From Self-Doubt to Self-Trust: An embodied approach
Self doubt... It can rear its head and leave you feeling crippled, at loss, and unsure of where to turn. Spiralling into shame and sucking all your power away.
What am I doing wrong? What’s wrong with me? Why don’t they like me?
Does it sound familiar?
These thought loops can cut pretty deep, the inner critic is HARSH.
And yes, absolutely these thoughts visit me too. Time and time again, just last week, just a moment ago in all it’s variations. So know this, you definitely aren’t alone!
I don’t know if we ever discover a place of complete and utter self-belief that follows us 100% of the time. Personally I think this is what human existence, and meeting growth edges is about. Each opportunity for expansion requires some gentle tension.
It’s critical to know that you will encounter these down periods in your life. Getting to know your own patterns, and your own personal makeup of bodily cues and messages is great emotional intelligence, and as you begin to learn and to train your skills to move through them you develop increasing levels of emotional fitness, allowing you to move through the next period of shame/self-doubt/name your poison more quickly.
How I move through the discomfort
When I’m in it, in the thick heaviness and the thought loops, I don’t find it helps to rationalise myself out of it.
I keep in check my mind’s tendency to analyse, and analyse. For I now very well that the brain can play a multitude of tricks, with the ability to justify just about anything, and can send us spiralling down rabbit warrens to who’s know where in a mere instant.
The body however, doesn’t lie.
Depth before Direction
I’ve come to appreciate that my thoughts, while significant in determining my behaviour and my health, are not in charge of the responses that are going on in my body. Rather through emotional awareness and sensitivity to my inner world I am aware that I’ve been triggered and have either spiralled up into frantic worry, or down into melancholic sorrow. I know that this doesn’t necessarily mean anything rather than my nervous system has been kicked into gear and is trying to keep me safe from the threat my body had perceived.
There’s a few common options here:
Going into analysis paralysis and trying to work out the original core incident that created this tendency, or unpicking the trigger from back to front.
Choosing a mantra or affirmation. Reversing the thoughts to “I am enough”. “I am loved”.
Meditating, or trying to chill out
Ignoring it, zoning out or numbing out
BUT
Analysis Paralysis just has you butting up thought against thought, and your brain is clever enough to get you caught into a loop that supports whatever story you’ve internalised about yourself.
Mantra’s and affirmations or any other version of these are like sweet icing, something that doesn’t have any substance, and that can actually make you feel worse as you create greater dissonance between what’s playing out in your mind, and what’s percolating in your body and nervous system.
Meditating, again might not be the most useful thing for your nervous system, or to complete the response that’s ticking through. In a way it’s a another form of checking-out and disassociating from what’s going on. Yes absolutely relaxation works wonders to restore and recalibrate, but it might not be appropriate in the moment.
Numbing out, well, enough said. There’s a myriad of coping mechanisms from exercise to Ecstasy, shopping to sugar, all variations of the same thing - avoiding what you’re feeling and chasing a different endorphin promoting feeling instead.
The one we shy away from the most is also the one that is most effective and efficient in moving it. That is to fully feel it.
Feeling It
So we don’t push the self-doubt, or the heaviness away, we don’t try to reverse it, or wash it away, instead we create the space to feel it.
I feel everywhere it there is contraction, everywhere that I’m trying to let shame be felt, the constriction in my throat, the stuck-ness in my solar plexus, the bruise in my heart, the tight fear in my sacral area.... and I start here.
It’s amazing what our body can tell us if we only choose to listen.
So I feel into it, with curiosity and compassion, and feel the pain, and feel the emotion and I feel safe to do this because
a) I know that we physically can’t feel these emotions for very long if we allow them fully
b) my body will only allow me to feel what I am capable of feeling
c) I retain agency, I am the one doing the feeling not anyone else
d) I keep to the principle of slowly and gently is better than hard and fast.
I am fully in the moment when I feel, I feel my inner world and the emotions that bubble through without judging them, and I feel the sensations without trying to make sense of them, or work out what they mean. I just let it move through my body and trust my body’s genius and self-healing wisdom.
When we allow our deepest hurts and pain the time to be acknowledged, and expressed, then this energy has a chance of loosening, and being released into our natural energetic flow, rather than keeping another brick of unnecessary tension and constriction in our bodies.
Once I feel that my body has expressed I allow time to integrate. Then I slowly bring myself back through breath. Long, deep cleansing breaths to nourish me and hold me and centre me.
Emotional Fitness
I take this experience on, and develop greater emotional fitness in doing so, with this opportunity to integrate my body and mind wisdom. I am thankful for my courage in choosing to pay attention instead of not running from them. In facing the self-doubt and allowing what is ultimately momentary discomfort and pain to be felt it becomes less terrible and less hidden. I learn what self-doubt feels like, I learn what it needs. With this knowledge I can choose to support myself as only I know how.
This might be doing some inner child work, it might be reaching for a disconfirming experience, or out to a friend to help me gain perspective and co-regulate, it might be reassessing who and what I’m surrounding myself by, and choosing what supports me, instead of erodes me and choosing Me first.
Depth before direction
But remember, we first need to go deep before we move forward. We need to pay attention to the body and the messages it sends us first. We need to recalibrate before we choose our next step less we keep wading through the same mess. Our body is our primal being, it is an ancient store of wisdom and holds the experiences of our entire life. It is time it is centred in our lives once again.
This work of meeting ourselves and loving ourselves back into our true nature is a continuous journey. I don’t believe we will ever be fully ‘awoke’ or without something to shed light on, and work through. I believe that this is our path as humans. This is actually what we live for, to become more of ourselves, to love more of ourselves, to connect more deeply, and to feel unapologetically expressed as our true nature.
May every step you take, be a step further into your truth. May every leap you take move you deeper into the sacred.
The world needs more embodied womxn.
xo Jess