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.