is sensing reality as it is today. Look around your room and try to notice things you have never noticed before, not just what needs to be cleaned. Often, we are so concerned with b-lining to do something productive that we aren’t actually looking ourselves and taking in our surroundings at all. Smell. Really smell. Like take a few deep breaths through your nose and notice temperature, air thickness, and fragrances. Taste. What flavors remain from your last meal? What would it be like to be tasting lemon right now, mint, chocolate, [some other flavor you like]? Can you swallow your saliva and imagine you are digesting this meal? Feel. What’s going on in your body right now? What’s happening on its surface? What textures and temperatures are you coming into contact with? Hear. What sounds do you hear in your body? In your room? Can you hear more remote sounds outside your room? Voila, you are actually in your body. And now you are actually in the present. And if you are in the present, you are not stuck in the past, and you are free to move into the future with intentionality. What feels good in and around your body right now? Can you enhance this? Would positive sensations do you want to strengthen, deepen and grow? What would it be like to see this moment right now and what you can do with it as sacred? What do you want to go do with that amazing brain of yours? What do you want to create with those hands? What desires and inclinations are present for you right now? What is preventing you from actualizing them?

Oh, and while we’re at it, now that we are present, what is actually true in your life? Not emotionally true, but what is factually true? By grounding into the present and perceiving reality for what it is, you are reclaiming the developmental phase that we all must check off to functionally operate in society: innocence. This is the phase of perceiving reality as it is, without fear-based, performance-based, victim mentality, or family-of-origin-modeled schemas informing how you see the world. A child must know what it is like to just be before doing, in order to take in the world around them and define for themselves how they feel compelled to engage with it. If not, they will default to performing and living for other people or operating in a way that was imposed upon them by others. With time, this becomes too much pressure, and they opt instead to avoid life (depression) or try to control it by going through what if’s and [unsuccessfully] planning for unlikely scenarios (anxiety). These thought patterns, as we saw, pull us further and further out of their bodies, out of reality, and out of the capacity to experience the joys afforded by our present day lives.

Thus, before we start understanding who we authentically are and what we came here to create, as is the goal of the developmental phase we are looking at now, we must innocently live in sensual engagement with our present reality, like a tactile child exploring a garden. In this way, we can live free of our previous programming. We can’t just check off nesting and then return to puppeteering ourselves to be impressive or check off as many should’s as possible every day. To be free to discover who we are and what we like, we must integrate feeling at home in our bodies as our baseline. We must start every day by being before we can do. If you just wake up cognitively, going right to planning or an intellectually-driven action, your mind will revert back to familiar pathways that ignore that you are an adult living in the present. These pathways typically tend towards one of four negative senses of self: I am bad or flawed in some way; I am powerless; I am not safe; or I don’t belong.

If you can feel your body here and now, you can change your life. By embodying your whole body without resistance to what you may feel, you are allowing the self-acceptance and orientation to reality that constitutes the “ready to change” state from which anything is possible. Your body can soften enough to reconfigure those issues in the tissues. And, if you can really perceive your adult reality for what it is, you can remember that you survived everything bad that ever happened to you. Cognitive change can inform and rewire what is physically encoded in the body, just as mindful physical movement can shift your embodiment and with it your cognitive sense of self; these two levels of change can happen simultaneously if you allow yourself to feel safe in and oriented to your present day body. You are the writer of your own story (and sense of self!). You matter, and you have the right to live a value-oriented, enjoyable life.

As you narrate your life, make sure that you are uniquely writing it from the first person. Are you operating from I matter — using “I” statements? This may seem like a given, but pay close attention to how you internally comment on your movements throughout your day. Do you ever find yourself narrating in your mind how you assume other people are seeing you in that moment? This could be positive, such as imagining that someone is watching you in the gym thinking “what an impressive stretch,” or negative, such as, “did he brush his hair today?” In either case, by going through your day imagining how you are coming across to others, you are ceding power in your life and reinforcing limited definitions of your worth.

Every time you find yourself wondering what other people are thinking about you in a given moment, come back to owning to yourself why you are doing what you are doing. For example, if you assume that your old classmate you just ran into is thinking “man, what a loser,” remind yourself that “I am choosing to take time off work because I was really unhappy there; I don’t want to just rush into a new job out of fear of what other people will think; I am pausing to carefully determining what I really want in my next one.” If you are imagining that that woman who just passed by is thinking “what a crazy person, walking barefoot like that,” reframe this as an “I” statement to yourself that captures what you know to be true: “I am choosing to ground in the woods right now.” Rather than imagining a dialogue with someone else in which you defend yourself, take them out of the picture and just focus on your relationship with you, owning your life for you and from you. Reframing and owning your life from “I” statements is not about justifying yourself to others but instead about orienting to your values and self-trusting confidence that you know why you are living your life and nothing else really matters. Of course, you can integrate how you want to engage with others from a value-oriented perceptive, as discussed in previous blogs, but you must first orient that you are in charge of your life or you will revert to earlier patterns of either passivity/depression or resisting obligation and agency-free living.

You may find that you have to reorient to narrating [and living] consciously many, many times a day. With time, though, it will get easier. As soon as you stop resisting living from freedom, you will be free. In other words, it just needs to click in your mind that you are free to stop controlling your life and actually live it. You have an intuitive you within you who will take over once you stop resisting (via control and old patterning) this inner guidance, and you have a parasympathetic nervous system that knows, at a cellular level, how to live your life from love and abundance rather than the sympathetic nervous system’s proclivity towards scarcity, panic, and lack. Allowing this change to occur is as simple as deeply owning that you matter, which you do by orienting to being made up of matter (aka a body). With time, the daily mindful, grounding practices will become more familiar to your automatic mind, though it will always try to expend as little energy as possible and prefer staying in the intellect rather than the depths of your body. But if you commit to rewiring with grounding, the ease, joy, and appreciation of life afforded by this practice will become the new track in your brain that your inner freight train knows to take.

Typically, new patterns take six weeks to establish, and as they solidify, you will become increasingly familiar with who you authentically are. To facilitate this rewiring, follow what feels joyful to you specifically. Your definition of joy will bring you to an expansive life that resonates with you. Remember, we are not just talking about leisure here. By really understanding what moves you and slowing down enough to listen to yourself and be your own guide, you will discover your unique gifts and aptitudes, around which you will build your life. This life will be one that is governed by a soul-infused capacity to truly connect with and impact the world around you. When you move beyond being limited to trying to be impressive or fulfill obligations, you will find joy, yes, but this joy is the ticket to finding yourself, and the impacts of this will touch every aspect of your life.

Developmental Stage 2: Play and Creativity

Hooray! Here we are, finally moving out of nesting. Once we can feel safe and at home in our bodies, we can reclaim the second developmental step that would have emerged naturally if we had received everything we needed in infancy: agenda-free self-expression. If you’re not sure you’re quite ready to move to this step, try the following italicized exercise to check. If you’re blaring full-speed ahead, catch you in a few paragraphs – but be careful, the capacity to slow down and marvel, with all five senses, at the act of living is what the second stage is all about; if your tendency is to rush ahead in hopes that joy may be just around the corner, your mind-body-soul trifecta have yet to integrate and orient around the safety that characterizes the first developmental stage.

Place one hand on your belly and one on your heart. Ask yourself what freedom means to you. See if you can visualize what tomorrow would look like were you totally unencumbered by the past (or anything else that imposes negative tethers on you or restricts you in any way, though by definition the source of any obstacle is in the past; even fears about the future have their roots in historical threat postures – the future is amorphous and uncertain and thus can have no hold over you). If I were to wave a magic wand that allowed you to wake up tomorrow completely free to live a life of pure joy, happiness, and child-like wonder, how would you know you were free? What would your body feel like? How would you relate to your bed, to the sheets, mattress, and pillow beneath you? How would you move through your space? How would you interact with others? What would your day look like? How would your five senses relate to your external environment? Use back and forth tapping with your hands moving left and right on your thighs, shoulders, or elbows to strengthen deepen and grow the feelings of freedom until they feel as strong as possible.

If you can conceptualize a positive future, you’re ready to actualize it. Trauma keeps us past-oriented, but if you feel safe enough to envision the future you want for yourself, you can make it happen. Invite all parts of your consciousness to help with the visualization so they know they have nothing to fear. If they let go of their old ways and attempts to maintain control, the result will be this state of freedom. Letting go of control does not create a power vacuum in which some scary unknown will take ahold of your consciousness or force you to live a life that doesn’t resonate. Letting go of control allows you to live your life and experience the joy that can only come via feeling safe enough to orient to your present reality with all five senses. This is the gift of the second stage of development. When we let ourselves experience our world with child-like awe and curiosity, we leave space for fun and excitement to occur. We can’t plan or orchestrate a feeling of joy. True joy and creativity come from allowing spontaneity. Your unique gifts will then emerge when you let your intuition show you who you really are and what you are capable of when you don’t feel like you’re under pressure to make something happen, but presence itself is a tremendous gift – it’s what allows you to enjoy being alive. Many of us never had the chance to actually just be creative children, or if we did, we likely rushed through this stage due to the pressures perceived by our parents to keep up with the pace of our society. Most of us don’t know what our minds are capable of when allowed to play with uncontrolled, agenda-free idle time. What is your mind capable of when you let is create or have fun just for the sake of it?

Once you feel safe enough to approach your life with wonder, you really are free from the past. If you can allow yourself to adopt a youthful, beginner’s mindset and, like a two-year-old, just have fun moving a paintbrush without even knowing what you’re creating or having expectations on the act of painting, you are free. As discussed in previous posts, it is the postures that historically kept us safe that become the symptoms for which we seek present treatment (anxiety, for example, likely emerged from needing to scan your environment to make sure you were safe or preemptively planning for the worst to prevent being blindsided by a hurtful caregiver). What this means is that many of us are in prisons of our own making, clinging to a crutch for a leg that is no longer broken. Our past-oriented stress, anger, or sadness often lead to ailments that look like very real threats in the present, such as thyroid, organ, hair, or hormonal problems, which perpetuate feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, or something being wrong with us; were we to recognize how safe our bodies and minds truly are in the present, health problems too would go away. Thus, if you can conceptualize freedom, you can make it happen. The one “exception” may be still being surrounded by perpetrators of abuse, but you are agent in establishing boundaries. You are free now. Your life can be filled with joy.

Okay, now we are ready to toddle around in timeless wonder. Create time for yourself to reclaim play and agenda-less expression. Make dates to go out in nature with a variety of art supplies, allowing yourself to then be inspired. Maybe you’ll use the clay you packed, or maybe it will be the colored pencils. Maybe you will just sing with the birds, or dance around a tree. Maybe you’ll end up making snow angels. The point is that you won’t know until you get there, and then a powerful force within you will show you what it looks like when you truly play.

Put on music and close your eyes. Notice how your body wants to move. Allow discomfort, and then move through it. See how your legs want to shake out distress. Feel how your hand wants to scribble away anger. Once you have released negativity or doubt, allow yourself to be moved by play. How does your voice want to become involved? Do you want to crawl on the ground and meow like a cat? Do you want to sing? Giggle?

How would you move through your space if you were young enough to not care about how you were perceived by others? That is what we are going towards. It’s not about the output but the process. It really is just about living your life (for you). Carving out time where you can really slow down and get into your groove is ideal, but this isn’t always possible. Reclaiming play can also happen while you wash the dishes. Maybe it’s singing or dancing while doing so, but maybe it’s just feeling the temperature of the water and the pleasure of really being in your physical body. We are sensual beings. The second developmental stage is giving yourself the permission to see just how fun and exciting expressing these senses can be.

Ready to Start Unlocking Your Authentic Self?

This post builds upon the previous ones. Scroll all the way to the bottom to catch up.

Okay, enough with the nesting. Do you feel ready to move on to the next stages of human development, which will help you safely unleash your innate gifts and get to know who you really are and what deeply moves you? Let’s find out if you really are.

Check out the activities below. If you can comfortably do them without too much resistance, which could be coming up in the form of mental noise (i.e., extensive planning and to-do lists, whirring worry, or random thoughts that take you out of the now), or even outright anxiety or blatant discomfort, stay with nesting for a little while longer (read on to understand why this is important and to access some ways to deepen and reinforce your previous work in this domain).

1.      Meditation: Can you focus on the present and move beyond initial thoughts that may arise to experience right now just as it is? This can be while using walking, a mantra, a prayer, or some other mechanism to quiet the intellect, but it is important that you can transcend mental noise to access innocent presence in the mind. In other words, can you reclaim some connection to a child-like capacity to just be, without agenda and pressure, maybe even with joy and spaciousness?

2.    Mindfulness: Can you stay present with the sensual experience of just being? Can you slow down enough to feel your feet walking, your body breathing, or your mouth tasting? Can you tolerate idle time, or do you unknowingly protect yourself from the pain of your memories (explicit flashbacks or encoded discomfort in your body) by ensuring you don’t have space to feel? Can you be alone and awake to your human experience without constantly distracting, avoiding, and go-go-go-ing? The Dalai Lama himself reports needing to remind himself to be mindful over thirty times a day when he notices his attention drifting. The expectation here is not to be constantly mindful, but to be able to feel safe enough to access this capacity. These is really hard stuff. What we are going for here is the ability to safely be in your own presence and aware of what is happening in your body.

3. Alone Time in Nature: Can you take mindfulness one step further and spend time in nature and move as slowly as an elephant? Can you see the colors around you, feel the ground below you, and hear the birds chirping without escaping into your mind, being accompanied by another human or set of headphones, or titrating the experience by knowing just how long you will be in the woods, exactly what you will do in them, and what you will be doing next?

4.  Let Toddlers Lead You: Can you play with young children without controlling the agenda? Can you just ask, “what do you want to do today?” to a child and join in whatever they have in mind without clinging to the need to be in charge or to be productive? Of course, if these are your children, this will be a time-limited capacity because you will then need to go back to clean-up or follow-the-schedule mode, but can you do it? Can you play just to be with them and share in the innocent magic and wonder? We will unlock play and creativity more formally as milestones next, but are you able to join in the creation of a block tower, or are you too distracted or even anxious about everything else there is to do? Can you behold the magic that is infants and toddlers and just marvel at the beauty of these creatures? Can you breathe those delicious deep-belly breaths alongside them and be slow, slow, slow?

If you can do these things without too much resistance or discomfort, you are ready to move on to the next blog (coming shortly). This means that you can reclaim sufficient safety, wonder, and innocence to create an entirely new foundation, or “homeostasis” in your nervous system, made up of these essential human building blocks. If you are still uncomfortable with unplanned time, there is absolutely no shame in this. In fact, shame is the very building block within you that we are trying to let go of. *

We must complete each life stage before we can move on the next. The expectation is not to be feel perfectly safe all the time. You can of course continue to work on the checklist items as you simultaneously foster the capacities to play, create, and follow joy. But, if you don’t have access to safety and if you can’t soothe yourself sufficiently to overcome initial discomfort being on your own to enjoy your own company, jumping to the next step too early can do more harm than good. If we don’t feel like we intrinsically belong and deserve cozy pleasure, we won’t be able to develop the capacities to safely play. Instead, fostering the capacities to play or create will become a “should,” aka another to-do governed by our youngest, most threatened hypervigilant parts. ** They may have dipped a toe in safety in the previous stage while still clinging to hyper vigilant, threatened stances from which they undoubtedly were able to identify something scary. If we start experimenting with change without really letting it in and allowing a new way of doing things, we significantly risk unconscious self-sabotage and perceived defeat. To our youngest, most fearful parts, the known misery feels safer than the unknown, even if on a certain level they recognize that the unknown could yield freedom or spaciousness. This launches a process of us imprisoning ourselves in a prison of our own making in which the old, stress- and depression-informed ways may even become stronger as we simultaneously lament how there is something wrong with us and our capacity to progress. It is for this reason that I break the first stage of human development into two parts: 1) nesting and 2) wonder and free play.

Most developmental theorists put these two steps together as the first stage, that of innocence, but I think they must be tackled linearly to ensure we truly feel safe and at home in our body before we start trying to do things with it. We must really truly change the narrative surrounding safety before we can learn new skills and go to the next stage. If nesting is unfamiliar, the narrator in your mind is very likely a planning-oriented, young survivalist part. Slow down and take time to really nest and discover your innate, calm, self-accepting true Self capable of safely giving and receiving love. You may not have had the luxury in life to operate from this place, but it is in there. And, it is You.

Okay, ready for the nesting hack? Imagine getting everything you needed in utero and early babyhood and see if you can feel into what this would have been like. Because your parents may not have gotten what they needed in their infancies to have had calm nervous systems that would have been safe to be around, it can be really helpful to imagine growing in the womb of Gaia/Mother Earth personified as a full-bodied tree being or “wombing” in a grotto or nest in the earth itself. Tap slowly back and forth on your thighs or with your feet on the ground as you do so to soothe your body and quiet your intellect. Allow in the felt sense of nurturing support from a mother who loves you unconditionally. Feel desired and wanted. Imagine that all your nutritional needs are being met such that all there is to focus on is the comfort of the experience. Allow yourself to marvel at the wonder and joy of developing a body and the awe of coming into this world. Tap back and forth until you can feel this alternative positive early experience in every cell of your body. If memories of your actual early experience or other forms of discomfort or distress arise, flush them out of your feet and into the earth to be composted and transformed into something beautiful. This is old, survival baggage you don’t need anymore. You are safe now. Once you can embody the earth nesting, notice what positive self-beliefs this would have allowed for and tap these in until they feel true. If you had felt safe and desired in utero, what would feel true for you today? I belong? All is well? I am lovable? I can trust myself and determine who to trust? I choose to rejoice in life? I love and accept myself and where I am in life right now? Tap back and forth until the positive beliefs feel as true as possible.

As you can see, what we are doing here is healing your inner most child. We will heal the other children, or ego states, in the following developmental stages by giving them what they didn’t get. Then, we can unlock the deep gifts you didn’t know you possessed because you didn’t feel safe at the age at which these would have expressed themselves for them to make themselves known and blossom. If you truly feel ready to do this and are frustrated by the tease that is this article, here is a hint to get you started with the next stage. Follow joy and wonder as your North Star. This is the key to unlocking your intuition and living an authentic life. These are not childish, unproductive ways of living, but actually the basis of the most sagacious, spiritual practices. The joy of living involves childlike play and whimsy, but you can also follow joy and wonder throughout your workday, marveling at the fact that you are an adult with a job typing at a computer, grown-up, impressive, and competent. In free time, allow what feels truly joyful to show you what you deeply enjoy doing. See the world around you through this lens.

* On Shame:

Shame parallels feigned analgesic death in animals (think rabbit caught in a snare or a deer in headlights) and is what we humans fight hard to avoid because we experience this mechanism of playing dead or hiding in plain sight as akin to death. Our brain draws on the neurocircuitry shared with animals to automatically perceive our external environment(s) as automatically life threatening, with no way out except to shut down.  Unbeknown to us, behind the scenes, our nervous system then fights hard to get us out of and avoid the shutdown that is shame. We do this via sympathetic arousal, or facets of our fight-or-flight mechanisms (those delightful emotions we get addicted to (in addition to getting addicted to the ‘I am bad’ messaging of shame): fear, anger, sadness, panic, and seeking an external solution). See previous blog for more on these addictions.

A rabbit can fake death and go back to living his life amongst his colony as if nothing happened because of his simpler, instinctual brain. Though we share his mechanism of trying to hide in plain sight, our brains are much larger and more complex and thus had to develop analytical mechanisms as part of their growth. All a rabbit needs to do is move the initial energy of the fear and ensuing faked death out of his body to go back to stress-free playing with his colony. In the animal world, this energy release is called “spronking.” Have you ever seen videos of the amazing leaps antelopes take after escaping a lion? This is what it entails, and for animals it is as simple as this. Big jump. Back to joy and innocence. If a threat arises again, then it’s back to survival mode, but there is no preemptive planning for the next attack or rumination in the interim. But, our brains are too complicated to exist without an “I” analyzing how we are operating in relation to our internal and external landscapes and making decisions [this “I” is really many “I’s” when we have experienced trauma (which we all have), and they don’t usually work together, creating distress – a major issue of human development that this blog seeks to unpack and provide hacks to]. What this means is we want to make meaning of everything that happens to us. We are not mind readers, we don’t have the full picture, and we tend to bias towards negativity or self-blame, especially when we have attachment injuries at our foundation, so more often we analyze a scary external circumstance as meaning that we are shameful.

Attachment injuries can be understood as events that shatter our belief systems. We believe people to be safe and trustworthy and then something happens that makes us question this safe foundation of joyful connection, and our innocence is lost. We no longer can engage with the world without vigilantly scanning for threats, analyzing who is safe, or skipping over this taxing work altogether by putting up walls between us and others. As social animals, we rely on belonging in the herd for survival, but shame makes us think we don’t belong, are utterly alone, and thus are at a primal risk of death. This is why the sustained relational “little t traumas” that we feel ashamed for being impacted by are actually just as significant if not more so in terms of lasting distress in the mind as the “Big T Traumas.” Sustained relational traumas result in Complex PTSD, making us believe we can’t trust anyone including ourselves, causing our hypervigilant, danger-scanning mechanisms to always stay on, even when we’re sleeping, scanning for internal and external threats.

Shame is bad enough when it happens later in life. Take a girl who believes herself to belong socially her whole life, reinforced by supportive, loving parents and easeful peer relations until she faces a sudden event where, at thirteen, a friend or group of friends deems her “uncool” and cuts her off. This is paradigm altering, and she now is anxious about attaching to other people. This is an explicit memory that the brain is aware of (even if she tries to suppress it because she is embarrassed to be so impacted by it). What this means is that sometimes the brain will flashback to this memory for the rest of this woman’s life and automatically play it like a movie in the background when something looks like, smells like, sounds like, or otherwise reminds the woman of the initial core memory (unless it is adaptively processed using bilateral stimulation a la EMDR). She will feel anxious in the present that somebody is not texting her back because an old story is playing in the background, not realizing that she is thirty-five, married with children and friends, and part of a safe tribe. But then the trigger will subside, and she will remember she is safe. She had a foundation of safety and she has safety now, even though a specific insecure ego state (thirteen-year-old locked in time) will frequently be reminded of the past and automatically jump into the driver’s seat in her brain and steer the car into danger land.

But when attachment injuries occur before age three, these are implicit memories, “the issues in our tissues.” We can’t identify a flashback because these preverbal memories are often uniquely felt and not stored in the mind with images or thoughts. Thus, starting before the age of three and as early as in utero, one stores a felt sense of terror, abandonment, and/or hurt, confused about when it is happening, often thinking that it is always happening, and that there is, and has always been, something fundamentally wrong with him or her. In cases of preverbal relational trauma, shame is thus ingrained at the base of our operating systems because we didn’t get the safety we needed to be an innocent baby or young child; it is all we know, and it is what we deeply get addicted to (in addition to its protectors). This is very different than the event that occurred for the twelve-year-old, which was paradigm shattering and constituted a major attachment wound, yet only threatened her capacity to trust others or connect in certain settings. Babies typically develop attachment capacities via the ventral vagal system, or social engagement system. We need our caregivers to calmly engage with us and lovingly nest with us in order to develop the capacities to connect with not only others but also others. These capacities are learned via early social engagement; this system does not come online automatically. There is nothing wrong with us if we are socially anxious. We just didn’t get what we needed to know how to not be. Your mother had a mother too, and she very likely didn’t get what she would have needed to mirror a safe nervous system to you, so these issues are often intergenerational.

It is crucial that you slow down enough to grieve what you didn’t get. By grieving, you can learn safe social engagement first and foremost with yourself and, in doing so, overcome the self-criticism at the core of shame. Ideally, you can also invite others into this vulnerability, drawing on the safety of their social engagement system to develop your own. You can also pleasure your way out of this early foundation if you allow yourself to feel deserving of cozy yumminess because this level of self-prioritization directly counters the beliefs inbedded in shame.

* * I have said this before but it bears repeating. We all have child parts or fragmented ego states. This doesn’t mean you have Dissociative Identity Disorder (previously called multiple personality disorder), just that your brain was overwhelmed at certain points in your life and aspects of your consciousness got locked in time. You brilliantly developed ways to protect you that were necessary then but now, because they don’t know that what happened is over, they are clinging to the protective structures that not only do not protect you anymore but keep you in a prison of your own making. The protective functions become symptoms of mental unrest (e.g., scanning for threat becomes anxiety, shutting down overwhelm becomes not feeling joy aka “anhedonia,” and shutting out unsafe people becomes attachment difficulties and social/performance anxiety, etc.). Do not get frustrated when these emerge, or they will feel more unsafe and fight harder to protect you. Instead, try to approach them from your most loving, adult parts and orient them to your present safety, thank them for everything they have done to keep you safe, and invite them to get their job done more effectively by taking on a new role. Ask them what the function of their role was at the time that they developed it. If they judged others to feel less insecure, for example, would they now want to help you feel confident by highlighting your strengths that surface throughout the day, given that it is now safe to more directly feel secure about yourself (you are now in charge of who you surround yourself with and not beholden to people who make you feel badly about yourself)?

Being the Savior You Seek

Many people come to therapy looking for salvation. This creates the impression of helplessness and reinforces shame and perceived flaws. It is important to recognize that nobody, not even the world’s best psychic, is going to fix you. All any healer can do is connect you to your intuitive capacity to heal yourself. You are the savior you seek. Once you realize this, then you can fully claim your capacity to matter, to seek pleasure, and to move forward with confidence. In other words, once you realize your capacity to heal yourself, and once you understand that the past is over and you are free to live in the present and pursue your wildest dreams unobstructed, you are healed.

In the following blog posts, we will explore what comes after nesting. All these steps are important to human development and to enabling an integrated, whole adult able to contributed to his or her larger ecosystem. These steps consist of “post-traumatic growth,” or the ability to understand that one has not only survived but is also able to disentangle from this identity and move on to thriving in life. In order to fully check off nesting and feel entitled to what comes next, it is important to fully grasp the extent to which you have everything you need within you. Without this realization and the safety required to accept this present reality, you can never really move out of being an infant constantly seeking a caregiver’s love and affection. And though you may move on to the next developmental phases of learning to play, to be curious, to become social, generative, and industrious, you can never master these, and thus you can never become a true adult—you can never truly be capable of actualizing authentic connection and contribution to others and your greater-than-human surroundings.

To move onto thriving, it is important that you allow your innately nurturing, true self to be the solution for your whole system. You are the only one who can heal your traumatized, fragmented parts of your consciousness that still feel locked in time and under attack. Believing a therapist or other healer to be the solution is an impossible setup. Therapists are here to help you realize that no part of you is bad and that they all deserve the compassion required to help them integrate into an adult consciousness. If you believe that you need to get rid of parts of yourself and need someone else to fix you, then these parts will only become stronger as they fight to not be expunged. Every part of you served a purpose, as discussed in the previous posts, but now they don’t need to use old mechanisms anymore, that is, if they trust that you are able to lead your whole mind as a compassionate nurturer with whom they can feel safe. [I use the third person because fragmented memories and traumas really do function as ego states with minds of their own.]

In addition to “for me” and “I matter,” there are a few other mantras that can help cognitively lead the nesting process of shifting towards comfort, pleasure, and joy as governing forces. These to not take the place of self-care practices, but they help integrate mind and body as compassionate, empowered self-leadership becomes second nature.

First, remind yourself of your goal for seeking therapy in the first place and use this as your compass. For most people, its to ultimately feel self-love. Keep coming back to this. Ask yourself throughout the day: “Is this something somebody who loves themselves would do or say?” If the answer is no, shake off the energy that was compelling a certain thought or action and try to embody the loving alternative.

Second, it is important to let your guard down and open up your heart to vulnerability. Like a bird learning to fly, you must be willing to bare your chest, knowing that you are an adult who can take care of yourself if someone hurts you. To do so, the mantra “I am willing to let life love me” can help you let in not only yourself but also others. It can help take down the wall that was preventing you from feeling. At a certain point, it was probably necessary to block out the bad, but this came at the expense of feeling the good. Most people around you are also just trying to live their lives and will predominantly be rooting for you and are similarly yearning for connection. Those who are judgmental have their own unhealed wounds barring them from the connection and love we innately crave as humans. Why let them project these onto you? You can determine to not take their negativity. You are truly the adult who can give yourself everything you need now. You don’t need everyone you cross paths with to love you or approve of you, nor is this possible.

Finally, it is helpful to emphasize: “I forgive myself for not knowing how lovable I am.” As you shift out of self-criticism, your mind will naturally be looking for imperfections and outlets for negative energy. Rather than seeking to forgive yourself for not being perfect, it is important that you rewrite this narrative and unlearn negativity entirely. The only thing there is to really strive for here is knowing that you are lovable. You can’t fail at this, but you can forgive yourself each time you falter. You are a beginner. This is a new skill. You will forget that you are lovable. Keep forgiving yourself for this.

Living For Me

Brain studies show that we literally get addicted to the chemicals emitted by our typical emotional experiences. That means that if you spend significant time in shame, your brain not only gets used to the physical experience of this emotion, but actually seeks it out. This is typically done both via internal ruminations on imperfections or “embarrassing” things we did , and also via outsourcing: making up stories about how someone else negatively perceives us. If your brain is addicted to anger and resentment, it will look for upsetting people or circumstances to orbit around; if it is addicted to fear, it will dwell on what-ifs; if it is addicted to panic and sadness loops, it will paint pictures of being stuck and helpless while frantically convincing you that you need X external thing to get out (when in fact you are the savior you seek), and so on and so forth. Thus, we need to completely rewire our neural-circuitry by nesting so often that we get addicted to safety, and then have space to follow joy.

An important tool throughout this process is the mantra “for me.” Each of the afore mentioned emotions (shame, anger, fear, panic, and sadness) are experienced by our sympathetic and immobilization systems, which is to say that they comprise fight-or-flight (or freeze). Thus, when we experience them, we think that our survival is at stake. To move out of this limited way of living, we must claim the capacity to matter, as described in the previous post, and move onto thriving.

If you take inventory of your present life, you will notice that you have everything you need to thrive, objectively at least. You just need to convince your survival brain that you can let go of the sympathetic nervous system addictions. This is where “for me” comes in. As you move throughout your day, allow this mantra to punctuate everything you do. I don’t mean to become selfish necessarily. Rather, allow yourself to recognize your agency. When you first wake up, your mind will probably go straight to the old addiction if you are early in the nesting process. This may look like an automatic to-do list or dread. Pull your brain back to the present with “for me.” Notice that you are an adult who ultimately is in charge in everything you do. Yes, your day ahead may include many things that you do need to do, and it may even start with doing something for someone else, especially if you are a parent. But, you have the choice to bring yourself fully into the driver’s seat rather than passively going through the motions of life. Say to yourself: “I am doing this for me.” I am making my kids breakfast because I love them. I matter and they matter. I am choosing love and connection right now. Wait, can this actually be enjoyable? Woah.

As you bring yourself into the present, you will have way more access to the energy of your true self (aka parasympathetic nervous system), and you will likely notice that you do even the most mundane checklist items differently. They may look the same, such as pouring the same orange juice you do every day. Maybe they look the sameish, like doing so while singing. For me. I like singing. So what if it sounds bad. This is my life, and I am choosing joy. But your day may start to look drastically different as you follow “for me.” The orange juice may become a superfood blend made exclusively from plants in your new garden. Who knows. Only you know what makes you happy, and only you can follow you. You may not even need to change anything at all in your daily routine to feel substantially different. Maybe all you needed to no longer feel stuck in your job was remembering that you matter and that at the end of the day you are going to that office for you. You always have the option to quit; if you don’t feel like this is an option financially, then you are the one deciding to make money, and you can feel empowered remembering that I am choosing to support myself right now.

Challenge yourself to use “for me” every day for a week. If you find yourself “stuck” in the familiar shame, frustration, or helplessness channel, remember the mantra. You can’t fail at this. Just like on a college campus where impatient students trudge dirt short-cuts across the lawns, you can veer off the established cement paths and chart new ones by returning to them until they become well-worn. At first, everything in you will be pulling you towards the old addiction, but then your brain will catch on that it actually feels really great to feel agent in your own life.

Learning to Nest

I Matter.

It is crucial that we proceed from this operating principle in order to not only heal but also to execute anything in life, be it personal or professional. If we are trying to make things happen for a different reason, such as gaining external validation, we will find ourselves hamstrung by unhealed childhood wounds and thus stuck in negativity spirals from which it is impossible to really create much at all. Inherently, our brains want to operate from the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the feelings we covet: play, wonder, awe, joy, love, creativity, care, pleasure, and desire. When we find ourselves instead proceeding from an insecure part of our minds, what is happening is that a childhood wound is surfacing and shifting us into our dorsal vagal or sympathetic nervous systems, punctuated by the oh-so-delightful emotions of: shame, anger, fear, panic, sadness and seeking [external solutions from a place of perceived helplessness].

Our childhood wounds manifest as parts of our consciousness, or ego states, that have maladaptive perceptions on our reality and misattuned beliefs about what we need to do in order to feel safe. I find it helpful to personify them as wounded children within our brains who are locked in a painful past in which they developed mechanisms to survive and protect us. It really does function like this. Our brains our often highjacked by inner children with individual wounds, moods, and unique impulses and survival strategies; these strategies are often in conflict with those derived by other parts, which can lead to frustrating patterns that make us feel stuck and miserable, and even our own worst enemies constantly sabotaging ourselves. Our inner wounded children are locked in time. We can think of them as stuck in various taping rooms in our brains in which they are 24/7 watching a video of an overwhelming event that happened decades ago (or a series of awful events thematically lumped together such as those supporting the narrative that “I am bad and need to constantly puppeteer myself to gain external approval”). Our inner children are triggered into action when something happens today that reminds them of something traumatic that happened in the past, a past that they are constantly reliving in their area of neurological dominion. For individuals with significant childhood wounding, they may constantly be governed by child parts and unaware of who they really are, or what the parasympathetic emotions listed above could feel like. When something occurs today that looks like, smells like or sounds like that horrible past video, our inner children assume that the present situation must be exactly the same as it was then (even though we are adults in charge of our lives who are not vulnerable in the way that we were as children). When reminded of the past, the triggered inner child assumes control in your brain and takes the steering wheel in your inner cockpit without even showing you what video they are playing. In a split second, this wounded child controls the story you are telling yourself about what is happening in the present and forces you to revert to the old strategies you developed in response to the initial catalyst, such as running away from an embarrassing scene, say a baseball gaff at age 10. Because this inner ten-year-old is stuck playing the video of that fated baseball game behind the scenes in your brain, it hasn’t had the capacity to develop a more mature response to perceived social humiliation, so all it knows to do today is run away or hide in plain sight in the face of anything it deems potentially shame-inducing. What this looks like is you freezing and avoiding eye contact when that “cool” coworker starts talking about weekend plans, protecting yourself by withdrawing and self-excluding because you assume they would never want to hang out with you (all because their mention of wanting to start an intramural team spurred your inner ten-year-old into action).

The strategies of our inner children were necessary at the time we developed them. Now, however, they constitute the symptoms for which many seek therapy in the first place. For example, putting pressure on yourself to be perfect at the age of five because this felt like the only way to get your critical father’s positive regard gave you some glimmers of love then, which you needed as a mammal oriented to social belonging and your parents’ attention for survival, but now this looks like stress and the inability to relax. Disassociating and trying to not feel emotion at the age of two in an acrimonious household when everyone was yelling may have allowed you to have preserved some childhood and innocence then but now looks like depression, numbing, and relying on substances to escape a life that actually could be really fun to experience today (were your wounded children to give you enough space to do so). Constantly having a plan and avoiding idle time is what helped you feel in control at age six when your parents consistently proved unreliable and distracted, but now this looks like anxiety and fear of the unknown. And so on and so forth.

Healing childhood wounding is less about focusing on discreet traumas, as is the case if someone feels safe most of their life and then gets into a serious car accident, to which they begin having flashbacks, but more about identifying and healing chronic unmet emotional needs. This is done via determining what you would have needed growing up to have felt safe. By imagining what life would have been like had you gotten what you, an innocent child, would have needed to have been able to be a kid uniquely responsible for kid things like creative expression and playing and being silly while the adults around you focused on the taking care of you part, we can change your story in the present. Recognizing (and grieving) that you didn’t get what you needed and really defining and feeling into exactly what you did need is akin to creating an alternative timeline for your life that meets in the same present but affords a new perspective on the future. We can mourn the past, and then notice that it’s the past, and it’s over. You aren’t beholden to those caregivers anymore, and you can be the inner parent now. You are responsible for your perspective on your current life, and you can orient your inner wounded children to the safe reality of your present existence. You can choose to live in a present and future in which you matter, in which you can safely connect with other people without needing to impress them first, and in which you deserve pleasure. You can live a life for you that allows you to feel happy.

If you continue trying to motivate yourself via the old ways of planning your life to a T or putting pressure on yourself to be perfect and impressive, you will stay stuck in a prison of your own making. Status orientation or pushing yourself like a machine may work to fuel you for a little while, but then you will inevitably confront the other wounded children within you who know that you will quickly burnout if the inner child currently in charge continues with this negative energy. Thus, a new wounded child will take charge and resort to the numbing strategies she developed at another traumatic point in childhood to try to halt the course charted by the pressure-imposing inner child. This often looks like a push and pull in which the pressure-oriented child in your consciousness joylessly yells at you to achieve something impressive until the evasive part of you grabs the steering wheel and slams on the breaks with ice cream, some other substance, or a TV show, also joylessly. But, if we proceed with agency because I deserve to live a life that is pleasurable and makes me feel good, all parts of our consciousness are reassured that there is a benevolent leader in charge and even our most risk-adverse ones can allow this authentic self to actualize our goals.

In practice, making this neurological shift is really hard to do because it feels like a really scary unknown. We really like familiarity, even if it is known misery. When proceeding from self-prioritization is entirely novel, this will specifically spook the part of you who likes being in control. Thus, this part may flirt with allowing more pleasure and space to matter in your life, but it will want to implement this change using its old survival strategy: having a clear plan. AKA, here is what we are going to do today to allow for more pleasure. The problem with this “clear plan” is that is is survival-oriented, because, for example, this was something a part of your brain began craving at age four in relation to parents who felt unreliable, either because they were preoccupied or overtly unsafe. A clear plan, then, cannot be part of the living a more pleasure-oriented life that actually resonates with you because it is safe to do so now picture because this picture is fueled by the memory of not actually feeling safe. So, we must first learn what it means to really feel emotionally safe.

Let me say this a different way. It can intellectually make sense to you that you will only get what you want in life if you try to motivate yourself to do so because you matter, but you must also truly embody this affirmation for it to guide you. Mattering means prioritizing yourself and your pleasure, which is very different from just saying these words to yourself from the same task-oriented, feeling-less part of your brain. Mattering is a sensorial experience felt in every cell of the body. If we spend five minutes on saying a mantra before rushing to do everything else in our lives as we normally would have, we aren’t living these words. Instead, we are setting ourselves up to believe we are failing therapy and will never change. Pushing ourselves to heal with a rigid agenda will lead to the same inner dynamics of pressure and evasion.  

Most readers can identify with liking planning, and most readers will thus have trouble truly shifting towards prioritizing pleasure and mattering (if this is not your case, you are one of the lucky few who will be able to skip right to the posts coming in the next sections of the blog). Many of us have had to survive by planning every step of our existence to hypervigilantly mitigate what were very real dangers in childhood. There are many dangers in childhood, and though the source is not one-size-fits-all, the effects are. Any of these look familiar? The dangers of being seen and ridiculed for who we were? The dangers of taking up too much space and threatening power-hungry caregivers or peers? The dangers of not taking up enough space and being made to feel unworthy? The dangers of striving to fit in with the wrong people and being rejected à la ugly duckling? The dangers of letting our guard down and being blind-sided by cruelty or physical danger? Steadfast control and scrutiny of our external environments were truly brilliant human adaptations. The less brilliant human adaptation is our brains’ reliving of the traumas and the conviction that we are still in danger. As every therapist loves to say, this made sense when humans were faced with the threat that a tiger could attack their campsite again and needed to be prepared for the same eventuality, but it does not today. Neurological evolution leaves a lot to be desired. The dangers of our childhoods are over now. We are grownups with agency and the capacity to handle all the things that felt life-ending historically.

Not only is maintaining a rigid, jacked up nervous system painful, alienating, and exhausting, but I hope I have clearly established by now that it also makes change impossible. But how on earth do we become flexible and open to a new, more enjoyable way of living if safety and trust feel foreign? At your core, there is a life-loving, pleasure-seeking true adult ready to take the wheel in your brain. All that needs to happen to let this part in is orienting the go-go-go [child] planner in your consciousness to the fact that they no longer live in a world in which other people have power over them by going all the way back to the beginning and giving them what they never got: safety.  

And when I say all the way back, I mean all the way back. You need to complete the first developmental task of human existence in order to feel safe, and this is nesting. By nesting, I mean the skill of learning how to feel cozy, comfortable, and at home in our bodies.The first life stage of nesting can be understood as the baby and infant stage of knowing we are safe. It is the stage of pure curious innocence, during which we are uniquely responsible for moving through the world mindfully, sensorily attuned to how things feel and what we like and don’t like. If we can reclaim this skill, we can derive the embodied capacity to care for ourselves, from which we then have the space to live from a place of I matter (and to deeply know who this ‘I’ even is). This enables us to follow wonder, leaning into what intrinsically interests and impassions us, rather than what we believe we must do to survive. Magically, once we reclaim this skill, life is suddenly fun, full and inspiring because we are living from our parasympathic nervous system, which connects us to play, interpersonal connection, and creativity, rather than the dorsal vagal and sympathetic fight-flight-freeze-fawn emphasis on warding off shame and perceived danger.

This really feels like magic because of how simple and yet drastic the changes noticed are. By going back to the basics and learning how to prioritize pleasure and physical comfort, we are claiming our birthright to feel safe belonging in this world. We don’t have to learn who we are or what we like from scratch thereafter. Nor do we have to painstakingly work our way through all of childhood and each trauma we endured until we get to the present (we may choose to do this work to deepen the foundation we are cultivating, but it won’t feel as urgent). Rather, we suddenly find ourselves with the missing nervous system puzzle piece that engenders us with the capacity to actually live and enjoy our present life, without constantly finding ourself panicked, stuck, or self-sabotoging whenever we try to actualize a goal.

So, what is this nesting exactly? It is exactly what it sounds like. I literally mean creating a cocoon for yourself in which you can learn what it would have been like to have gotten everything you needed in the love, nurturance, and nourishment department both in utero and in your first few years of life. This can be a pillow cave or some other cozy dwelling you set up for yourself in new bedding you buy specifically for this or in nature – or all of the above. Learning to nest will also touch upon the self-care you may usually gloss over. It will probably involve many aspects of comfort, including gentle, physical movement, healthy food and teas, physical touch, pleasing aromas, and time outdoors. Doing these things for yourself should never feel like pressure because what we are going for here is tapping into what your body intuitively craves, not what somebody online said to do. Listen to what true safe coziness feels like to you, not escaping or mimicking somebody else’s definition of healthy. Heeding your inner knowledge will likely feel entirely new and maybe even counter-cultural.

Definitely invite others to care for you as part of this endeavor (especially somatic practitioners, bodyworkers, and cranial-sacral-therapists), and work on feeling safe receiving this support. However, in order to truly master this developmental step, you will need to feel comfortable nesting on your own. For those of us who never learned to nest, establishing a comfortable place of rest will involve first moving through deep unrest and dysregulation before allowing the ease we would want to accompany something ostensibly relaxing, such as lying by the fire in a pillow fort. This is a necessary part of the process. If you learn to tolerate discomfort, you can move through what is preventing you from receiving the deep comfort your body yearns for the most. Once this happens, all parts of your consciousness will understand that the past is over and you truly do have the capacity to feel safe and at ease now.

It is up to you to determine what feels deeply soothing for you. It is then up to you to give this to yourself, daily, and for months until you can really soak it up. Like a broken record, work on feeling entitled to giving yourself pleasure, comfort, and love. You will know you are there once you can receive it without placing time limitations or qualifications of any sort on the experience.

I cannot emphasize enough that it is not frivolous or unproductive to focus on nesting and to stay in this developmental step until you can really lean into coziness from a place of I matter. You truly won’t be able to do anything else in an organized manner without this foundation. This fact is extremely frustrating for those of us who may have successfully soldiered through life as task-oriented perfectionists for twenty-some-odd years. Living for task completion and external validation really does work very well for some time. But, if true joy and feeling entitled to comfort are not part of the equation, we will inevitably get burnt out. Then, avoidant parts start rebelling against the rigor. Once this happens, the only way out of the standstill between pressure-based and evasive parts of our consciousness is to learn how to experience and marinate in safe pleasure. Then, armed with the completion of this first human task, we can go back to being an adult, and a much more effective one at that. We can still write that book or apply for that job. We don’t suddenly become a bliss head or ski bum. However, our motivation will have changed. It is no longer about doing things to be seen in pursuit of happiness, but rather doing things from happiness, because they feel good.

Having to go all the way back to completing baby milestones is also very frustrating to spiritualists. But we can’t spiritually bypass learning how to feel safe in our bodies and on this earth. We can attain the most transcendental heights in meditation yet not know how to have truly mature adult interactions in which we feel able to stay grounded and present regardless of who or what we are interacting with. If we are consistently blaming “triggering” others for sudden shifts in our moods, we lack an internal capacity to stay regulated. We are all humans, and we all need to achieve the first fundamental milestone of being a human in order to functionally live on this earth.