_______ I witnessed adults who consistently took responsibility for their actions and apologized for their role in conflicts and emotional upsets.
_______ I was given space to develop my own individuality by adults who allowed me to explore my own thoughts and ideas and didn’t pressure me to conform to other’s beliefs (or groupthink).
_______ I was encouraged to explore my curiosities and passions by adults who asked questions and expressed a desire to know me and my interests and had time for play and spontaneous, unstructured activities.
The more boxes you checked, the more likely it is that you had safe and secure relationships growing up. On the other hand, if you, like me, don’t relate to many or any of the above childhood experiences, your earliest relationships likely didn’t provide you with the safety and security needed to explore your own emotional expression. The great news is that the tools throughout this book will give you an opportunity to create safety and security for yourself, no matter what your past circumstances.
Your Relationship Experiences and Beliefs Exploration
Take some time to consider the various relationships in your life, beginning with your earliest parent-figures or caregivers. Explore the following questions and write down your reflections in the space provided or in a separate notebook or journal if helpful.
In childhood, how often (and when) were your needs (physical and/or emotional) met?
In childhood, how often (and when) were you left with unmet needs (physical and/or emotional)?
In childhood, how often (and when) were you expected to monitor or meet the needs (physical and/or emotional) of others, including your parent-figures?
In childhood, how often (and when) did you turn to your parents or other caregivers for safety or to protect or comfort you, learning as a result to trust others/the world around you?
In childhood, how often (and when) did you feel you needed to flee from your parent-figures to find safety or protect or comfort yourself, learning as a result to feel fearful of others or the world around you?
In childhood, how often (and when) did you experience feelings of pleasure or joy?
In childhood, how often (and when) did you experience feelings of playfulness or spontaneity?
In childhood, how often (and when) did your parents or other caregivers model negotiation and collaborative problem solving?
Now take some time to consider your relationships as an adult. Explore the following questions and write down your reflections in the space provided or in a separate notebook or journal if helpful.
When I think about relationships, I think . . .
When I think about love, I think . . .
When I think about relationships, I feel . . .
When I think about love, I feel . . .
2
Exploring Your Embodied Self
If someone had asked me about my connection to my soul ten years ago, I would have laughed. My soul? At the time, I didn’t know what or where my soul was or if it even existed, let alone how to connect with it. After spending eight years earning a doctorate in clinical psychology, I had developed a very academic, mechanistic outlook on the world. I believed that everything could and should be explained by the hard facts of science. And if science couldn’t explain it, then it wasn’t real or legitimate.
I first heard about my “soul” when I was young. Raised Catholic, I went to a parochial grade school and high school and was expected to go to Mass every Sunday, which I usually protested. At church, I learned the Christian view of the soul, which seemed supernatural or otherworldly to me—a concept I could never objectively understand. The more interested I became in science and psychology, the more the Christian concept of a soul felt illusory, even superstitious.
My perspective changed after going through the emotional crisis I now understand as my “dark night of the soul.” It began, not surprisingly, at a time when I reached the end of my lifelong list of achievements, receiving my PhD, maintaining a committed relationship, and making a stable living by opening a successful private practice. Still feeling deeply unfulfilled despite everything I had already accomplished in my life, I became more consciously aware of how disconnected and unsure I felt about myself, who I was, and what I wanted—a way that I had been feeling for years or decades, even though I struggled to admit it. I imagine some of you may feel similarly now, and although it might not seem so, these feelings are often the beginning of awakening to a more deeper understanding of yourself. Though I couldn’t see it at the time, my own awakening began after I hit an emotional rock bottom while vacationing with my partner, Lolly.
Those of you who read my first book, How to Do the Work, may remember the story: I was sitting in a rocking chair eating oatmeal and reading a book about emotionally absent mothers when I broke down and began to cry uncontrollably. Though I didn’t fully understand what was happening at the time, I had finally begun to more consciously allow myself to realize that I didn’t share an emotional connection with my family, especially with my mom. With the help of that book, I was starting to see all the ways I had compensated for that lack of connection, constantly dismissing or ignoring my own needs and desires in order to “connect” with her and those I loved most. For years, I’d drop everything to be available to nearly everyone in my life without pausing first to make sure I was also caring for myself. If a friend invited me out to the movies, to dinner, or for a hike, I’d immediately say yes, even if I didn’t have the desire or energetic resources to go. If a loved one needed emotional support, I would do anything to try to comfort them, even if that meant jeopardizing my physical or emotional well-being. I was constantly worried others might think I was selfish or be feel disappointed if I tended to my own needs before theirs.
The irony, of course, is that prioritizing others’ needs while dismissing or ignoring my own didn’t help me feel safe, valued, or loved in any of my relationships. Instead, doing so just made me feel hollow, lonely, and unfulfilled on the inside—all the feelings that hit me like a tidal wave while I was sitting in a rocking chair reading on vacation. With chronically unmet needs, my body would never feel safe enough to shift out of survival mode and give me the opportunity to explore the deeper interests and desires of my authentic Self.
In that moment, I started to open my eyes and see all the ways that I had put off dealing with those uncomfortable feelings, mostly by looking to others to take them away or make me feel better. When the efforts of my family, friends, or romantic partner failed to uplift me, I only felt emptier and sadder on the inside. Eventually, I only grew more frustrated and resentful that others couldn’t “save” me or fill the deepening hole inside my heart.
Contrary to the messages many of us received in our families or through the media (hello, Disney and rom-com movies), the perfect partner or relationship just doesn’t exist and even if they did, they couldn’t take away our pain. It is not anyone’s job to rescue or “complete” us because we are capable and whole exactly as we are. We are all human beings doing the best we can, and having romanticized ideas about relationships only sets us up for disappointment. At the same time, we need to learn how to tolerate disappointing others. Many of us were raised with certain idealized notions of morality or what makes us a “good person,” driven by familial, cultural, religious, and societal messaging that often prioritizes the comfort of others, activating internalized guilt and self-neglecting habits.
One of my clearest memories from my childhood is my mom rehearsing a list of excuses with me after I had told her that I didn’t want to go to a friend’s party. In her attempt to help me decline my friend’s invite, she coached me while we made up an excuse about why I couldn’t go, and we practiced together. Then, with fear coursing through my ten-year-old body, I made the call to my friend and recited the excuse we’d crafted. My mom, of course, had good intentions; she didn’t want me to appear rude. She had been conditioned in the same way during her own childhood. But this kind of conditioning lays the subconscious groundwork for the “good person” beliefs I know still exist inside me today, especially when I struggle to turn down an invite unless I have an “acceptable” reason, often overexplaining and overapologizing when I do. Driven to please others in order to be liked, I found myself constantly fearful of disappointing or upsetting those around me.
The reality is, the sooner we can release any illusions of perfection in ourselves or our relationships, the sooner we can begin to embrace the messy, vulnerable journey we call love. We can stop believing that others will leave us if we can’t do something or if we say no because that’s not true, even if our mind tells us it is. Truly healthy relationships require a commitment to learning through these moments of difference or disagreement using emotional regulation, active communication, conflict resolution or repair (something we’ll talk more about in later chapters), and compromise.
These realizations may sound unnerving—and they certainly were for me at the time—but the awareness I gained during my dark night of the soul was the greatest gift I ever received. That clarity led to the start of my Self Healing journey, when I started to take responsibility for myself, empowering myself to become an active participant in creating the change I so deeply needed. I applied this responsibility to my relationships with others: I was the only one who could realistically ensure all of my needs were known and met. And it would only be when my needs were met that I’d feel safe enough to share my natural gifts and talents authentically with those around me.
For the first time in my life, I began to see how the most important relationship I have is the relationship I have with myself. I started to realize that if I wasn’t able to be honest with myself about my deepest needs and desires, I would never be able to truly or authentically connect with another person. Being honest with myself was the first step in sharing myself more authentically with others. To start breaking some of my conditioned habits, every time I noticed myself thinking about what I “should” (or “shouldn’t”) do or how I “should” (or “shouldn’t”) respond, which was often, I created a new habit of pausing (using the empowerment pause exercise you’ll learn here) to check in with myself. This time gave me the opportunity to explore whether there was something else I needed or wanted to do for myself instead.
For the next several years, I concentrated on exploring my own wants and needs. As I got clearer about what was true for me, I distanced and even removed myself from certain relationships that were no longer aligned. That created the space I needed to focus on accepting and caring for all of me rather than just the parts of me that were validated by others. Identifying my authentic needs wasn’t easy; it meant peeling back years of childhood conditioning that had led me to think, feel, and act in ways that didn’t serve my best interests. The more I stripped away the deeply embedded layers of conditioning, the more clearly I was able to connect with my authentic Self, or who I am at my core. And my authentic Self wasn’t just part of me; it was all of me. I had a unique way of being in the world, an essence that made me me.
Finally, it dawned on me: this is my soul. My soul is my essence, what makes me special for being the individual I am. It is an energy that is unique to me, always swirling and shifting with the people and things around me, creating an individualized expression that no one else in the universe can possibly have.
As I continued to awaken, I started to read more about our mind-body connection, including research into the field of quantum mechanics, where I stumbled upon scientific evidence of our “soul.” Quantum mechanics is the study of our world on a subatomic level—“science’s most precise, powerful theory of reality,” as described by John Horgan in Scientific American.7 The field of quantum mechanics explains that everything in our world, including you and me, is made up of both energy and matter. Though most of us identify with the material existence of our physical body, we have an unseen energy that contributes to and animates all our physical experiences. This creates a unique vibrational energy at our core—what can be called our soul—that interacts with the world around us.
Coming to understand the concept of the soul through science was pivotal for me. At the time, I felt I needed scientific validation to recognize and accept the most vital part of my being. As soon as I had proof, though, I knew that I had to learn how to connect with this innermost part of me if I wanted to meet all my needs and heal all of me, including my connections with others.
You might not believe in the idea of a soul, as I once didn’t. Or you might believe that it exists somewhere but have no idea where to find it. Regardless of what you think or feel about your soul, this book will help you connect with who you are at your core; it’s the next step in your journey and the one that will ultimately enable you to be the love you seek.
Before you can reconnect with your soul, though, it’s important to learn how to reconnect with your physical body and explore your subconscious mind. This is how we begin to integrate our embodied Self and eventually heal all our embodied relationships with others.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR EMBODIED SELF
We are what we think. Or that’s what many of us believe, thanks in part to the famous French philosopher René Descartes, best known for the saying “I think, therefore I am.” But we’re far more complex than the thoughts that run through our mind. When we show up in our relationships, we show up as all of us: body, mind, and soul. This is why we often can’t relieve our suffering or change our relationships by changing just the thoughts in our conscious mind.
