Tag: wisdom
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Was I An Overachiever or Really Just Trying to Prove My Worth?
“I spend an insane amount of time wondering if I’m doing it right. At some point I just remind myself that I’m doing my best. That is enough.” ~Myleik Teele
Just one more client. Just one more call. Just one more. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
Then, maybe, just maybe, I will feel validated. Worthy. Appreciated.
That’s how success works, right? Everyone has to like you, think you’re amazing, and recognize all of your hard work for you to be successful? I learned the hard way that this is the path to overwhelm, burnout, and a massive anxiety disorder. Because, you have to grind it out for that business; forget your physical, emotional, and mental health.
Let’s not scapegoat my business, however; my lack of self-worth started years, decades even before I opened my former company.
As the oldest of three, I was expected to achieve.
In middle school, I played competitively on an AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) basketball team. I remember never feeling good enough, tying my self-worth up in what my coach thought of me, if our team won or not, or if I scored a certain number of points. Something I loved became something I despised.
Playing basketball in high school left me feeling empty and like fraud. If I wasn’t the best, who was I? The performative pressure was suffocating.
The overachiever in me was never satisfied, never okay with mediocre.
In high school, I took the SAT three times to earn the scholarship I needed to pay for most of my education. I got into the top state schools and even some private colleges. I couldn’t apply to just one. I had to apply to just one more.
With each letter of acceptance, I felt validated. Like I actually belonged and that my life held meaning. Maybe then, when I got into my dream school, I would be worthy, and all of this anxiety would be worth it.
“Where are you going in the fall”? I remember not knowing how to answer that question.
Wanting to go to college and actually going were two very different things.
My parents sent me to a private college prep school, where we were practically reading through course catalogs freshman year. I thought it was something that was next in the sequence of achievements.
On the way home from a college tour in the spring, my mom told me I had to pay for room and board. I just had to figure out how. I ended up staying in my hometown and going to community college, which was a blow to my eighteen-year-old ego. I was devastated, angry with my parents, and frustrated about all the hard work I had put in with nothing to show for it.
My self-worth was in the tank; my need to prove myself was at an all-time high. So was that constant, chirping companion, anxiety.
After two years of community college, I transferred to a state college and chose education as my major. I wanted to be a leader, a catalyst for change, a visionary. I made the Dean’s list, worked my way through college, and even got married.
After I graduated, I taught physical education and was also athletic director of a grade school. I believed that by using my degree I worked so hard for, I would finally be happy and fulfilled. Instead, the position came with a principal who gaslit and bullied me daily, at the time taking away any joy that I had in my chosen field. But I had worked so hard for this. Shouldn’t that be enough?
Working hard was always a badge of honor I wore proudly; more accolades from others to put into the validation tank. All the while, I never felt worthy. As the things I’d worked so hard for were taken away from me, I began to wonder if success was even in the cards.
I felt lost. Undeserving. I was focused on my first year of marriage, teaching, and working on extended family relationships. Would I ever be accepted?
If I tried hard enough, they would like me, the overachiever in me believed.
But wait, was I really an overachiever? Maybe it was something deeper?
Was I just addicted to working hard because I was trying to prove my worth and gain approval?
With a full-blown anxiety disorder, depression, a drinking problem, and zero boundaries, I entered my thirties thinking that if I just made it in business, I would be whole.
What a crock.
The patriarchal standards I had tried to measure up to, were the same ones holding me back from living a life of peace. If I just, “hustled,” and “grinded,” despite the effects on my mental, emotional, and physical health, I could finally prove my worth. All that ended up proving was that mental health matters. My work is not my worthiness.
So how did I go from codependent thinking and seeking validation outside of myself to understanding that we are all born worthy?
First, I had to decide what really lights me up like a firecracker. Passion, playfulness, and purpose are lost when you were trained to look outside yourself for validation.
I’d spent my life focused on achievement. What did “success” even mean? It wasn’t until I was well into my thirties that I realized success, to me, means freedom, and freedom meant letting go.
I had to then get radically honest with myself about my upbringing, my relationships with family members, my belief system, and what I wanted out of life.
Did I really want to run the service-based business I’d started after I quit my teaching job, with several employees, ongoing calls and emails, that had me working holidays, nights, and weekends, and that left me in a people-pleasing tailspin on a regular basis?
My honest answer: No.
Relief washed over me. Not regret, longing, or sadness.
Relief.
I then realized I needed to let go of people-pleasing, overachieving, and the need for external validation in other aspects of my life, which meant doing some radical boundary setting and self-reflection.
Looking back through my years of wearing my hard work in school as a badge of honor, drowning in my former business like a sacrificial lamb, and navigating the sometimes-chaotic waters of a new marriage and family, I can finally understand that my worthiness doesn’t come from others. I am good enough as I am. My oneness comes from within, not from outside accolades.
Getting to the root cause of the unworthiness, worry, and workaholism was a deep dive into my childhood and young adulthood. I realized I carried toxic shame and guilt and believed that if I was just “enough,” I would be able to finally be free.
Turns out, the complete opposite is true. Chasing becomes all-encompassing. I had been treading water; doggie-paddling, not knowing that the pool of people-pleasing I was swimming in was keeping me stuck.
These days, creating takes the place of hard work, clarity takes the place of drinking to cope, and self-compassion takes the place of validation-seeking to prove my worth. And that toxic friend named Anxiety? She still likes to show up unannounced, but I have the self-acceptance and healthy internal dialogue to keep our interactions short.
Take it from this former overachiever: You are worth more than your work and your accomplishments. Just one more client? Just one more call? Not anymore. Now I just choose freedom.
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How I’ve Stopped Attracting One-Sided Relationships That Leave Me Feeling Empty
“Curiosity will save your soul.” ~Danielle LaPorte
When I was a young girl, about age five, my mother volunteered weekly at a nursing home. Because she was a stay-at-home mom, I was required to tag along with her.
While she would wheel all the residents into the front room and sing prayers and read devotionals, I simply couldn’t sit still for 2.5 seconds. I was a busy girl with an agenda. I had people to see and things to do.
Weekly, I would pop in and out of residents’ rooms while my mom banged on the piano down the hall. In and out of each room I would float, loaded with question upon question for each resident.
At the ripe age of five, I knew something about these people that many struggle to see. I didn’t see them as sick, helpless people preparing to leave this world.
Oh, I was fully aware that their last and final days would be spent in this place. I was fully aware that many of the folks sat day after day with no visitors, no family, and no sense of community. And while that broke my heart, I saw these people as productive individuals—teachers, attorneys, homemakers, and accountants who had stories to share and things to offer.
I saw them as humans who had contributed to society, using their gifts and talents to leave the world a better place.
I loved cruising those dark and dim hallways just to see who would make eye contact with me so I could strike up a conversation.
My curiosity wasn’t just contained to the hallways of the nursing homes. Many times, my mother would find me at a neighbor’s house down the street, following them along while they tilled or pulled weeds in their garden, asking question upon question to experience just a snippet of their worldview and hear their life stories.
Often, I think my mom was taken aback by this behavior, thinking it was intrusive rather than a gift. Many times, I was told not to bother folks or to be quiet. She didn’t do it to be coldhearted or cruel; I think sometimes my endless curiosity and questions just felt exhausting to her.
While I have come to see my curiosity as a beautiful gift and one of my strongest skills, I didn’t always see it that way.
In school, I was often told I was too social, too talkative, by teachers and coaches. My love and curiosity for others weren’t things a lot of other people appreciated. As a child who was also highly empathic, I felt everything. I was very attuned to other people’s feelings and emotions.
I didn’t really know what my boundaries were, and so I often was overly attuned to others and took responsibility for their emotions, neglecting my own needs and preferences.
Looking back, I can see how I have always been the cheerleader and the “yes girl” within my friend groups. I was the one who would rally the girls and include everyone because I believed from an early age that everyone mattered, and everyone’s story mattered.
And frankly, I am not willing to stop using this precious gift of mine. Holding back on using my curiosity in my relationships would be out of integrity for me and mean not showing up as my authentic self.
However, over these past few years my curiosity led me to realize that these relationships I seemed to care about so deeply were beginning to feel a bit one-sided. Most folks love being around me. I am fun, vibrant, always asking questions and always holding space for others. I love deep conversations and getting to know someone’s heart.
However, I started to realize that while I was getting to know someone, they really weren’t getting to know me.
I started to pay attention to how I felt after being around certain people. It was evident that when I would return home after time with particular friends, I felt empty. Sure, we may have had a “good time,” a few good laughs, but for me, something was missing.
I turned my own gift of curiosity on myself to explore what that might be.
I began to realize that many of my relationships were, in fact, one-sided. In order for a relationship to be healthy and to deepen, it has to go both ways.
While I love getting to know people and deeply understanding them, I crave and need to be known by the other person too.
I need my relationships to be two-sided.
Because that is a sign of a healthy relationship. Give and take. Two-sided. Holding space for one another.
It’s easy for me to allow my curiosity to run rampant when building relationships, but now that I am aware of this deep need within myself there are a few questions I ask myself before giving my time and energy away. Maybe these will be helpful to you too.
1. Do you take turns sharing about various aspects of your lives?
2. Do they know about your interests or struggles, just as you know about theirs?
3. Does this person reach out to you? Or are you the only one initiating?
If you want to develop healthy relationships, the first thing you have to do is to identify the unhealthy ones. It’s hard to forge healthy friendships if you’re spending all your time and energy on dead-end relationships. So while it never feels good to release old friendships, in order to make room for the new, sometimes you have to release the old.
Healthy relationships aren’t created by luck. They are created by knowing what you need and what matters to you and then seeking out or asking for that in your relationships.
Knowing and communicating our needs is key to intimacy and honesty in our relationships. When we take this step, we are actually teaching people how to be successful in a relationship with us. They get to decide if they have the capacity or desire to meet our needs. Their feedback is all we need to know to either move forward and create greater depth or back away, understanding that this may not be a friendship we want to invest a lot of energy into.
The truth is that for us recovering people-pleasers, we were often taught to:
- Be nice.
- Get along with others.
- Be polite.
- Never rock the boat.
However, being nice, having good manners, and working to make the waters smooth for other people is not how you make good friends. It’s how you become a wonderful houseguest.
I want more. And I want more for you.
I want us to learn how to move far away from toxic relationships and pull in healthy ones.
I want us to have friends who share in our heartaches and celebrate our successes.
I want us to have friends who know us inside and out.
In order to have relationships like that—even just one relationship like that—we are going to need to decide we deserve two-way relationships with people who cherish and adore us for who we are, and we’re not willing to settle for less.
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Dear Mom and Dad, Thank You for the Years of Trauma
“When you finally learn that a person’s behavior has more to do with their own internal struggle than you, you learn grace.” ~Allison Aars
I’m writing this to say thank you for the trauma you caused me since I was born. You might be thinking that I’m being sarcastic, but that’s far from the truth.
Let me explain why I have such gratitude for the pain and trauma you created in my life. Also, please understand that I forgive you.
Dad, I want to start with you because you’re no longer living. I know you’re now able to see the pain you caused.
When I witnessed the violence between you and mom, it caused years of anxiety and depression. I was no longer able to have friends at our house for fear violence and your drunken, angry rages might happen again.
That caused me difficulty in making friends, and that stayed with me for many years. It also taught me to pretend everything was okay and that we had a “good” family. I learned to live a lie.
Your depression made me believe there was something wrong with me. I thought I was the reason you rarely wanted to be around us. I falsely learned I was unlovable.
Your portrayal of being the victim in all of life’s situations taught me that others are always to blame for anything that goes wrong in life. Your self-hatred taught me to hate myself too.
The explosions of anger taught me that’s how you handle life. For years, I blew up on people when I was angry, then pretended it never happened. That cost me romantic and friend relationships for many years.
The embarrassment of your drunk episodes in public caused me a tremendous amount of shame. Not until I got much older, did I realize I shouldn’t be ashamed of something I had no control over.
Your absence throughout my teenage years resulted in seeking negative, unhealthy attention from men. When you attempted a return in my early twenties, you shamed me for being emotionally and physically scared of you.
Every new friendship or romantic relationship I had brought such dread. I knew at some point I’d be asked about my family.
Since I was emotionally unhealthy, I attracted unhealthy people. So, explaining how my alcoholic father wasn’t in my life was never received well.
The shame I had was only increased as I was told, “that’s your father. You should forgive him. Let him be in your life.”
Oh, how that brings up such sadness. I think about all the times I attempted to reconnect with you throughout my twenties. Each time I had high hopes that you’d changed, only to be let down further each time.
To say I had “Daddy Issues” was putting it lightly. Those “Daddy Issues” showed up in very harmful ways. I struggled with men in authority in work environments because of you. I don’t even have to mention again how much you affected my dating life.
Now, it’s time to address Mom and the trauma she caused. Also, I’m going to tell you how the two of you as a unit, also caused a lot of my trauma.
Mom, I have so much to say about the deep, emotional pain you caused and continue to cause. I used to think many of my struggles were a result of Dad. The older I get, the more I realize you’re responsible for more of my pain than Dad ever was.
Since I was just talking about the trauma Dad caused me, let’s talk about how you handled that. You taught me to pretend bad things never happened. Pretend everything is okay and no matter what, never talk about it.
The fear, shame, depression, and anxiety that caused was more than any child should ever endure. Not only that, but when I told you I was depressed as a young teen, you belittled me. Your response was that I had nothing to be depressed about and “to get over myself.”
All of that was incredibly painful, but there’s much more. Your inability to love me and show me affection was the biggest pain of all. Still to this day, even after having done so much healing, I’m still uncomfortable if somebody tries to hug me, other than my husband or baby.
You taught me to never show others that life is hard. Instead, act like we have a good life and that we’re the perfect family. I cringe just even typing that because it’s far from the truth.
As you know, because I’ve told you many times, marrying the man you chose after the divorce was also incredibly traumatic. Your happiness was your priority, not me.
I was a teenager. I still needed my mom, even though we had our issues. It appeared that I was tossed aside for him. You gave up on me. I was free to do anything I wanted to do because you were occupied with him.
I thought that was so much fun. Looking back, I realize how unhealthy and out of control I was. I had no rules and could do anything I wanted, and I did.
I’m still amazed that you married another alcoholic, but you refuse to acknowledge that. On top of that, he despises me and your entire family. I still remember having to load my little nieces up in their pajamas with no shoes to escape one of his childish tantrums aimed at them.
I could go on about my major life events you chose to miss because of him. As I mentioned, he made it clear that he hated me. I even remember you saying, “If you ever make me choose between him or you, I will always choose him.”
That still brings such sadness and pain. Being a mother now, I can’t imagine any circumstance where I’d choose anybody over my child. However, I see how different we are.
Mom and Dad, it’s now time to talk about how your unhealthy, dysfunctional marriage caused such pain. I never saw love between you.
What I saw was the two of you growing further and further away from each other. I saw that neither of you attempted any healing or got me help for the trauma you created.
Instead, we were supposed to ignore all the bad stuff. Never talk about it, no matter what. When I attempted to talk about my struggles and feelings, I was labeled as “dramatic” and “ridiculous.”
Healthy love and healthy relationships are two of the most important things parents should teach their children. Yes, I’m aware that very few parents actually do that.
That gets me to the gratitude I have for you both. The trauma you created is something in which I’ll forever be thankful.
Yes, you wouldn’t think that based on all that I have written thus far. I’m just asking that you bear with me.
For years, I was an angry person and mad at the world. Underneath that anger was depression and a belief that I was unlovable, not good enough for anything.
Due to my childhood trauma, I needed deep healing and years of therapy. I started that in my late twenties.
That process took me several long, hard years. I’m so grateful for the pain you caused. Also, your never getting help gave me guidance in how to do things differently.
The generational trauma has stopped with me. I will not pass on the behaviors that you both taught me.
As I continue my healing work, I can easily see the pain that both of you endured. I know that pain resulted in your hurting me. So, I’ll address you both individually for that.
Dad, I have such love and compassion for you. I know your father was an incredibly abusive alcoholic. He put so much of his not good enough stuff, those feelings of never being good enough, on you, which left you swimming in your insecurities.
I am pretty certain that your father hated himself. That’s probably how you learned to hate yourself, as I did from you.
When I think about your true soul identity, I see a soul with such love. Your true soul was kind and loving.
I remember you driving a girl home on my soccer team that you coached. It was always seemed odd that you dropped me off at home before taking her home.
Now, I know why. She lived in a dangerous area for us to be in, especially at night. The only way she could play soccer was if she had transportation.
You risked yourself driving her home but made sure I was safe. I know I have your loving nature. I love that about myself.
The reason you were an alcoholic was your own childhood. Sadly, you didn’t learn a better way. You repeated what you were shown.
It may seem odd but thank you for the life you chose resulting in my “daddy issues.” That was a beautiful gift that I needed.
Without that, I wouldn’t have married a loving, emotionally healthy man. Also, I wouldn’t have started my healing journey. Self-love would’ve never existed.
As for the childhood trauma you had, I know now you’re at peace. I know you’re proud of what I’m doing in life to heal the generational trauma you left and helping others do the same with my work. Just know the generational trauma will not continue.
Mom, it’s taken a lot more time to have gratitude for the emotional pain you caused. That’s probably because that pain is more recent and still occurs.
However, I now see the reasons you did all you did and continue to do. Acknowledging reality would be too much for you. You would crumble.
Also, I’m aware that your mother was unable to nurture and show you affection. You truly didn’t know how to love me in a healthy way.
I know that you’re not well emotionally. For that, I have such love and compassion. I’ve been there. It’s miserable.
Mom, I also know that you were taught that your image was the most important thing in life. Your behaviors to “protect” your image were simply your way of trying to prove to yourself and others that you were happy.
Due to the trauma, I had from both of you, I was able to learn how to create a life I truly love. Seeing both of you being so miserable showed me that I wanted more for myself.
The pain you two caused resulted in many beautiful things for me. The two things I’m most proud of in my life are results of learning to do things in a different way than I was shown.
Finding an emotionally available, loving, supportive husband was one of my biggest struggles. Fortunately, you two gave me a blueprint for what I didn’t want.
Many people follow in their parents’ footsteps when choosing a partner. Since the two of you showed me how an unhealthy marriage can destroy your life, I did a lot of healing before deciding to marry.
My gratitude for the emotional pain I endured from you two, led me to a promise to myself. I’d never have a child until I was in a good place with the ability to be a loving, nurturing, emotionally available mother.
Without that pain, I’d have never known how to meet my child’s emotional needs. There would’ve been no knowledge of what my baby needs from me.
For me, that’s the most beautiful gift you could have given me. Raising a baby who experiences unconditional love, acceptance and nurturing ends that generational trauma.
Yes, there are times where intense sadness and anger still pop up. However, I’ll continue to do my healing work that allows me to come back to this place of gratitude for you both.
So, hopefully you both see how much love and gratitude I have for you. At your soul levels, I know you have love for me. Showing that was not easy for either of you. Being lost in your own traumas meant you had no clue how to heal.
I truly thank you for creating the pain that led me to this beautiful life. Not only was I able to heal, but I’m now able to pass that on to the world through the work I do and raising my baby.
It’s taken me many years to say and truly mean this, but I wish you both peace and love. You both deserve that.
I know that neither of you intentionally caused me such pain. Also, apologies aren’t something either of you’ve ever been capable of giving.
That’s okay. Again, I know your own trauma prevents that. I forgive you anyway.
In conclusion, I love you both. Thank you for all you put me through because I now have a wonderful, happy life. That’s not something many can say.
Thank you for the hard lessons. Thank you for creating me. Thank you for being who you were or weren’t to me.
That was needed for me to now sit here with love in my heart for you. Forgiveness and gratitude are two things you both deserve.
Love,
Mary Beth
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All It Takes Is One Person to Start a Chain Reaction of Caring and Kindness
“People will never know how far a little kindness can go. You just may start a chain reaction.” ~Rachel Joy Scott
One afternoon a while back, after stepping onboard to a full train car with no available seats, I situated myself in the standing section.
A couple of stops later, two passengers vacated their seats, allowing me the chance to sit. I embraced the opportunity to people-watch. The woman in front of me began chapter four of her book, titled How to Jump for Your Life. The girl next to her alternated between the Tinder app and a school report. A little dog ruffed from the black duffel bag on the lap of the woman across the aisle from me.
One minute I was staring down at my iPhone screen—earphones in, listening to a podcast. The next I was looking up to a group of teenagers yelling at a middle-aged man. The man was seated next to his bike in the bike section. I didn’t see what he’d done to provoke them.
Their voices grew louder. Removing my earphones, I watched as the man stood up, chest puffed out. Barely an inch of space separated his face from the younger man’s. His opponent bridged this distance by stepping closer and punching him square in the eye. The older man hit back.
As the spat escalated into a physical altercation, each hit delivered with more force than the last, passengers (myself included) watched incredulously. Headlines broadcasting the recent senseless murder of Nia Wilson on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) flashed through my mind, and I wondered if one of these men would pull out a weapon.
I wondered how long they would fight for, and I wondered what would put an end to it. Was there anything we witnesses could or should do (and if so, what?)—or were we just captive audiences to the violent scene occurring in front of us?
Visibly shaken, and with tears in her eyes, a woman passenger with dark curly hair, who looked to be in her early thirties, got up from her seat. “Stop. STOP!” she yelled, her voice at once insistent and pleading.
About twenty seconds later the train came to its next stop, and the teenage boy and his group of friends ran off. The older man with the bike stayed behind—left side of his face twitching, injured eye watering heavily (he seemed unable to keep it open).
Though I’d witnessed violence like this on television, this was the first time I’d been so close to actual, real-life physical aggression. That the fight had occurred between real people rather than actors— powered by raw anger and heightened emotions—and that it hadn’t been manufactured for audiences to consume from behind a screen both jarred and disturbed me.
Still, the initial collective response seemed no different than had we all just watched a scene from Orange is the New Black together.
Some BART riders put their earphones back in. Others appeared minimally affected, yet still somewhat removed and distanced from the spectacle. Almost everyone remained seated.
Everyone except for one woman—the one who had been noticeably shaken by the altercation. The one who had cried and pleaded with the two men to stop.
This woman marched over to the intercom and reported the assault to the station agent, asking that he please send a person to attend to the injured man. She then sat with the man, allowing him to use her phone to provide his information to the police.
Once he hung up and handed her phone back to her, I felt suddenly compelled to leave my seat. The woman’s actions had emboldened me to push past my apprehensions. After getting up, I approached and offered the man some water to wash out his eye with.
And then I watched as other people followed suit.
One woman handed him eye-drops. Another conjured towelettes with disinfectant from her bag. A third offered Ibuprofen.
I observed, and felt calmed by, the prosocial Domino effect playing out in front of me. And the precipitator of it—that woman in her thirties with the dark curly hair—stayed in my mind for a long time after.
Since then, I’ve reflected a lot on the initial collective response. I don’t think it’s specific to our time; our desensitization in the presence of large groups of strangers is nothing new, as much as we might like to blame it on the disconnection from one another that technology has engendered.
What came to mind was the bystander effect, “a social psychological phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when other people are present” (Wikipedia). In short, according to this theory, the more people there are, the less likely it is that any one of them will step forward to help in a given situation.
One of the most famous examples of the bystander effect took place in 1964 Queens New York, when Kitty Genovese was brutally stabbed, sexually assaulted, and left to die while returning home from work on foot at 3 am. The New York Times reported that thirty-eight witnesses watched the stabbings and did not try to intervene. They did not call the police until the assailant was gone and Genovese had already passed away.
It’s disconcerting to read what the worst-case scenario of bystander effect can lead to, but at the same time I think we can glean a hopeful message from it. I think we can use it as evidence that any one of us may take it upon ourselves to model responsible, prosocial behavior for one another.
I think a lot of times people shut down and check out when they don’t see a way to be useful or help the situation. To me, it’s comforting to know that all it takes is one person to get the helping momentum going, though.
One person can drag us out of this paralysis by leading by example, perhaps motivating others to be that initial precipitator in a future scenario—the one who steps up and steps in, encouraging others to follow their lead.
Imagine what the world would be like if we all did just that?
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The Many Shades of Support: Everyone Shows Up for Us in Different Ways
“Empathy has no script. There is no right way or wrong way to do it. It’s simply listening, holding space, withholding judgment, emotionally connecting, and communicating that incredibly healing message of ‘You’re not alone.’” ~Brené Brown
What do a pregnancy test, a wheelchair, and an Airbnb have in common? The answer is this story.
In February 2019, one night before I was to get on a flight for my first ever trip to Paris, with my sister and best friend, I took a pregnancy test and it read… positive.
Excited? Worried? Anxious? I was all of the above.
You see, I have a history of early pregnancy loss, at least one of which has been an ectopic pregnancy. This means that for me, every positive pregnancy test is considered high risk because ectopic pregnancies can be fatal.
Normally, I would have to notify my doctor about the positive pregnancy test. Then, they would test my blood for pregnancy hormones every two days to keep an eye on the trend. The direction of the numbers tells us whether we should expect a normal pregnancy or a miscarriage or suspect an ectopic pregnancy.
Well, in this case, I wouldn’t be doing that… because, well, Paris.
Another consequence of my history of recurrent miscarriage is that I never tell anyone, other than my husband, when I test positive for pregnancy. I usually lose the pregnancies so quickly that it’s not worth the shame and emotional rollercoaster to have other people involved.
So, when I boarded that plane to Paris, my sister and best friend had no single idea that I was a ticking time bomb.
The festivities commenced.
One night near the end of our weeklong trip, I was standing in the kitchen of our Airbnb when all of a sudden, it felt like a dagger had been hurled through the right side of my groin.
I dropped to my hands and knees.
In between the stabs of pain and trying to catch my breath, the alarm bells started going off in my head.
The girls immediately came running over. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
I managed to get out the words “Call my husband. Tell him what’s going on.”
They called him and he told them that I would need to get to a hospital immediately … in Paris … where none of us spoke French.
Luckily, our Airbnb host, an American expat, lived in the same building and was an absolute angel. She responded when they called and then quickly escorted us to the nearest hospital and even stayed around to translate for me.
We were in those waiting rooms for hours.
At some point in the middle of all the ruckus, I had had to come clean to the girls. Sheepishly, I explained that I had had a positive pregnancy test and it was possible that I was having another ectopic pregnancy. (They knew about my first one and understood the gravity of this emergency).
When the seriousness of the situation became clear, shock initially brought them all into silence.
Soon after, my best friend sprung into action. She was offering encouragement and consolatory back rubs and updating my husband every few minutes. I can’t quite remember how many cups of water she offered me.
My sister, on the other hand, my own flesh and blood, had no words. The few that she had, awkwardly dripped from her mouth—“Do you … need anything?” She had this shocked and frightened look stamped permanently across her face for the whole ordeal.
There is one moment that I can’t forget, however.
When they finally brought a wheelchair to wheel me down to the OB/GYN side of the hospital, someone else attempted to take hold of the wheelchair, and she quickly said “No” and rushed in.
She planted her hands on those wheelchair handles and didn’t let go as we silently walked down the long, cold, concrete corridor to the other side of the hospital.
Our Airbnb host eventually returned home to her son.
But as for my sister and my best friend? They were there all night into the wee hours of the morning.
In those uncomfortable waiting room chairs. While it was cold. Despite hunger. Without asking why I hadn’t told them ahead of time. And without once making me feel guilty about the obvious demise of the rest of our trip.We eventually went home and took flights back to our respective cities.
A couple days after we had returned to the US, my sister called me to see how I was feeling.
After giving her the updates, she offered an apology. She said that she was sorry if she hadn’t said or done the right things. She admitted that she didn’t know the right thing to say and felt bad that my best friend had been so much more proactive.
I was happy to reassure her that she had done exactly what I needed at that time.
You see, she was there. And she stayed there. Without complaint. Without exception. Without excuse. She was there. And that was all I needed from her at that time.
My best friend also did exactly what she needed to do. She offered comfort and tried to advocate for me as much as she could. She gave me everything that was within her capacity in that moment.
And I don’t take either response for granted.
You see, when it comes to support, there is no one right way to do it. It means different things to different people in different situations.
In any given moment, the support of a loved one can mean a word of encouragement or a pot of food. It can mean buying something from your friend’s new business at full price. It can mean connecting them to resources, driving them where they need to be, a hug, and it can mean just being there.
Sometimes we underestimate the power of just holding space. Even though oftentimes, that is enough.
And for those in the position to receive support, it’s important to remember that the people that love you all have different capacities for supporting you at any given time. Show them grace and be thankful for how much or how little they can offer you.
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How a Highly Sensitive Person Can Get Over a Breakup And Move On
“A shoutout to everyone who is trying right now… Trying to do the right thing. Trying to stay open. Trying to keep going. Trying to hold on. Trying to let go. Trying to find their flow. Trying to stay afloat. Trying to meet each new day. Trying to find their balance. Trying to love themselves. Trying new things and new ways. I see you. I’m there too. We’re in this together.” ~S.C. Lourie
Breakups are devastating, and the pain is real. But if you’re a highly sensitive person (HSP), it can take an extreme toll on your system because HSPs feel everything twice as deeply.
For the HSP, the pain of a breakup can be completely overwhelming and trigger a heightened emotional state.
When a relationship ends, it can make you feel insignificant. Regardless of who initiated the ending, you experience a tremendous impact in your life that can drive you into despair, confusion, and rage. Not only do you feel emotionally affected, but you may feel as if you are physically wounded as well.
My whole world came crashing down when my partner went radio silent. He refused to answer my texts and avoided any form of contact. I felt lost and confused, not knowing what to do or where to turn. Each day felt harder than the day before.
I knew for months that things were not going well, but I was clinging on to hope that the situation would somehow improve. When my partner left without a word, I knew that was the end. I did not get any closure, not that I require it because I realized it would not make me feel even the least bit better even if I did.
I’ve heard stories from fellow HSPs who took a long time to get over a breakup, and I didn’t want that same experience for myself. But the pain of dragging my broken heart around and the intense emotional stress were not getting any easier on me.
A day felt like a month, and I wasn’t sure I could survive until the end of the month because the experience was so devastating. I wanted to get over to the other side quickly and get on with my life.
These are the steps that helped me recover within a shorter time than I feared it would it take.
1. Forcing Myself to Get Out
When the realization that we’d never be together again hit my brain multiple times a day, I lost functionality. My entire system broke down. I could not think clearly or act normally. All I wanted to do was vegetate and cry, which only made the situation worse.
To reset my brain, I tried to get out of the house as often as I could. My body and brain would fight me. I was already exhausted and feeling hopeless. It took a tremendous amount of willpower to drag myself out of bed. The moment I succeeded, I realized it wasn’t half as bad as I thought it would be. I just had to win the mind game.
I engaged in simple activities such as dropping in for a cup of coffee at the local café, taking a drive to nowhere, sitting alone watching children play in the park, or just enjoying the sunset. Beauty has a way of distracting us from our thoughts and soothing our nervous system. It drew my mind temporarily away from the problem and provided relief at the moment.
2. Affirming My Self Worth
Whenever my mind started reminding me it was over, I blamed myself. I imagined there was something I could have done differently. Or that it was my fault it had happened. I beat myself up and placed the entire burden on my shoulders.
Knowing there was nothing I could do to reverse the situation, I attempted to tell myself a different story, even though I did not believe it in the beginning. I assured myself I was worthy of love, that I deserved to have someone love me as I was, and I required no validation from others to feel good about myself. I made those affirmations out loud so I could hear myself speak.
In the beginning, it was a struggle. I would sneer, criticize, or ridicule myself every time I said an affirmation because I did not believe my own words. I persisted between tears and disbelief. Thankfully, it got better over time. Gradually I stopped criticizing myself and what remained were purely affirmations. As I continued to hear myself speak, I gained my own acceptance.
3. Practicing Self-Compassion
Research suggests that practicing self-compassion can help us become better adjusted and significantly improve our mental health. But it doesn’t come easily to HSPs.
We tend to have unlimited compassion for everyone else but struggle to offer the same compassion to ourselves. We often judge ourselves as weak when we’re struggling with emotional pain. But that’s when we need self-compassion the most.
As I gradually came to terms with reality, I indulged in more positive self-talk. I spoke to myself as I would my best friend. I told myself that I was the main character in my story, and I needed to heal. Despite what was going on, I assured myself I could feel better and rise above the situation.
I focused on myself, telling myself that I would get out of this episode just fine. I convinced myself that soon, the pain would go away, and the awful feelings would end. Again, in the beginning, there were no significant changes. I persisted and gradually experienced mental clarity that showed me I was on the right path.
4. Dealing With Relapse
As I began to heal, I noticed the gap between the time I crumbled and the time I could hold up became further apart. It was not uncommon for me to break down multiple times throughout the day. Sometimes, I managed to get by without crying for an entire day. To me, that was a breakthrough because it showed a marked improvement.
Some days I unexpectedly suffered a relapse after a period that I thought was an improvement. That took me completely by surprise. Gradually, I accepted that I was still in the process of healing, and that it was normal for my brain to revert to the lingering memory.
When that happened, I revisited what I practiced earlier—getting out, affirming my self-worth, and practicing self-compassion. Self-talk was a crucial part of my healing process.
I had to listen to my own words long enough to believe they were true. I had to avoid giving in to the mental chatter about my role in the breakup and my worth.
We generally act on what we believe about ourselves. If we believe we deserve to hurt, we don’t do the things we need to do to heal.
Moving On With My Life
In slightly less than two months, I woke up with no brain fog and was able to go through an entire day without breaking down. I was able to resume my normal activities and focus on the day ahead.
For me, the whole healing process was a battle of willpower. Some days were tranquil, although most days were difficult. Typically, it was one step forward and two steps backward. Whenever I struggled, I reminded myself that I wanted to heal and feel better. That generally got me on my feet and out of the house.
A breakup can have a huge impact on a highly sensitive person, since we are more susceptible to stress and extreme anxiety. Although healing takes time and often we have to allow nature to run its course, there is no need to prolong the pain longer than necessary.
Once you decide you are ready to receive healing and do everything you need to accommodate the process, you can come out of the episode faster and move on with your life.
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The Messiness of Being Human and Why We Shouldn’t Judge Each Other
“Those who understand will never judge, and those who judge will never understand.” ~Wilson Kanadi
I’m waiting for my mother’s nurse to pick up. The hospital recording has been on a loop for twenty minutes: “Our hospital is committed to integrity, to the destitute, the sick. Our physicians and nurses have trained at some of the most prestigious colleges in the country. Our patients’ health and comfort is our #1 priority.”
The woman on the recording sounds so clear and passionate. I can picture her in the recording studio. Maybe she had to audition for the part. Maybe she got paid a lot of money to say these things. Finally, a nurse picks up. She sounds exhausted. Would never have gotten the part.
“Has anyone been in to see my mother? She’s hysterical and can’t breathe.”
“Your mother is getting a new nurse.”
“But the nurse I spoke with earlier said she was on her way with meds!”
“Someone will be there within the hour.”
“She’s got to suffer for an hour?”
“Someone will be there as soon as they can.”
“That’s not what your hospital recording says!”
The nurse takes a deep breath. “Oh god,” she mutters. Then I hear the phone land on a hard surface.
I know from experience what happens when the recording ends. When the recording ends, individuals take over.
Recordings are usually neat and tidy. Real individuals are not. There may still be a commitment to life, to kindness, but unscripted commitments are harder to decipher. I think because behind the slogans and edited promises, everyone has to deal with their own relationship between the way we are told things are going to be and the way things are.
My mother, for example, has a slogan that goes something like: I am a strong as sh*t individual with impeccable judgment. And she often is. But behind the scenes, in the moments of reality when whatever pain sets in and there’s no one around to slogan to, she cannot handle her anxiety and has a tendency to drink herself nearly to death and wind up in the hospital on life support.
Me, for example, when I’m writing this, I’m pretty grounded in my ideas for about ten minutes at a time. But in between those moments, when the vastness of everything collides with the tininess of who I think I am, when my insane restlessness causes unbearable pain, I clench and then go to places like Amazon to look for things to better organize my pantry.
I think of the nurse, obviously in no mood to hear about slogans. Perhaps she hasn’t slept in days and has been taking care of so many sick and destitute people that she has not been able to take care of herself. Maybe I caught her at one of those moments when she didn’t have enough energy to pretend to be a spokesperson for anything. Who knows what people have to deal with behind their job descriptions?
There’s the slogan, and then the fractaling inward to a more intimate reality, to those minutes in secrecy behind all closed doors, where there are individuals dealing with themselves and other individuals.
My mother’s neighbor has visited my mother every day in the hospital. He cares about my mother. And yet, he’s the one who gives her the vodka. He says he figures if she doesn’t get it from him, she’ll get it from someone else. He doesn’t think of himself as being a bad person; he’s just doing what he does based on the equipment and experiences he has.
Just like the woman who called from the Special Olympics on the other line who got upset with me because I didn’t have time to listen to her slogan. “Thanks a lot,” she told me. “Now I won’t meet my quota.”
I laughed to myself, thinking I must be attracting every fed-up person in the country. And I couldn’t wait to dismiss her as horrible, to throw her in that bin in my mind where ridiculously horrible people go. But if I dismissed everyone for being horrible, who would be left? Not even me. And I wouldn’t be able to call anyone to commiserate with, because they’d all be in my trash can.
I think my expectations for people were learned from television. I grew up on television. Life on television always had a beginning, middle, and end, then applause and credits. People on television were always who they said they were, and if they weren’t, everyone would band together and help get them back.
I remember when the television shows would end, resenting the real people around me for not being recognizable from one day to the next. What I didn’t realize was that the people on television were dependent on a budget, on someone to write their lines, on rehearsals. I didn’t understand that in real life people were dealing with their own thoughts and doing their best to express them in some manner that didn’t get them made fun of, divorced, in jail, or all alone.
In reality, things are messy. In reality, the judgments we make of each other are judgments based on each other’s slogans and worldly circumstances.
I think of this wealthy relative of mine who says things like, “I feel so badly for your mother. It’s so sad.” And then I think of my mother, who says about this same person, “That poor sap. I am so grateful not to be her. She’s never had to survive any sort of malignancy. She’s just so blasé. So benign.”
Sometimes I don’t think we really know each other. At best, I think we know our experiences of each other. Or maybe, just our experiences of ourselves experiencing each other. Perhaps the only way to really and truly be neat and tidy is to admit that we’re not. When we are honest about our shortcomings, maybe then we become real. And when we are real, maybe then we can be there for each other in ways that don’t disappoint as much.
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Why Fibromyalgia Is the Greatest Gift of My Life
“The wound is the place where the light enters you.” ~Rumi
TRIGGER WARNING: This article contains discussions of difficult topics, including suicidal depression and a fatal car accident.
I’ve always been an active, athletic person. In my twenties I was huge in tennis, squash, and swimming, and I began every morning with an intense workout that cleared my head and let me confront the day’s challenges with a relaxed, positive attitude. So, when I started experiencing mysterious pains and fatigue that didn’t go away no matter how much sleep I got, my life was turned upside down.
After two years of doctors’ visits, I finally received the earth-shattering diagnosis: fibromyalgia. My worst nightmare had come true. The doctors told me I would have to stop exercising as all the sports I loved are hard on your joints, and according to them I needed to take it easy. But physical activity was my life, and I quickly found that “taking it easy” was emotionally devastating for me.
Without my workout routine, my depression and anxiety spiraled out of control. I couldn’t find meaning or purpose in my day-to-day life anymore. The days blurred together, and all the energy I usually released through exercise turned inward, against me, in the form of daily panic attacks.
Worse than anything was the sense that my body—my best friend and my #1 support system for so many years—had betrayed me. And on top of this, the symptoms of my fibromyalgia were not getting better despite the enormous sacrifice I had made of giving up exercise. In fact, they were getting worse.
My turning point came several years after my diagnosis, when I was in my early thirties.
My condition had continued to decline, and I was ready to give up—on my body, on myself, and on life. It’s not something you can really understand unless you’ve experienced it yourself, but I had reached a point where I had no interest and no motivation to go on living. The uphill battle just wasn’t worth it to me anymore.
I remember the moment like it was yesterday. It was nighttime, pouring rain outside my third-story bedroom. I opened the window, put my head outside, and screamed from the top of my lungs into the howling wind: “Why, God, why do I have to go through this?” Then, overtaken by a sudden urge, I lifted my leg to climb out of the window, to fall to my death and put myself out of this agony.
At that moment, something happened that I still, to this day, cannot rationally explain. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a child standing by my side—a child I quickly recognized as the younger version of myself.
She looked up at me with pleading eyes and begged me to keep going. She told me to go back to my workout, that exercise would be my remedy, and that fibromyalgia, my greatest struggle, would lead me to my destiny.
I closed my window, feeling like I had just woken up from a dream. That night I made the choice not to give up on my life, somehow knowing my story would not and could not end here. I realized I had more to offer—instead of turning my misery into someone else’s grief, I could turn it into a gift that I could share with the world.
Although I had promised my friends and family that I would take it easy and not work out anymore, the next day I spent an hour swimming at the public pool. While I was there, I shared my story with a lifeguard who in turn shared some unexpected wisdom with me: “A doctor reads the book, memorizes it, and repeats it to the patient, but the patient knows her body.”
His words resonated with me. I started doing a mild exercise routine: a few hours a day of swimming, which was easier on my joints than tennis or squash. After a while, I decided to retry some of the other sports I had loved to play before my diagnosis and found that, as long as I was careful, I could enjoy them without too much pain. The trick was knowing my body—learning and recognizing its warning signs, keeping a close eye on how I felt, and not letting myself overdo it.
The young girl, the one who had stopped me from taking my own life, was right: exercise was my remedy.
My mental health started to improve, and while I was still experiencing body aches, swollen joints, and all the other joys of my disease, I had a renewed, intentional outlook that made them possible to manage. I couldn’t choose to live my life without pain, but I could choose to live it without suffering.
I will not lie to you and tell you it was a smooth recovery. I had bad days—days where all I could do was curl up in bed and cry, days spent feeling sorry for myself and angry at the universe. Days where my symptoms got so bad that I forgot all about my positive mindset and the mission I had set for myself, to turn my struggle into something positive and use it to help others.
I experienced a serious setback when, almost ten years after my diagnosis, I was driving with my best friend and we got into a horrific car accident. I was the one at fault. My friend, who was thrown from the car, ended up being declared brain dead at the hospital; I myself suffered severe injuries that badly worsened my fibromyalgia symptoms, and I was told by doctors that I would likely have to start using a wheelchair if my condition did not improve.
(Incidentally, while receiving psychiatric treatment for extreme suicidality in the days following my accident, I was also diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia—a fact that might once have given me consolation or comfort in understanding why I am the way I am, but given the circumstances, only served to depress me further.)
My physical decline combined with the trauma of causing my friend’s death was more than I could bear, and I again spiraled into hopeless agony. It was one of the darkest periods of my life, even worse than the few years after I was first diagnosed with fibromyalgia. But I did not succumb to misery as I almost had back then. And now, looking back, I see why.
This disease, and my active and consistent determination to make the best of a bad situation, had given me the best possible tools to deal with whatever hardship came my way.
I was in worse physical and emotional shape than ever before. But years ago I had made a choice to keep going, and followed through with that choice for many years, and because of this my mind was in perfect shape to keep me from falling apart when I hit rock bottom.
So I kept going. Through my tears and my pain, I got up each morning and faced the day, whether I wanted to or not. Not only did I continue working out, I became certified as a yoga and Pilates instructor. It was during this time that I got my black belt in Taekwondo, though it took me six years. I even started working as a fitness trainer, finding that my experience with fibromyalgia gave me a unique perspective on physical and mental health that my clients appreciated.
This realization was the beginning of a much larger realization about the struggles each of us will face in our lives.
First, setbacks are an inevitable part of any recovery process.
If you’re not seeing forward progress on a day-to-day basis, that doesn’t mean you’re not still moving forward! I went through long periods of nothing but bad days, but I wasn’t giving up, and that’s what mattered. Continuing to fight is an active choice—you are making progress every day that you choose to stay alive.
Second, no matter what you’re dealing with, you have the power to turn it into something amazing.
Fibromyalgia made me a better, more compassionate, and more open person, allowing me to connect with people on a deeper level and help them more than I could before. It opened up opportunities and put me on personal and career paths I would never have followed otherwise. It taught me patience, gratitude, and—more than anything—that I am capable of so much more than I think.
Fibromyalgia has been the greatest gift of my life, but I need you to understand that it is a gift because I chose to turn it into one. The universe handed me an awful situation, and as you now know, I came close—too close—to letting it destroy me. It was my own decision to turn my pain into the blessing that it has become, for myself and for those around me.
Life is full of hardships, but the incredible thing about being human is that we have the ability to choose how we respond to them. You can choose to fall apart, or you can choose to turn your pain into a gift.
What will you choose?
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Disordered Eating: What We Need to Understand and How to Heal
“Food can distract you from your pain but food cannot take away your pain.” ~Karen Salmansohn
Long before I was watching The Biggest Loser (a popular weight loss reality TV series) and trying to look like a swimsuit model, I was hiding in my closet eating candy, fiercely addicted to sugar.
I remember feeling completely out of control over my cravings for all things sweet, and I didn’t know how to stop myself from eating until I felt sick. Food played a bigger role in my life than simply to support the processes in my body that lead to optimal health. To my “child self,” who wasn’t sure the world was a safe and welcoming place, food was a lifeboat.
No little kid imagines, “Oh, it would be fun to starve myself and see what happens!” Or enjoys waking up in the middle of the night to work out for hours for the reward of being “loved” by those around them. But when faced with adversity in childhood, our number one goal is to survive, and in order to do so, we look for ways to reassure ourselves that we have some element of control.
I grasped for anything I could to create a sense of agency and stability in my life, but at the cost of disconnecting from my inner wisdom and abandoning the core of who I was created to be. I was trying to survive by becoming less. Less of myself, less visible to the world around me, while at the same time crying out to be seen.
As you consider your own childhood experiences with food, notice any emotions that come forward. How old were you? What was the backdrop in which these early experiences with food occurred?
As I reflect on my own food story, I see how my emotional pain and a complicated relationship with food became intertwined. It was one of the only levers I could pull to manage the chaos both in my home and within myself.
What appeared on the surface as a “fear of food” was in truth a fear of feeling. Feeling meant facing the ache of growing up in a home where strong emotions were suppressed, intuition ignored, and many conversations critical for the healthy maturation process of an adolescent, avoided.
For example, any discussion around the topic of sexuality and what it meant to embody and express mine, was considered “taboo,” and shameful in the highly religious culture of my upbringing. Therefore, it is no coincidence my disordered eating patterns surfaced in tandem with my body’s transition into puberty.
The changes in my body, at that time, felt terrifying, and the disordered eating served as an attempt to shut down the process of sexual maturation—a means to avoid the shame of being “sexual.”
In my rehabilitation process from anorexia, bulimia, and orthorexia I found again and again that behind a binge, purge, or restrictive behavior was often a deep emotional pain I felt ill-equipped to meet and care for in a healing manner.
Disordered eating was “pain-management.” Albeit not the most effective strategy for coping with distress, but it was the one I knew inside and out.
The first time I recall recognizing disordered eating as a way to handle emotional turmoil, I was sitting in therapy feeling guarded and hesitant to believe that the healing answers lived anywhere in that room. I didn’t fully understand why I was there, aside from being told it was the “right” thing to do to get professional help.
The therapist looked at me with concern in her eyes and asked, as if the answer should be simple, “Why are you so afraid of food? Why the eating disorder?”
Now, I’d been asked that question by many well-meaning, worried adults before, but on this day, I felt an unexpected flood of emotion rise within, and fighting back tears, I replied,
“I’m not afraid of food. I’m afraid my parents will divorce.”
The moment the words left my mouth, I realized the question my heart had been desiring for someone to ask all along was: “Why the pain?”
Think back to your childhood home and the role food played, beyond physical sustenance.
Was food a reward for good behavior?
Did food cause fights between your parents (i.e., one parent burns dinner, and the other explodes in anger)?
Was food used as a way to “regulate” you—help you “calm down,” feel comforted when you were sad, or numb pain?
When you faced challenges, was food more available than the ears of the adults in your life?
Did you feel safe in your childhood home to express internal pain?
Furthermore, if you grew up in an intense emotional climate, and your primary caregivers lacked the level of consciousness, and resources, to support you in learning healthy emotional regulation, food might have been the only “state-changer” (the only thing to take the edge off painful experiences) available. Food was your therapy.
Emotions ended up being “fed” instead of felt. Eating became a way to cope with the feelings that seemed out of control in your life. Instead of fueling your body with the building blocks required for healing, you ate to numb your pain.
Hear me when I say, there is no shame if you find yourself here—if you’re still stuck in the cycle of using food to survive your own emotional experience. You’re worthy of self-compassion—to be able to look back at your younger self and appreciate the ways you managed the pain you faced, with the resources you had. Whole-body rehabilitation starts by offering gentleness toward oneself.
Another critical component of healing is giving yourself permission to have the conversations with yourself that, as a child, you didn’t or couldn’t have with others, but longed to. Doing so aids in establishing a “safe” environment within yourself for healing to flow. Set yourself free to explore any and every question that feels important to you.
As I mentioned earlier, for me one such conversation was around what it meant to be a sexual being. For you this might mean exploring the confusion you felt when your parents split and the challenges you faced adjusting to new blended family dynamics, the loneliness you experienced as a child because it was hard for you to make friends, or a sense of shame about your family’s socioeconomic status.
And if it was normal in your family of origin to bury and suppress half of the emotional spectrum, as it was in mine, especially the feelings that are uncomfortable, that require deeper self-inquiry, think about whether this culture aligns with your core values, now.
What culture do you desire to cultivate for your future self around navigating emotional pain? This is your opportunity to excavate a new tunnel from which to travel from emotional pain to healing, for you and generations after you!
Right now, you have an opportunity to build trust with yourself by committing to allowing every emotion to be experienced. What is one emotion that you believed as a child was “off limits?” What would change today if you allowed yourself to experience that emotion—to permit its flow through you?
Listen to the little voice within you, with your heart wide open. Witness yourself. Be the listening ear you longed for when things first got “complicated” with food. Only then can you ask your younger self if they’re ready to entertain some alternative strategies, besides food, to help scary emotions move through the body.
And when you are ready, here are some of the beautiful practices I have found on my own healing journey, that aid in building a space where the body feels free to release big feelings:
1. Jin Shin Jyutsu- Finger Holding Practice
This Japanese healing technique works to calm your energetic body. The practice involves holding each finger for one to three minutes on one hand, then repeating on the other hand. Each finger represents a different emotion:
Thumb- Worry
Pointer Finger- Fear
Middle Finger- Anger
Ring Finger- Insecurity and grief
Pinkie- Self-confidence
2. The 4-7-8 Breath or “Relaxing Breath”
One benefit of this breath practice is its ability to strengthen “vagal tone.” The Vagus Nerve is the longest group of nerves in the body, running from your brain to your gut, and it is a key component in the activation of your parasympathetic nervous system—the branch of the autonomic nervous system that promotes the resting, digesting, and repairing in the body. Improving vagal tone can play a role in reducing stress and anxiety as well as:
- Improve digestive health
- Increase HRV (Heart Rate Variability)
- And lower levels of inflammation in the body
3. Walking outside barefoot
Reconnecting to our roots, putting feet to earth, and absorbing the healing nutrients it has to offer can do a world of healing. When you put your bare feet on the earth, the electrical current coming from the ground contains an abundance of negative ions that are then absorbed by your skin and dispersed throughout the body. These negatively charged ions have been shown in clinical research to promote greater physical and psychological well-being.
Try one or all of the techniques listed above to reconnect to your emotional body, ground yourself, and release stuck feelings. Notice any shifts you experience as a result.
The goal is to start to create an environment of safety for your inner child to explore the previously forbidden emotions, without fear of abandonment or shame.
No different from any other coping strategy, disordered eating can be a means to try to create the safety within that we lacked in our outside world early on in life. But there are other interventions, such as the ones mentioned above, that can offer a sense of safety without harm.
Recovering from disordered eating comes back to finding healing ways to be there for your emotions, rather than numb them with food restriction, binging, or purging. Because it’s really not about the food at all. It’s about becoming the friend your body longed for in your most painful moments.
Give your body a safe place to express, let go, and experience, without judgment, the total expanse of feelings that come with being human, and watch your relationship with food transform as a side effect.
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3 Reasons Why It’s Hard to Set Boundaries and What to Do About It
“Care what other people think, and you will forever be their prisoner.” ~Lao Tzu
I love this quote because it is such truth. But I also recognize the difficulty and the uncomfortable feelings that arise when working toward living this quote.
There’s a reason why it feels so hard to set healthy boundaries, and that is what this article is going to show you.
Discovery #1: Understanding our hard wiring
Our minds were not created to care about healthy boundaries. Say what? Let me explain.
From the beginning of time, we humans were hard wired for connection. We are not solitary creatures; we are similar to herd animals. Back in the caveman days, we needed a hive or a pack because we were more powerful when we were together. If we didn’t lean on our tribe, we were eaten by a saber tooth tiger.
We were built to care about others, to rely on others, to let others watch out for our safety and for us to watch out for them too. Staying in our herd, our hive, our pack, our tribe is how we stayed safe. And it worked!
Our tribe was important to us back then for our survival. If your pack wasn’t happy with you, you were outta there. Your tribe is what kept you alive, and so the human brain learned, “Oh, we must keep people happy with us and then we get to live.”
If you struggle with people-pleasing, I hope you will understand that we come by our people-pleasing instincts naturally. They are quite literally part of our survival set up. It is part of being human. It is perfectly normal to have the urge to people-please.
Wanting to serve and please others is a perfectly good and often wonderful thing. The problem with people-pleasing in today’s world is when we don’t have good boundaries to go with it.
Our brain today says, “Let’s do whatever keeps the tribe happy. Let’s do whatever we need to, to be part of the gang.” Most of the time that looks like acquiescing, going along to get along, and doing whatever we can to “not upset the apple cart.”
As children we gain information from all types of sources around us—our traumas, personality, health status, our race, ethnicity, gender, family of origin, our class, economic status, and more! Each one of these alone comes with a handbag of rules that instruct us how to behave, act, what to think and what to say in order to please our tribe. Our poor mind has to put all of these pieces together somehow in a way that makes sense and keeps us alive.
Discovery #2: The Rulebook
In essence, our sweet mind creates a sort of rule book in terms of what will keep us safe. We start to notice from the time we are small that if our people are not happy with us, we do not feel safe. We start to notice this in our bodies, our feelings, the look on someone’s face, the tone, what is not being said, the iciness of the room.
When we are children, we are 100% dependent on our caregivers. They are quite literally everything to us. Remember the tribe, the pack, the hive that I talked about earlier? Well, to our little toddler minds, they are our first tribe.
It is our caregivers’ job to mirror to us who we are in the world. And hopefully with healthy caregivers, we are shown that we are loved, cherished, worthy, important. This is what creates our self-esteem. This is what relays the message to us that we matter.
This gets written into the rule book or the rolodex file of our little child brain.
However, many folks did not grow up this way. Those of us who may have grown up with caregivers who were harsh, unloving, absent, unpredictable, neglectful, and even abusive, their little, sweet mind recorded a whole different set of rules into the rulebook of life.
It may sound something like I am not loveable, I don’t matter, I’m a nuisance, I am a bother, I should never take up space. It might sound like I’m loved as long as I’m good, or performing, or agreeable.
(Please note, much of the time our parents did the best they could with the skills and tools that they had in their awareness. However, to our innocent, little, childlike selves, it simply wasn’t the message that we needed. The message was misconstrued, and we wound up feeling as though we somehow did not matter).
Often this gets passed down generation after generation.
So now are you starting to understand that the mind’s idea of boundaries is to do whatever it needs to do to keep you alive?
Perhaps when you were little, if you were constantly told to be quiet, that you were too loud, too much, or to simply go away, then the mind created a belief that came into agreement with this. A rule was filed away that it was better to not disrespect your elders and continue to be loud or to take up space.
The problem is that of course this is nonsense (you were just being a sweet and normal child), but you never questioned the rule. You questioned Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. Yet, you never stopped or questioned your rules or beliefs about yourself. You wrote those things in the rule book as absolute truth.
Your mind doesn’t care that you are older now and that the situation is different now. To the mind, a rule is a rule. And remember what happened to humans who questioned the rules in the past? They didn’t survive!
Let me tell you a little bit about my own rulebook…
Several years ago, I was deeply terrified of what other people thought of me. Growing up in a small town, it was written in my rulebook that all eyes were on you. Boundaries were one of my biggest struggles because it meant breaking free of the people-pleasing pattern in order to speak my truth.
Having struggled with codependent patterns and low self-esteem, I didn’t even know what my truth was, what my needs and values were, or what mattered to me.
What I did know was that I needed people to like me, to not talk ill of me and to think of me in a certain way—nice, kind, giving, good.
I couldn’t excuse myself from a phone conversation.
I couldn’t end playdates at the time I needed to even if my kids were throwing a full-blown temper tantrum.
I couldn’t remove myself from a conversation that made me uncomfortable because of the topic.
I laughed at jokes that, deep down, I found offensive.
I agreed with others’ opinions because I either didn’t know my opinion or if I did, I didn’t feel confident sharing it.
I talked incessantly because silence felt unbearable.
I couldn’t even be on time, because I was rushing from one activity to the next, just trying to show face and that I was doing my part to be the nice girl and make everyone around me feel good.
Speaking my truth was so uncomfortable that many years ago I actually had a seven-hour coffee date. I didn’t want a seven-hour coffee date. The idea was come over for a couple hours, chit chat a bit, and move on with our day.
However, this woman arrived promptly right after the kiddos left on the school bus in the morning and was still there when they got home on said school bus at 3:30pm.
I can recall the massive headache I felt because I wanted so badly to ask her leave and tell her I had things to do, but I couldn’t.
I remember that I never invited her back again, even though she was a great gal in many ways. I was clueless in how to handle these situations, so my answer was to cut the relationship off and move forward by avoiding her.
At the time I was a young mom with a husband who worked long hours, and I often felt lonely. I wanted so badly to connect with other women and be a part of a community, and I thought the way to connection was through self-abandoning any of my needs so that I could focus on appeasing what other people in my life needed.
This was all written in my rulebook. All of this worrying about what others thought and not wanting to upset anyone caused me severe stress, anxiety, and overwhelm.
I was trying to function on fried adrenals and walking on eggshells. I was unhappy, and it showed up in my relationship with my partner, my kids, and mostly, the relationship I had with myself. But there was something always driving me to keep pleasing, keep appeasing, and that leads me to our next discovery.
Discovery #3: But why do I always feel so guilty?
Why do we feel so darn guilty when we try to set a boundary? Well, anytime we step outside the rulebook, the mind pushes a great big, huge alarm bell.
Remember, our mind thinks that this is a rule created for our safety. I share this because hopefully you can start to relax and realize that there is absolutely nothing wrong with you. The mind simply is perceiving danger.
From there we may experience bodily reactions—our palms get sweaty, we have a million butterflies in our stomach, our temperature rises, our throat constricts.
Our brain’s one and only job is to keep us alive, so it often uses guilt to get us to acquiesce and once again, go along to get along.
How many times have you been invited to a baby shower or a barbecue on a Saturday and absolutely dreaded it? You’ve worked fifty hours this week, you coached soccer two nights, ran the carpool this week, and are utterly exhausted. You know you need a day to get caught up, sleep in, and take a little time to yourself. But there it is—guilt lurking around the corner, “What will Aunt Betty think if you don’t show your face at Cousin Amy’s shower?”
That guilt pushes on you, making you feel as if you are doing something wrong. So, what do you do? You RSVP that you will gladly be there. Oh, and you will also make and bring the punch.
Pretty effective strategy to get you to follow the rules, right?
This is why boundaries feel so challenging. Because they are not part of our original hardwiring.
So where do we start if we want to set healthy boundaries?
1. Understand that boundaries are first and foremost an internal job.
Yes, we create parameters and limits with institutions and people. But ultimately, before we can ever do that, we have to start on the inside.
When we aren’t taught how to properly do the internal work, our boundaries come off as rigid walls and we are left isolated and lonely. I have been that person because I didn’t understand what boundaries were, how to set them, and I certainly wasn’t going to entertain any sort of an uncomfortable conversation that looked like any type of repair or reconciliation work. I was left alone and miserable.
Boundary work starts by addressing our own issues. And as the inner work is done and healing occurs, it organically flows into changed outer behaviors, habits, and choices. We can be empowered to have loving and compassionate conversations that build bridges of connection rather than walls of isolation.
2. You have to realize that boundaries are in fact healthy.
If you don’t believe this then it will be hard to lean into them. Make the agreement right now, or work toward believing, that setting boundaries is healthy for you to do.
3. You have to know your needs.
Do you know your needs? Have you ever thought about them? Many people don’t, so if you haven’t, know that it’s not uncommon.
Start by thinking of what a “good” parent would do for their child. What needs do they help their child remember to meet? I.E., even if the child does not want to go to bed, they help them to calm down and go to sleep. Start by making a list of the needs a good parent will help a child to meet.
When you’re done with that list, circle the needs that you are not meeting for yourself (or inconsistently meeting).
For each circled need, respond to the following questions:
- How do I respond to this need?
- What gets in the way of responsiveness or consistency?
- How do I respond to other people when they have this need?
- How would my life improve if I responded to this need?
For each need, create an intention that you will honor by setting boundaries if necessary. Focus on one intention a week to get a need met more fully and consistently. I know you want to do more, but remember, your mind will fight you because it wants you simply to stay safe and alive. It will douse you with that guilt working you toward acquiescing and shape shifting, so let’s just focus on nailing one for now. Keeping it simple is key!
Write out your intentions weekly by finishing the sentence stem:
My intentions are:
If you’re working to build up the strength to bring more integrity to your relationships and set healthy boundaries, please understand that you don’t have to go it alone. Be consistent and trust that your hard work in your boundary journey will pay off.
