Why you aren’t holding yourself back
Fears, blocks, resistance, self-sabotaging... are anyone of us immune?
Maybe you have a health goal, but you can’t help yourself from snacking on your favourite treats.
You might be wanting to bring a passion project to life, but you seem to find yourself doing everything but that.
Looking at your finances, asking for a promotion at work, or setting a boundary with a loved one, all sending you into a cold sweat so you just avoid them.
So nothing changes. And you feel stuck. And frustrated at yourself, and a little bit ashamed that you can’t do better.
That you just keep getting in your own way.
But.
There’s something much deeper going on here, that developed for a very good reason.
And I’d like to invite you to a new way of looking at yourself and your behaviours.
You are not holding yourself back.
Let’s take a really tangible situation that many may be able to relate to: Public Speaking.
If you feel comfortable , I invite you to close your eyes a moment and imagine you have a speech to give this week. A few hundred people are going to have their eyes and ears all tuned to you.
How do you feel in your body?
You might notice a flush come to your face? Perhaps a twinge of tension has come to your neck and shoulders and you hunch over? Your heart rate has escalated? Tension in the jaw?
What are you believing about yourself in this moment?
You might feel silly. Perhaps you feel weak for not having the confidence and aptitude that you witness in others. Maybe small, and not enough?
What is your typical behavioural response?
In the lead up we may tend towards:
Perfectionism – researching, writing, revising and practicing the speech over and over again, impacting on other work, sleep, or social plans
Procrastination – finding the washing, or a phone call to make, or a bill to be paid every time you go to sit down instead
Avoidance – totally blocking it from your mind until the day of.
Equally we might find ourselves numbing out and pushing down our feelings:
Eating more, turning to carbs and sweet things
Going on an online shopping binge
Losing ourselves in our phones more than usual
Overreacting to minor things.
Spacing out.
What’s going on?
We might tend to call the fear that arises a block, the beliefs that we think about ourselves as limiting, and the behaviours we take on as self-sabotaging.
And ultimately, we feel a bit silly and ashamed about it all – like we should know and do better.
But the thing is that every response makes perfect sense.
What we see as resistance, blocks, and self-sabotaging behaviours are actually adaptive and instinctive responses that are trying to keep us safe from a perceived threat.
Threat?
Let’s talk trauma
Now, you might be thinking that this blog post has gone way off topic, and you don’t hold trauma.
But I’d gently disagree.
I believe we all hold trauma.
Trauma is so very misunderstood.
We often limit it to big T trauma, the events that anyone would consider extremely distressing. But there’s also little-t trauma, for example, the dismissal from a parent as a little girl, or the taunts from a sibling. And we all hold emotional trauma similar to this to some degree or another.
In addition, there is the additional societal, cultural, ancestral, and familial trauma’s that have been handed down to us as well.
Ok, but how does trauma I barely even remember impact my life now?
Meet Your Inner Child
Our individual and inherited experiences, remembered or not, are stored deep in our subconscious brain, and inform us as to what is safe and not safe.
For example, if we’ve been banished by our primary caregivers for speaking out then we are left with an imprint in our nervous system that registers that speaking our minds is unsafe. The experience of the collective feminine during the witch trials leaves the imprint that if we have an opinion, or a passion to pursue we risk death.
These imprints can stay stuck in subconscious and in our nervous systems, and we can be triggered by seemingly unrelated situations, or by ways that we don’t understand, and we respond with adaptive survival seeking behaviours, the same way we did as a little girl.
And this response comes from deep inside our ancestral, reptilian brain which is solely focused on automatic self-preserving behaviour patterns. When triggered our reptilian brain hijacks our neo-cortex, the newest and most advanced part of our brain responsible for conscious thought, language and reasoning.
Your self-sabotaging, resistance, and blocks are actually brilliantly designed survival mechanisms that are keeping you safe.
Everything you do makes sense.
So despite our cognitive brain telling ourselves that we can do it somewhere in our body lives the little girl, that sends us the message that no, it’s not safe, and our unconscious guides us to avoid encountering the threat.
Why Mindset Work Doesn’t Work
The trauma response is triggered from a place deep in our primal brains, our subconscious, and our bodies. Not our minds.
We can tell ourselves all the wonderful things to focus on when we go to deliver that speech. Yet we will still go to sit down to write or practice the speech to only find ourselves folding the washing. We will still find our faces flush and our hearts race, because our subconscious is focused on preparing to respond to the threat.
Self-Sabotage & Why we eat our feelings
Our survival responses are entirely unconscious.
And we don’t like them. It feels uncomfortable to feel ourselves feeling small, it feels uncomfortable to have our hearts race, to feel fear and anxiety flush our systems. Human beings are hardwired to avoid the uncomfortable.
So we’ve developed an equally understandable behaviour response – to numb them.
There are a myriad of wonderful ways to numb, from sugar to shopping to sex, to cleaning the house, brushing our teeth, going for a jog, hitting the gym, having an argument, biting our nails, eating the entire tub of icecream while watching Netflix.
Our cognitive, conscious brains can’t make sense or easily control these because this they do not come from our cognitive brains.
Every action, thought, belief you hold makes perfect sense. You are not flawed. You do not need fixing. You are not holding yourself back.
So how do I move forward?
By bringing your body on board, and choosing a body-led, trauma-informed approach.
One that allows you to befriend your nervous system to support you to reach your goals, to discover your body’s unique story, to gently release the trauma it holds, and find flow and freedom again and to compassionately work with your fears, blocks and resistances as beautiful adaptive responses.
It takes a lot of courage to choose to work with the trauma that lies in your body, but it’s so worth it.
That’s where freedom lies.