Participating With Life

and the six ways we leave ourselves

Ahoy, reader.

How did you learn to stay safe?

I personally didn’t grow up with much conversation centered around intuition, self referencing, or staying connected to myself really at all.

My creativity was incredibly nurtured, though. And as an adult, I’m practicing telling a different story about my childhood. A story that has evolved from one that strictly focuses on different flavors of trauma and abuse to a story that includes those two things as only part of the story.

Buddying up to nuance has really allowed me to zoom out on my life in countless ways, including seeing how much goodness was in my childhood. Those formative years are no longer just a period of time that lay at the root of all of my perceived “problems”. They’re rich with clues about who I am when I have capacity to see beyond the adaptations strategies I unconsciously developed to give me a sense of “safe”.

Amidst all of the vantage points from which I can view my life in hindsight, though, it’s still true that I needed to adapt to people, relationships, experiences, circumstances, and traumas that required or caused me to leave myself. To disconnect from my intuition, my body, and my core/center. To disconnect from my self in general as someone I could trust, who could keep me safe, and as someone who was worthy.

It seems the truer question isn’t “how did you learn stay safe?” but rather “how did you learn to disconnect from yourself in order to stay safe?”

We all become a stranger to our self at some point. Whether it’s our family system, culture, society, religion, trauma, success, social media, mental health, unhealthy work environments, or the myriad of other forces that shape our lives, we all develop practices of leaving ourselves in order to feel safe, get love, feel more accepted, etc.

We people please. We outsource our authority and ask everyone else before making a decision. We say yes when we mean no. We develop perfectionist tendencies. We overthink and doom scroll and can not sit with ourselves without the need to stay busy. We compare our lives to that of others. We beat ourselves up. We put people on pedestals, and put their needs before our own.

We constantly seek control. Certainty.

We have chronically tight shoulders and diaphragms. The breath becomes shallow. We constantly scan for threats. And the body continues to adapt from there; chronic pain, tension, compensatory patterns, and health issues.

But every way we leave ourselves is an attempt to protect ourselves, and every protective mechanism and strategy has its own intelligence.

So before you go hating on all of the ways you’ve abandoned your self in your life, remember that it’s a miracle to have made it this. Think of all you’ve survived. Think of how your own innate and learned nervous system intelligence has kept you alive over and over again.

Every way back to ourselves begins with awareness of what it has cost us to be so disconnected.

Capacity. Joy. Pleasure. Relationships. Vulnerability. Self trust. Opportunity. Creativity. Love. Freedom and ease in the body. Breath. The ability to hear our own thoughts. Our full participation with life.

After sixteen years of working with people, watching them try to find their way back to themselves, and working intimately with their bodies, identities, emotions, and patterns through massage therapy, energy work, and coaching, and through my own identity shifting, inner work, and budding relationship with uncertainty, I’ve noticed six patterns that show up in people when the capacity for self referencing and self trusting goes dormant.

By the way, these aren’t diagnoses or personality types. They’re simply six common ways that humans tend to lose their own signal.

The Six Ways We Leave Ourselves

1. The Negotiator

This is someone who compromises their self to stay connected. Often these people actually know what they want, but they fear it will cost them approval, they will disappoint someone, or they’ll lose out on connection or love if they follow their desire or knowing.

Their return to self is learning that true belonging can’t be built on a foundation of self abandonment, and that trusting what they know and want will grant them a life full of connection.

2. The Mirror

Anyone who has ever identified as an empath mirrors. They become who they need to be in every room based on the data they collect from scanning energy and people. They’re incredibly attuned to their surroundings, and it can be challenging to know where the mirror ends and others begin.

Their return to self is through developing strong energetic boundaries, and enforcing deep within themselves the possibility of maintaining connection with others while developing their own sense of self.

3. The Shapeshifter

Have you ever known someone who seemed like they were always trying on new identities? The person who is always doing the next course, the next retreat, the new career, the new business, etc. They seem to believe that if they just become the right person, they’ve have arrived and they’ll finally be loved and accepted.

Their return to self is through self acceptance, choosing to no longer avoid their self, and often working through shame.

4. The Analyst

The analysts intellectualize their way out of feeling. These are the people who, when I ask them what they’re feeling in their body will begin their answer with “I think _____”. These people tend to analyze, strategize, plan, and over-explain. Their mind, to them, is the safest place to be on the entire planet.

Their return to self is through understanding that wisdom isn’t only found through knowledge, but also through the intelligence of the body and feeeeeeelllliiiinnng and experiencing. Through opening to the possibility that logic isn’t necessarily safer than the illogical or unexplainable. That sometimes the thing that doesn’t make logical sense can be true.

5. The Watchtower

Those who are watchful tend to observe life rather than participate in it. They’re always scanning for threat: Is this safe? What might go wrong? How might I prepare for every outcome? They’re so gifted with a special kind of awareness, but they spend a lot of time and energy preparing for things that almost never come to fruition.

Their return to self is through building a relationship with uncertainty. Self trust, self trust, self trust. It is also through repeatedly returning to thinking about all that could possibly go right. It’s good for them to ask themselves “what if this actually works out?”

6. The Adapter

These are people who, I hate to say, are easy to need. They’re incredibly responsible and reliable, and capable of completing just about anything. They’re the one that likely completed everything in the group project, or takes on too many tasks in the office. Everyone knows they can count on the adapter and that they’ll likely be agreeable to whatever it is you ask or need of them.

These can also be people who have no opinion and no desires when you ask what they want and seem to just constantly go with the flow. They might say “I don’t care” a lot when you ask them where they want to go for dinner, even though they do care very much.

Their return to self is learning their limits and giving their self permission to say no before they burn out. It can also be to state clearly what they want.

The six ways ask the same question: what are we choosing instead of ourselves?

• Other people’s needs over our own

• Approval over authenticity

• Certainty over the aliveness of presence (choosing to be with uncertainty always reminds me of a brilliant quote by Bill Murray where he says “I try to make myself available for life to happen to me.”)

• Distraction, avoidance, and noise over what we are experiencing in our bodies

• Someone else’s authority over our own knowing

• Survival over capacity

It’s important to remember that these are NOT six different kinds of people, diagnoses, or personality types. They’re six patterns that people move through in times of stress, grief, change, success, pressure, etc. Meaning any one of us can move through these six patterns. I can certainly relate to all six, and I can identify different times in my life where I was practicing each one in different ways. And though they’re not fixed patterns, we each do primarily engage with one or two of them more consistently.

Coming Back to Your Self

Leaving yourself happens in a string of a thousand tiny moments. None of us are born inherently patterned with relational survival mechanisms; it’s learned and practiced over and over again.

Coming back to your self is a similar practice.

I work with people all the time who expect one massive breakthrough and voila, they’re healed. But the return is remarkably ordinary and mundane. Truthfully, it’s a life-long practice of moment to moment awareness.

And I urge people to come to the realization sooner rather than later that to live your life in waiting for the massive wake up call or download or revelation or breakthrough is only perpetuating whatever it is they’re trying to get out of or change.

Building the capacity to be present to your life and work with what presents in presence, though? That’s livin’, man. (Queue Matthew McConaughey’s voice)

What does building capacity look like? What does it look like to come back to your self?

First word: awareness.

Noticing the tightness in your chest before answering a question.
Realizing that you’re asking everyone around you what you should do even though you already know what to do, you just don’t trust it.
Catching yourself people pleasing, protecting, proving, performing.
Noticing the discomfort of staying quiet when you actually have a lot to say.
Realizing you just said yes to one more thing even though you’re exhausted, and thirsty, and hungry, and need use the restroom.

That’s the first step. The next step is choosing something new. It’s asking a new question. What does this tension mean? Why do I keep asking others what I should do when I already know? What if I just took action based on my knowing? Why do I stay silent when I actually have great ideas? Why don’t I allow myself to just…go to the bathroom?

This is capacity work, too. You’ll notice I don’t talk much about nervous system regulation. Mostly because it’s trendy and over-used and I’m not even sure everyone using the term fully knows what that means. Capacity, however, speaks to the nuance required when being with the uncertainty of choosing new behaviors, patterns, and responses. It speaks to creating new meaning of safety, and allowing that meaning to shift as you do. It speaks to your ability to stay with yourself amidst uncertainty, and remain present to your internal experience without abandoning yourself as you do so.

So as your capacity grows, you notice the tightness in your chest and answer the question truthfully anyway.
You take action on your knowing even while there is fear present that you might not be doing the “right” thing.
You say the thing out loud while your old fear of judgement is present.

You building capacity to stay with yourself happens while you live your life. It’s not “I’ll learn to stay connected to myself AND THEN life will begin, business will take off, I will trust myself, I’ll find the love of my life”.

It’s in the nuance of staying present with your self regardless of what is happening externally. Every time you pause long enough to hear your own signal again. That’s where you rebuild the relationship to self. That’s where you build a relationship to self trust. And that relationship is the foundation for everything else.

Next week in Field Notes, I’ll be sharing a self-assessment to identify your own dominant pattern(s). And if you’re curious about exploring any of this on a deeper level, this is the work that I do inside of Field Work.

Until then, keep noticing when you leave your self and see if you can practice your return.

Tallyho,
Jenny