Take Heart - It Takes Courage and Tenacity to Step Into Your Power

Last week I was watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy in which the character Jackson Avery has a realisation about his calling in life. He reflected “No one said it was easy becoming the person you’re meant to be. It takes bravery to step into your power, power you’ve discovered, earned and deserve.”

Then just a few days ago I received an email where Teal Swan echoed this sentiment saying “The journey to self love is not comfortable, it will feel scary and you will want to quit. But personal growth is within your power; others can teach you but only you can walk the path towards your unique truth.”

When I think back to my childhood, I had lots of stories about how life was, and would play out. For example, I had accepted my own lack of personal power to make decisions about many aspects of my life as a necessary but temporary evil of being dependant on my parents. I imagined that, as an adult, all would be well.

Actually though, having not had enough practice at making my own decisions, it didn’t exactly all go well. Especially when I add in the dynamic of co-dependency and enmeshment trauma, put simply as being taught to put others needs before my own, and my happiness depending on the happiness of those closest to me; anything else being inconsiderate and selfish.

I didn’t suddenly shrug off those unhealthy ways of being as I grew up. They had become ingrained habits, ways of interacting that were wired into my nervous system and thinking and being, mostly subconscious.

So much of my experience in adulthood has had me tolerating things I didn’t enjoy or, at times, even felt were unhealthy for me, in order to please others. Having learned to attune to others’ needs in childhood as a survival technique, it didn’t simply disappear, even with awareness. I can feel tremendous guilt, pain or shame if I contemplate choices that aren’t going to make others happy.

This was the point Teal was picking up in her email, she says “Every time we give up on ourselves we open the door to let in self hate, feelings of worthlessness, a fear of being seen, an inability to speak up, sleep problems, depression and abusive or unhealthy relationships to mention just a few; this is an act of self betrayal.”

Having made the link between giving too much to others in order to be perceived as useful (or not calling out someone who mistreats people) as an act of self betrayal, she then goes on clarify “this internal self betrayal is what caused us to stop trusting and loving ourselves, and self-love and self-trust are all about having healthy boundaries.”

Boundaries. Again. Until about a year ago I hadn’t even heard about healthy boundaries – and, if I had, it had passed me by.

Terri Cole, author of Boundary Boss, says that with healthy boundaries “you have separate needs, thoughts, feelings and desires from others. You recognise that your needs are different from others. You are empowered to take responsibility for yourself. You have good self respect. You share personal information gradually, over time, in a trusting relationship.”

Suffice to say I have since done, and continue to do, a lot of work on defining and holding my personal boundaries. It’s definitely a work in progress and takes conscious effort and focus to keep moving forwards without swinging to the opposite behaviour and being narcissistic. Balance isn’t something I’ve really seen modelled in my life.

Teal’s email suggested listing ten things I am unhappiest about in my life right now, and ten things I’d like other people to stop doing around me, or to me, or saying to me. That was a good litmus test as I could previously have written ten and more things easily, whereas now I struggled to write more than a few.

I was also reminded this week of the work of Terry Real, a relationship therapist and creator of Relational Life Therapy. He has devised a relationship matrix depicting how people show up in relationships. It has a horizontal axis showing boundaries (from boundary-less to walled-off) and a vertical axis showing self esteem (from shame-based to grandiosity) which shows the various dynamics between people.

I find his matrix is another helpful way of seeing what healthy looks like, and for seeing where I used to sit versus where I currently sit, as opposed to those other important relationships in my life.

He also made an excellent point about self esteem, sharing how the extremes on that axis (shame versus grandiosity/elitism) are based on the same emotion – contempt. Shame being contempt turned in on oneself, grandiosity being contempt towards others. With boundaries, the extremes are being love dependant versus love avoidant.

In hindsight, when I look back on things that didn’t work out the way I had hoped for, I can see the way those dynamics played into each scenario. I can also see that there was usually a silver lining.

Obvious examples are the friends and self interests I gave up when becoming involved in relationships, it took a few times around that same track to recognise my chameleon behaviour and begin to wonder who I am. 

Getting healthy; physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, and staring into the abyss where all my feelings of self love and self worth had been shunted in years gone past is a journey.

These did not slip into the abyss overnight, in fact the best analogy I can think of is one of those coin-drop/nudger/pusher arcade machines where I drop a coin in and it joins lots of other coins on a moving ledge, perhaps shunting the ones at the front to spill over to the next ledge and so on.

It’s as if every time I said no to myself, that was another coin I’d dropped into the machine, eventually those no’s nudged more and more of my sense of self into the abyss. So I would have been foolish to think I’d regain this healthy sense of myself overnight. The benefit of hindsight, though, has helped me to trust that life is always working out in my favour, even if it seems backhanded on occasion.

There have been times I have wanted to give up, and times I have given in to previous thought patterns and behaviours, but with the light of awareness it’s become too hard to tolerate the way that feels for very long. Just this week I uncomfortably declined a request from one of my daughter’s friend’s parents, I still want to please and help people, but it wasn’t the right thing for me in this situation – in fact, it wasn’t even possible and yet I still felt that familiar twinge of guilt.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever feel great about saying no to others, but I know it feels a whole lot better than compromising myself. Even when I listen to Terri Cole talk about boundaries, and she speaks so gracefully and uses her words so well, she admits it’s still uncomfortable for her at times.

Despite the heartbreak and pain I’ve endured in various situations, I wouldn’t swap those experiences for what I’ve learned from them. It took a while to get the message but I’m a wiser, kinder, more self aware person than I was. And, perhaps, most importantly to me, I feel more at peace with myself and the world around me more often.

I would encourage anyone who gets disheartened to keep going. As we each regain more awareness of the parts of ourselves that we have denied, suppressed or disowned, we start to move towards a more healthy, more connected, balance between me and us. And right now, this world needs a healthy sense of perspective more than ever.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, In What Unseen Ways Are You Abandoning Your Own Free Will?, How to Appreciate Our Differences Enough to Admire and Want to Embrace Them, How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight and What You Need to Know When You Feel Pulled in Different Directions. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.