Smile to increase your production of feel-good serotonin and dopamine.
Soothe your brain and body by listening to the sounds of nature (raindrops, gusts of wind, bird’s chirping, etc.) or to music specifically created to calm the nervous system, like binaural beats or solfeggio frequencies.
Listen to music to shift your mood by choosing tunes that match your current emotional state or energy. If you feel upset, sad, or angry, picking music that allows your brain to access these emotions can help support their flow through your body. Over time, once these emotions begin to release, you can gradually shift into listening to more upbeat or happy music to help increase your dopamine level and decrease your cortisol level.
Calm your nervous system by co-regulating with a pet: pet or cuddle your own, offer to walk a friend’s dog, or volunteer at a local animal shelter.
BOUNDARY SETTING
Boundaries are protective limits that we set with others to help us meet our body’s physical and emotional needs, which helps create safety for our nervous system. We can set physical boundaries by eating what and when we want, going to bed when we choose, and prioritizing how and when we exercise. We can set emotional boundaries by saying no to people, events, situations, or tasks when we don’t have the energetic, attentional, or emotional resources for them, even if the people we love are asking for our support. We can set these boundaries when we begin to feel on edge, are irritable with others, feel overwhelmed or on the verge of tears without explicit reason or cause, or are unable to think or express ourselves clearly.
Boundaries are choices we make for ourselves, not ultimatums we give to others. When we ask ourselves what we can change to help feel physically or emotionally different, we empower ourselves to ensure our own safety and security, regardless of what’s happening (or not happening) around us. Setting limits in these instances can also help us replenish our energy so that we can be there for our loved ones in the future. Recognize, too, that our boundaries can change depending on our emotional state, how connected we feel to the person we’re interacting with, and our body’s energetic resources, including the amount of stored stress or tension we face.
As I hope this chapter has illustrated, a consistent practice of body consciousness can help us become aware of the patterns of nervous system reactivity that may be keeping us stuck in cycles of conflict, disconnection, or dissatisfaction within our relationships. Consistently meeting the needs of our physical body by eating nutrient-dense foods, spending time both moving and resting, and breathing deeply and calmly is foundational to creating a safe environment for our nervous system to regulate itself in.
As we continue to practice the empowerment pause (see here), we can start to notice the sensations inside us that drive us to say hurtful things we don’t mean, keep ourselves endlessly “busy” or always on the go, say yes when we really mean no, or check out from difficult conversations or our relationships altogether. When we are able to consciously witness the sensations associated with our different nervous system responses, we can make conscious choices to bring our body back to safety. Only when we are in this grounded state can we intentionally choose our responses to our relationships and the world around us, ultimately allowing us all to be the love we seek.
As you learned in chapter 2, our body isn’t the only participant in these reactive cycles. Next we’ll talk more about the conditioning that lives in our subconscious mind and can drive these seemingly instinctual cycles with ourselves and others.
6
Creating Change Through Mind Consciousness
Trevor couldn’t understand why his last relationship had gone up in flames—yet again. He was smart, successful, attractive, and fit, all characteristics he thought made him the ultimate catch. Women should be flocking to me! he thought.
Though Trevor had no difficulty attracting dates or engaging in sexual experiences, sustaining a romantic relationship was another thing altogether. It didn’t have anything to do with what he looked like or how much money he made, as he had once thought. What was sabotaging his relationships was his ego story continually running through his mind about who he was and who he had to be to feel worthy of love.
We all have an ego, and every ego has its stories. These narratives are created by our subconscious mind to make sense of the world around us. Our ego may create the story that “we’re not worth their time” if someone we’re interested in doesn’t text us. Or our ego may interpret being passed over for a work project or business opportunity to mean that we’re an unqualified imposter or fraud. Though we can’t ever be sure of all the factors involved in a potential lover’s preferences or a boss’s decision, our mind creates stories and assumptions, assigning meanings to our experiences to try to help us deal with the discomfort of not knowing. The more frequently we assign the same meanings to similar experiences, the more these interpretations form a cohesive narrative or storyline that accompanies us through life. Even though it’s impossible to know all of the objective “facts” surrounding our circumstances, we continue to assume that our interpretations are factual representations of reality.
Most of us have several different ego stories, some that change over time. But our biggest ego story—the one that we’ve been listening to the longest and is most influential to our sense of self—is the story that our subconscious made up during our childhood to help us better manage the stress of having needs neglected by our parent-figures. No matter your personal ego story, it usually boils down to deep-rooted shame about being not lovable enough, good enough, or worthy enough for someone to want to meet your needs.
As children, we lacked the emotional maturity and perspective to know that it wasn’t our fault if our parent-figures weren’t always able to help us feel safe, valued, and loved in the ways we needed. In a childhood state of egocentricism, we couldn’t evaluate situations maturely or from another person’s perspective and, as a result, personalized all interactions and experiences. When our developing brains couldn’t understand the many factors that contributed to a person’s abilities or choices in any given moment, we reasoned that anything we or others did indicated something about us and who we were. Because our wounded inner child believed that we were the problem, we began adapting or modifying ourselves in order to fit into our environment and relationships. We tried to keep ourself safe and connected through the habitual patterns of our trauma bonds, trying to feel “loved” in whatever ways were available.
Today, we probably still subconsciously believe that we’re not worthy, continuing to suppress or hide those parts of ourselves that we believe make us instinctively unworthy. Sometimes we even hide those undesirable parts of ourselves from ourselves, keeping them repressed in our subconscious, unable to admit that they’re even a part of us at all. You may have even heard these repressed parts referred to as “shadow” parts.
You may be asking yourself why, if most ego stories include difficult, uncomfortable, or limiting aspects, do we repeat them over and over again? Because the human mind craves certainty, our ego works tirelessly to confirm, reconfirm, and reinforce the stories we’ve repeated and grown comfortable with since we were young.
Anytime we think thoughts about ourselves—I’m undesirable; I’m too sensitive; I’m not good at anything—that’s our ego at work, helping to create, define, and maintain our identity. Our ego’s primary job is to protect our hurt inner child, and to do so, it spins stories about who we are to help us understand, justify, and compensate for the ways in which we didn’t feel safe or secure in the past.
Examples of common ego stories include:
I’m too much or too sensitive to be loved by others.
I’m needy or helpless.
I’m worthless and deserve to be alone.
I’m cursed, and nothing good ever happens to me.
I’m loved only when I’m doing something for others.
I’m an imposter and worthy of love only when I appear to be perfect.
I’m always going to be left, abandoned, or cheated on.
I’m more important than others, and my needs or opinions are the only ones that matter.
I’m weak, and I’d feel too vulnerable to share how I really feel.
I’m always being violated or taken advantage of.
Most of us are unaware of our ego story. Instead, we think our ego story is our truth because it’s become such a familiar pathway of our subconscious mind. Since we were children, our brain has fired the same ego-driven thoughts and intrepretations again and again, creating and reinforcing the associated neural networks. As these networks grew stronger, our ego began to filter our daily experiences to confirm these forming beliefs. Whenever our subconscious is presented with information that contradicts or conflicts with our ego, it will quickly and adamantly reject it as a threat to our perceived identity. We easily get stuck repeating the thoughts and reactive patterns of our ego, our experiences continuing to confirm the identity-based narratives from our childhood. Over time, we become more and more limited in both our thinking and perception and end up feeling more threatened, reactive, and often out of control as a result.
Thankfully, though, we can choose to develop mind consciousness or to become aware of these powerful subconscious beliefs by learning how to witness our ego story and the ways in which it drives us to think, feel, and react with others that don’t serve our best interests or align with who we want to be. As we gain a greater awareness of our subconscious conditioning, we can begin to challenge our ego’s underlying beliefs of unworthiness and make new choices that aren’t colored by the hurt of our inner child.
TREVOR’S EGO STORY
Before we get into the process of developing mind consciousness, I want to go back to Trevor, since his ego story helps illustrate how our subconscious narratives can impact our relationships. Some of you may identify with Trevor’s story because you’ve experienced something similar or have been in a relationship with someone like him.
Trevor had many ego stories, but the one he’d been listening to the longest was the one that was largely responsible for short-circuiting his romantic relationships. His ego story was: I’m a man, and emotions make me (and all men) weak. Here’s how his hurt inner child came up with that belief.
Trevor had grown up in an upper-middle-class family in a safe, financially privileged neighborhood. His father, once a high-ranking officer in the military, was the CEO of a bank, which gave his mother the financial ability to stay home and raise their son. Trevor attended a good school, was encouraged to be physically active, ate healthy, home-cooked meals most nights of the week, and was allowed to pursue the hobbies that interested him, including costly ones like skiing, horseback riding, and guitar playing.
Though he had very few unmet physical needs, Trevor grew up with near-constant emotional abuse. His father was a physically and verbally domineering man who ruled the family with an iron fist. When Trevor expressed a normal emotion like sadness, loneliness, or fear, his father would respond by telling his son “Stop crying,” “Man up,” “Shape up or ship out,” or “Toughen up, or you’ll never make anything of yourself.” His father, who frequently shifted into Eruptor mode, often exploded in fits of rage, sometimes for no apparent reason. To cope, Trevor began to adopt a cool, distanced facade, often using humor or deflection to deal with uncomfortable emotions, whether his own or those of others. He learned from his father to be consumed with status, wealth, and physical appearance, since that was how Trevor’s dad felt he and other men were valued in the world.
Trevor’s mother didn’t protect her son from the near-constant emotional or verbal abuse in their home, helping him feel emotionally safe or secure. Though she loved Trevor deeply, she was frightened of her husband and fawned around him, enabling his temper and his harsh treatment of their son. This dynamic left Trevor with little to no emotional support since both his primary caregivers were unavailable: his father scared him, and his mother was too sacred to do anything about it. Trevor began to feel immense pressure to step in and mediate tense or volatile situations between his father and mother, using the same tactics he saw his mother use to try to please or calm his father.
Trevor was too scared to express his emotions or needs, so his nervous system remained on high alert, always ready to protect him against future attacks. Like his father, Trevor developed a two-faced exterior, remaining stoic or silently seething most of the time, then in reactive moments exhibiting rageful and abusive behaviors toward those closest to him. Though he mostly hid his dark feelings from the outside world, they created a highly complicated experience later in life for his romantic partners, who felt invalidated and silently enraged by his Jekyll-and-Hyde personality.
