_______ I often hide or change “shameful” parts of myself to try to be more like those I idealize.
_______ I overlook any flaws or issues in my loved ones and tend to focus solely on their positive aspects.
Empowerment Pause Exercise
As we’ve been learning, our experience of life is shaped by and filtered through our conditioned brain. Gaining awareness of our habitual reactions and patterns empowers us to start shaping and creating the experiences we want to have instead of feeling stuck, unfulfilled, or powerless in our circumstances. This empowerment comes from an area of our brain known as the prefrontal cortex, which controls our intentional responses, along with our ability to plan, focus our attention, curb our impulses, delay gratification, predict consequences, and manage our emotional reactions.
You can begin to practice activating your prefrontal cortex by taking a moment to pause before reacting to the thoughts, feelings, and impulses that come and go throughout your day. This practice can enable you to gain awareness of your reactivity and create a space in which to choose new, more intentional responses.
The following exploratory questions and exercises can help you explore your own experiences with reactivity and responsiveness. Spend time thinking about and writing down your thoughts and feelings in a separate notebook or journal if helpful.
Take a moment to call to mind a time when you found yourself instantly or explosively reacting to an experience without giving your behavior much thought and explore the following questions:
How do you physically feel during and after this moment of reactivity?
How do you emotionally feel about yourself and any others who may be involved in this moment of reactivity?
Take a moment to call to mind a time when you experienced another’s instant and explosive reaction to an experience and explore the following questions:
How do you physically feel during and after experiencing another’s reactivity?
How do you emotionally feel about yourself and the individual who was reactive?
Take a moment to call to mind a time when you found yourself able to remain grounded in your responses or choices and explore the following questions:
How do you physically feel during and after this moment of responsiveness?
How do you emotionally feel about yourself and about any others who may be involved in this moment of responsiveness?
Remember, there are no “right” or “wrong” answers; the work to consciously change our conditioned patterns and habits begins with this self-exploration, which can be empowering in and of itself. When we’re able to gain conscious awareness of our conditioned habits, we can begin to make intentional choices within our relationships instead of constantly reacting to and re-creating our old childhood wounds. We can then curiously explore the different ways the roles we’ve played since childhood may not be serving our authentic Selves or our relationships. This work to integrate our conditioned selves helps restore our sense of safety and security, regardless of what’s happening with others in our lives. Creating safety and security for ourselves through our daily choices creates new neural pathways in our brain. Over time and with consistent repetition, these new neural pathways can become permanent and the habits associated with them instinctual.
This doesn’t mean that you won’t ever repeat conditioned thoughts, feelings, or reactions again or won’t feel instinctively pulled back to your familiar habits. Becoming conscious of your conditioned self or selves means that you will gain access to new choices that will better align you with who you are, who you want to be, and the people and relationship dynamics that will truly fulfill you. And as I imagine you may not be surprised to hear, it is a regulated nervous system that gives you access to these new choices. We’ll begin our journey to regulate your nervous system in the next chapter where we’ll continue to explore the life-changing practice of body consciousness.
5
Harnessing the Wisdom of Your Body
Before we dive deeper into body consciousness, let’s take a few moments for a brief exercise to help you reconnect with your body exactly as it feels right now.
Starting with the top of your head, begin to notice any tension you may be holding in your muscles (jaw, neck, shoulders, lower back, legs, and so on). Breathe slowly and deeply into any areas of tightness or constriction, releasing your jaw and flattening your tongue if it is touching the roof of your mouth, lowering your shoulders and rolling them down your back if they are raised or hunched forward, and releasing any tension in any other muscles. Take another moment or two to notice any shifts or changes in your mental or emotional state after relaxing your body in this way.
Many of you may have probably discovered stress or tension you hadn’t previously noticed. Some of you may have even found it difficult to feel your body at all in this moment. Though this exercise may not seem to have anything to do with solving issues in your relationships, it’s actually a critical piece of the puzzle. As you’ll discover throughout this chapter, true physical and emotional safety and security begins in our body, and until we can feel this safety and security within ourselves, we can’t feel safe and secure with others.
When I was young, I adapted to my stressful environment by disconnecting from my physical body as a survival strategy and ignored the signals it was constantly sending me. I was unaware of when my muscles were tense or my breathing was quick and shallow—a state that continued well into adulthood, preventing me from recognizing what my body needed as well as what I was actually feeling. You see, our physical sensations play an important role in our emotional life, communicating our body’s ongoing assessment of our environment to our brain. But I was too disembodied to feel anything, living most of my life in my head, cut off from my physical self.
Being in my body felt unsafe mainly because it was unfamiliar and therefore uncomfortable. When I was a child, no one modeled for me what it was like to feel safe and secure living in a physical body. Instead, I was exposed to body shaming and insecurity in my home. My mom and sister were always on a diet or adopting other food-restrictive behaviors. They were critical of their own bodies and those of others around them, and my mom often commented on any weight gain or changes in body size of anyone in the family, including herself.
As I got older, uncomfortable in my own skin and growing more intolerant of feeling the sensations in my stressed body, I closed myself off from the physical aspects of my existence. Even though I desperately wanted to feel emotionally connected with others, I wasn’t connected to my physical self to access my emotions in a way that would allow me to bond with another person. The reality was, I had difficulty feeling anything at all.
It took me years to develop a state of body consciousness, or to become aware of my body’s physical sensations so that I could start to regulate my nervous system consciously and intentionally. Because most of us didn’t grow up in safe homes or have safe and secure relationships with others, we continue to live with nervous system dysregulation that keeps us disconnected from both our inner and outer worlds.
WHAT IS BODY CONSCIOUSNESS?
We are all aware that we have a physical body. We use it for almost everything we do and generally know how it feels when we walk, sit, sleep, work out, have sex, hold hands, eat food, drink wine, run in the rain, dance in the snow, or nap in the sun. Many of us are conscious of our body’s basic needs on a fundamental level: we’re usually aware when we’re hungry, thirsty, tired, sick, or injured. Some of us may even be focused on our body’s well-being and try to eat healthfully, exercise, get enough sleep, or adopt other habits that we think can improve how our body looks or feels.
Even those of us who are health minded, though, are rarely body conscious or aware of how safe or unsafe we feel in our physical self. The term body consciousness, as I use it in this book, does not mean a state of self-consciousness about or hyperawareness of how our body looks, whether to ourselves or to others. Instead, it describes our ability to sense what’s happening within our body.
We develop body consciousness when we enhance our ability to witness our physical sensations, then use this sensory input to help regulate our nervous system and our behavioral responses. Learning to identify when our nervous system is stressed creates the opportunity for us to shift ourselves out of a reactive, avoidant, or dissociated state into a more open and receptive one. As we become more attuned to our physical sensations, we can begin to discern not only obvious signs of physical stress, like the rate of our heartbeat or breathing, but more subtle signals, like if our energy is light, heavy, calm, or agitated; if our shoulders are hunched or straight; if we are speaking softly or loudly, quickly or slowly; and if we can maintain eye contact or smile easily.
These sensations may seem unremarkable, but they reflect the state of our nervous system while also communicating information to our brain that helps determine our emotions. When we’re able to consciously perceive these sensory shifts, we can begin to understand the emotional messages they send our brain. With this awareness, we can give ourselves the space to calm down when we know we’re activated and the opportunity to create safety by using the intentional mind-body techniques we’ll talk about later in this chapter.
Maintaining a consistent state of body consciousness isn’t easy. The stress and trauma stored in our body affects our ability to pay attention to our current experiences. Most of the time, our mind is reacting to the stress and tension stored in our body, causing our mind to wander and us to struggle to focus on the present moment and be fully aware of what’s happening in and around us. Because of these stress-induced thought spirals, few of us are truly present in our body during our daily life; instead, we’re in our mind, racing through thoughts about the past or trying to predict the future. While it can be helpful to reflect on the past or imagine the future at times, we need to be immersed in the present moment and connected with our body in order to be truly in our own presence. And if we’re constantly focusing on what someone else is thinking or feeling about or around us, we may never know how we really feel being in their presence.
In addition to the impact of this stored stress in our bodies, some of us have learned body-shaming habits from the cultural and societal messages we have been exposed to. The lack of diversity in skin color, ethnicity, body size, and physical ability in television, media, and movies has deeply impacted our body-based beliefs, sending the subconscious message that there is an ideal version of who is acceptable, attractive, or desirable. If our body’s skin tone, shape, or functioning is different, we may struggle to feel safe and accepted because of our natural physical appearance and our stress response may remain chronically activated.
Physical touch is universally important to all human beings, helping to comfort and soothe our emotional experiences. However, it is our individual experiences with touch (or the lack thereof) that can cause us to have conflicting feelings about physical contact that can lead to confusion, anxiety, and ultimately unmet needs. In order to feel comfortable being physically close with another, we first have to feel comfortable with our own body. To do so, we need to learn how to trust in our ability to stay connected with our own body and safe within our own boundaries as we move physically closer to one another. Knowing that we can stop or slow down whenever we want allows us to expand our ability to be physically soothed, comforted, and even stimulated by another.
If we have a dysregulated nervous system, as most of us do, spending any amount of time noticing our body won’t immediately feel safe to us. Feeling unsafe is why so many of us disconnect from our body in the first place, living inside our head instead. And many of us may notice that we continue to avoid those sensations that are connected to emotional memories that are too deeply uncomfortable to endure.
YOUR EMOTIONS BEGIN IN YOUR BODY
Emotions are part of our shared humanity. They color and give meaning to our life, guide us, and make us feel alive. From an evolutionary perspective, emotions help us interpret our environment so that we can identify threats and stay safe. The more quickly we’re able to register fear or signal the presence of a threat to others, the safer we’ll remain as individuals and groups.
Though the words emotions and feelings are often used interchangeably, they describe two different phenomena. Emotions are our subconscious reactions to our physical sensations, and feelings are our conscious experience of our body’s sensations.
Most people assume that our thoughts create our emotions and our emotions define who we are at any given moment: I think this emotion, and this emotion makes me me. If I tend to think sad or depressing thoughts, I might assume that this makes me a sad or depressed person. Or if I think angry, anxious, or worrying thoughts, it makes me an angry, anxious, or worried person.
Many of us also assume that what’s happening around us or in our immediate external environment causes our emotions: This situation now is causing me to feel X, Y, or Z. We often think that someone else made us feel a certain way: What you’re doing now is making me to feel this way. It’s empowering to realize that these assumptions aren’t true. Emotions aren’t facts or even accurate representations of what’s happening to us. In fact, most of the time, our emotions aren’t even reactions to what’s going on in the present moment.19
