To truly heal, we need to understand our embodied Self. Our embodied Self is the interwoven expression of our physical body, our mind (both our conscious and subconscious), and our soul, or authentic Self. Our soul and authentic Self are similar entities—both represent our unique essence or who we are at our core—so you’ll see the terms used interchangeably throughout this book.
We can begin to embody our authentic Self when we make sure we’re meeting our needs. We have three different types of needs:
Physical needs: nutrient-dense foods, nourishing oxygen and water, adequate rest/restorative sleep, beneficial movement
Emotional needs: to feel safe enough to authentically express ourselves and to connect with and be supported by others
Spiritual needs: to connect with and express our intrinsic passions, purpose, creativity, and imagination
Making sure we’re consistently getting all these needs met enables us to feel safely grounded and intentional in our responses to the world around us. We’re able to feel safe and secure enough to be our authentic Selves within our relationships, which enables us to form authentic connections with others.
Hypothetically, we would have all learned how to meet these needs for ourselves through our interactions with our caregivers in childhood. As many of you parents are acutely aware, infants are completely dependent on their caregivers to meet all of their needs for them, all of the time. Given the reality that it’s an enormous responsibility to care for another person, never is it more important to ensure your own needs are also being cared for. As you’ll continue to learn throughout this book, it is only when our body is getting what it needs to function that we are able to navigate the multitude of stressful moments we’ll face while tending to another person. Many of you parents reading this, especially those with infants or several children, may understandably find yourselves lacking in the time, energy, or financial resources required for supportive child care. Most modern-day, parents are cut off from neighbors and local communities, preventing them from accessing the practical and emotional support still available in some village-based communities. Parents these days are often overworked and under-supported, barely meeting their own needs and, as a result, physiologically unable to meet the needs of another.
I encourage all of you parents to practice regularly extending compassion to yourself, especially if you notice feelings of shame or other uncomfortable emotions as you continue to read about and explore the impact of unmet childhood needs. In my opinion, there is no role that has a greater impact on society than parenting, and it is necessary that we continue to come together as human beings to honor, support, and prioritize parenting for being the sacred act it is.
Regularly carving out small moments for self-care practices will help you remain more calm and grounded in the face of the overwhelmingly stressful experiences of parenting. Practicing self-care can change how you show up for your children while also providing them with a healthy model of self-prioritization and self-care.
As adults, we can learn to care for our physical needs by tuning in to our physical body. We can begin to pay closer attention to our physical sensations, the real origin of our thoughts and feelings (sit tight; we’ll cover this surprising fact in just a moment). We can even become conscious or aware of our subconscious mind and the conditioned thoughts, feelings, and habits that live there, driving most of our everyday actions and reactions. And finally, we can learn how to tap into our intuition and trust our instincts so that we can each embody and express the unique essence that makes us us.
So, what does it mean to embody something? When we embody something, we step into it as all of us: body, mind, and soul. These aren’t three separate entities but one integrated self. Integration occurs when individual parts join to form a unified whole. Think of integration as a fruit salad rather than a fruit smoothie: each piece maintains its distinct qualities while all come together to form something more delicious than the individual parts.8 (Thank you, Dr. Daniel Siegel, for this analogy.)
When we integrate our embodied Self or align our desires, intentions, and actions, we’re able to show up feeling safe, secure, and whole as individuals in our relationships. When we feel safe, secure, and whole, as individuals we’re able to be curious, empathetic, and receptive to others. Only then can we create the same safety and security others need to be their authentic Self, too.
When we’re connected to our body and attuned to our own emotions, we can begin to safely and securely connect with others in a deeper, more authentic way. Sharing an authentic emotional connection with someone allows us to attune to them, or sense what they may be experiencing. We’re open and receptive, responsive to shifts in and changes in their emotional states and are able to notice and respond to others’ emotional cues, including those that are nonverbal. This doesn’t mean that we need to be perfectly attuned to others all the time; that’s not possible, even for the most well-meaning of us. For all caregivers reading this who have harshly judged some (or all) of your past misattunement, I hope you can begin to extend yourself grace and compassion for those moments of understandable disconnection or overwhelmed reactivity. All of us can benefit from beginning to congratulate ourselves every time we make the choice to return to our loved ones after moments of misattunement in order to rebuild the safety and security of those relationships.
When we share this kind of deeper and secure connection at least some of the time, we create a foundation of authentic or true emotional connection. When two people feel safe enough to be themselves, they can exist in an interdependent relationship, allowing their differences while remaining connected and working collaboratively with each other. Each individual is able to express their unique energy and gifts while allowing the other person to do the same. You can think of interdependence as the opposite of codependency, where people in a relationship are completely dependent each other to meet their needs, often at the expense of their own. This chronic self-betrayal leads individuals to adapt and modify themselves to accommodate the other. In an interdependent relationship there is a mutual meeting of needs which allows each individual to embody and celebrate true diversity by thinking, feeling, and acting differently from those around us.
When we form this dynamic, we create a bond that allows us to become more successful together than we would be on our own. We each bring our natural strengths and talents to the partnership, enabling our group to accomplish greater things (we’ll talk more about that powerful phenomenon, which is known as social coherence, in chapter 10). It’s like being on a sports team: each player may be a phenomenal athlete on their own, but when we come together and allow each to play their own position and contribute their own special talents, we become better than individual players can be; we become a winning team.
As we continue to explore the three-step process to embodying your authentic Self, the first step is the same for all of us: we begin by reconnecting with our body. Though each of us has lived through our own unique circumstances, I’ll continue to share my own story of discovering and embodying my authentic Self in the hope that it can be of service to some of you on your individual journeys.
BEGINNING TO MEET MY BODY’S NEEDS
Before my dark night of the soul, I felt more and more disconnected from those around me and, as a result, increasingly lonely. To the outsider looking in, my loneliness might have seemed paradoxical. A serial monogamist for most of my adult life, I had spent only a handful of months in total without a romantic partner. I had a lot of friends, a busy social calendar, and a family who asked, if not expected, to see me as often as possible.
Despite having all those people in my life, I felt the embodiment of the cliché “alone in a crowded room.” At my core, I didn’t feel connected, supported, or even really known by anyone around me. As a result, I often thought that my relationships were never enough. I kept expecting to form a deeper emotional connection with my loved ones, and when it didn’t happen, I would become disappointed, disillusioned, and, over time, resentful. I’d get excited about an opportunity to spend a weekend away with my partner, hoping that we’d finally connect on a more meaningful level, and when we didn’t, I’d be disappointed and would blame her. Or I’d have high hopes for a special dinner with friends, but when the night came, the love or connection I desired remained out of reach, causing me to feel hurt or unimportant and end up emotionally shutting down or checking out entirely. My resentment would build over time until I’d move on from the friendship or, in the case of my romantic relationships, we broke up.
In my twenties, I explained away my constant unhappiness by telling myself “You’re young, you live in New York City—feeling disillusioned is normal!” But after I left and moved to a new city, where I didn’t have as many friends and a steady stream of social outings to distract me, I began to feel even more dissatisfied. I started to see how many of my colleagues in my clinical training program modeled a type of behavior I hadn’t often seen in others: they were more in touch with their emotions and able to share them more easily and openly than I could.
As I started to explore my emotions and the ways in which I’d been suppressing them for years, I began to slowly see the role that I played in all my relationships. Showing up disconnected, I was creating the emptiness, loneliness, and unhappiness that I felt inside; those feelings weren’t being created or caused by anyone else. I was out of touch with myself yet still expecting those around me to intuit and relieve my emotional suffering by helping me feel differently. I continued to expect others to “know” me but didn’t know myself enough to even begin to express myself. The reality was that if I wasn’t connected with all of me—body, mind, and soul—how could I possibly feel fully connected to anyone around me?
My healing journey instinctually began with my body after I had become more aware of my chronically stressed and dysregulated physical state. I wasn’t consistently meeting my body’s needs, even though I had enough to eat and a place to sleep. I regularly consumed whatever was readily available, including chemical-laden foods, processed sugar, gluten, and alcohol, all of which inflamed my body and brain and didn’t make me feel good. My sleep was erratic: sometimes I’d go to bed early, other nights, I’d stay up late; and most mornings, I’d wake up feeling tired, even if I’d slept eight hours. My breathing reflected that chronic state of stress and was agitated and shallow, not calm, deep, and restorative. For decades, I had been experiencing persistent gut issues and brain fog so thick that I’d suddenly float into periods of mental vacancy when my mind inexplicably went completely blank.
When I started to reconnect with my body and its physical needs, I could see that I was walking around undernourished, overstressed, and continually depleted and exhausted. Over time, I could see how I regularly viewed my daily physical care as just another task or obligation that was between me and my body’s need to “relax,” when, ironically, caring for my body was the one thing I needed to start doing so that I could finally relax. In the absence of external motivation or validation, like someone else pushing me or visible changes to my physical appearance, I simply didn’t feel motivated to take care of myself. The physical dysregulation that continued as a result of my habitual daily self-neglect wasn’t just harming myself, it was also hurting how I showed up in my relationships, which were in a state reflective of my physical distress. One wrong look or word—or my misperception of either—and I’d be on edge, worrying that the other person didn’t love me or was upset with me.
Do you know how you feel when you get really hungry or have a fever and don’t have the capacity to deal with anything outside of your seemingly all-consuming physical needs? The same is true if we don’t consistently eat nutrient-dense foods, don’t sleep enough or sleep erratically, don’t move enough or move too much, or routinely face more physical or emotional stress than our body can handle. These unmet physical needs may not manifest themselves as acute symptoms, but, over time, the constant trickle of unmet needs can add up to chronic dysregulation. Our body doesn’t feel safe, and as a result, our nervous system can’t regulate itself, causing us to show up around others as angry, distracted, checked out, or on high alert.
Today, I continue to make choices every day to regulate my nervous system by consistently committing to meet my body’s needs. Though your body’s daily needs may look a bit different from mine, here are some steps I took to begin to create new habits to better meet my physical needs, which we’ll explore in more detail in chapter 5.
I cut back on consuming gluten, alcohol, and processed foods/sugars (whenever possible) to avoid the chronic systemic inflammation that all these substances can cause.
I started prioritizing whole foods (whenever possible) to maximize the nutrients I was giving my body’s cells.
I started going to bed at the same time every night (whenever possible) to sync my sleep cycle and limit the cortisol spikes that an inconsistent bedtime can cause.
I prioritized getting morning sunlight to help regulate my circadian clock, increasing the likelihood that I get at least eight or nine hours of restorative sleep (when possible) to allow my body to rest and repair.
I started practicing deep, slow belly breathing on a daily basis to nourish my body with oxygen and help my nervous system regulate its stress responses.
After several months of listening to my body and meeting my physical needs, I began to feel more rested, energetic, peaceful, and ultimately more powerfully connected to and in control of my physical vessel.
WITNESSING MY SUBCONSCIOUS
When I was starting to feel confident that I was growing better able to satisfy my physical needs, I turned my attention to my emotional needs. I started to explore my subconscious mind—that deep part of our psyche that stores all of our childhood conditioning, along with all our memories, beliefs, interests, and passions.
For most of my life, I always believed that I was aware of what I thought and how I felt. I was continually mulling over my thoughts and wallowing in my feelings. I had chosen to be a psychologist, after all! Over time, though, I began to realize that the thoughts and feelings I was aware of represented only a tiny fraction of what I was really thinking and feeling. Most of my mental world was underneath my conscious awareness and driven by my subconscious mind, which steers up to 95 percent of our habitual thoughts, emotions, reactions. To identify and understand my emotional needs, I’d have to learn to become conscious of my subconscious, which, as it turns out, is not an impossible feat.
Inspired by both my psychoanalytic training and what I was learning about the power of consciousness, I peered into my subconscious mind by witnessing the automatic, conditioned habits that originated there on a daily basis. I started to realize that there was a difference between developing consciousness, or becoming aware of my thoughts and feelings, and staying caught in an endless loop of overanalyzing, overthinking, and worrying, which I had been doing for decades. Being conscious simply means noticing or witnessing, not thinking. Through a practice of conscious self-witnessing, or being a neutral observer of my mind, I began to see myself as separate from the habitual thoughts that had consumed my being for years on end, along with all of the feelings and behaviors that often accompanied them. Quite quickly, I discovered that the way I operated in the world—my very way of being—was based largely on old childhood wounds and learned coping strategies.
After paying more conscious attention to the way I cared for my physical being, I realized that I usually ate only when it was a traditional time for breakfast, lunch, or dinner or when others around me were eating. If I was starving and it wasn’t a standard mealtime or no one around me was eating, I wouldn’t eat, even if it meant that I’d feel off balance and agitated, at times even resentful of or upset with others for not having eaten. On other occasions, I’d rush through my meal, quickly consuming something less nutritious or nourishing. That wasn’t a conscious choice, nor was it because I couldn’t cook or provide myself with food. Instead, it was a conditioned habit I had developed in childhood after seeing and experiencing the eating habits of my family, learning that I “should” only eat at certain times or when and what others were.
As more time went on, I began to see that the rigid beliefs I had regarding my personal work ethics weren’t serving my body’s interests. When I was a child, my mom paid attention to me most consistently when I was achieving—when I got all A’s in school or won a softball game as the team’s star pitcher. Given the consistent validation I received for making these achievements, I learned to be an Overachiever, one of seven inner child archetypes (which we’ll talk more about in chapter 4) you may be familiar with if you read How to Do the Work. An Overachiever learns to perform to gain attention, connection, and love, believing that they are valued or loved by others only when they’re winning, succeeding, or otherwise meeting, or surpassing, expectations.
Being an Overachiever, I struggled to allow myself to take a break or have unstructured time to play unless those around me were also taking a break or playing. It didn’t matter how long or intensely I had worked, what I had accomplished, whether I had the attentional resources to keep working, or how desperately I wanted or needed a break. When working, I rarely allowed myself to make mistakes, crossing out entries or starting new pages in my notebook or journal to avoid being reminded of my past imperfections. Now, even where I find myself today, having written three books, I continue to find myself endlessly striving for “perfection” as I catch myself critiquing and meticulously editing my work right up until my last possible deadline.
The more I witnessed my habits, the more I realized how regularly I looked outside myself and to others for answers, filtering what I thought, felt, and did through the perception of what other people might think about or want from me. That wasn’t my intent, nor was it my fault; worrying what others thought of me and putting their needs before my own were learned coping strategies that I had developed as a child to protect myself from feeling overlooked, unconsidered, and hurt by those closest to me. I started to clearly see that my conditioning wasn’t serving my best interests or helping my relationships. By basing most of my choices on what I imagined were others’ wants and impressions of me, I was not only ignoring my own needs but also not showing up in support of others as I had long believed I was doing. In reality, I was always trying to manage others’ perceptions of me. But if I didn’t feel worthy enough to take up space in the world, how could I continue to expect others to support me or my Self-expression?
As I learned to become more aware of my subconscious, I gradually changed the conditioned habits that didn’t serve my best interests. While creating new habits isn’t an easy process for anyone, I benefited from pausing several times throughout the day to consciously check in with myself and witness the different thoughts, feelings, and behaviors I could become aware of in that moment. Those check-ins didn’t take more than a minute, but they gave me the opportunity to decide whether I wanted to keep thinking, feeling, and acting in the same way—or whether I wanted to use that moment as an opportunity to create a new way of being. And if I noticed I was waiting for others to inspire me to move my body, I could make the conscious choice to listen to my own needs and do something active for myself instead. Or if I was relying on others to decide what we’d eat for a particular meal, I could check in with my body to see if there was any food that I felt would best nourish me.
