I have been thinking a lot lately about some of the difficult paradoxes a lot of women who grapple with worthiness and the worthiness wound may find in themselves.
The worthiness wound® is a concept I formulated to name the place within us that feels both deeply broken and inadequate and also like we are too much for others.
Our emotional health is interconnected to our relational health. It is the relationships around us that help us cultivate inner joy, self-love and life satisfaction.
Now, that does not mean that every relationship is inherently healing. And it doesn’t mean that every relationship needs to be healed for us to be healed, or that every relationship can be healed.
And it doesn’t mean that relationships that end mark a failure to heal. (In fact, sometimes the ending is the healing.)
It is easy to get caught up in the idea that you should always be able to stop, drop, and feel all of your feelings. Especially if you are on a journey of personal healing and self empowerment, and looking to the world of the “self help” industry for tools and support.
But part of knowing how to truly feel your feelings is learning when it’s not appropriate to do so.
I first noticed rigidity within myself around food. I had so many rigid rules on how to eat, what to eat, when to eat… as well as how often I should exercise and when. If anyone attempted to change my plans I would fall into a spiral of shame and overwhelm. My rigid rules were the only things keeping me glued together, or so I thought.
Through my healing work, I found that when we explore with curiosity where we are rigid, when we offer compassion to the places that feel righteous…
I am a big fan of anger.
And I have been talking about the importance of normalizing anger a lot lately. Inevitably I receive comments from people about how anger is not OK, how anger is pointless, and that it just gets in the way.
All of these sentiments are understandable, particularly if we were modeled that feeling anger is equivalent to yelling, hitting, punishing, raging, etc. This is what we see on mainstream media, and for many of us it’s what we saw from our parents, so it makes a lot of sense that we distrust anger and feel fearful of its wrath.
The fact is that our feelings and our actions are different things.
Personally, I am no longer a big fan of using this language of “letting it go.”
I have been told to let things go my entire life.
On my healing journey, however, I started to realize that my need to let things go actually stemmed from an internalized narrative that I am too much, too broken, too emotional, not enough, etc.
I avoid hard conversations like the plague.
Sometimes I do this thing in relationships where I will claim {to myself or to the other} that I need space... and while it may be true for a short time, I sometimes take way more space than I need because I secretly hope that if I don’t have to talk about it, it will just go away.
Notice in your relationships where you secretly hope that the other person can read your mind. That they should “just know.”
That is not relating, that’s enmeshing.
And where there is enmeshment, there is usually resentment.
How often do we demand, whether it’s consciously or unconsciously, that our partner love us the way our parents never did? That they offer us the type of unconditionality that we never received? That they reparent us and tend to all of our needs?
The truth is… I abandon myself daily.
When I apologize for sharing my feelings because I am afraid others are uncomfortable.
When I focus more on making myself likable than honest.
Avoiding disappointment by trying not to have expectations is not the answer.
Because disappointment is not a problem that needs to be fixed.
Often when it comes to conversations of disappointment, we are told that if we don’t want to feel disappointed, we simply have to stop having expectations.
People do not need to be saved from feeling disappointment.
However, we often defend against our own fears of feeling disappointment by becoming overly concerned about not disappointing others.
If we were not taught how to sit with our disappointment, or we were taught other people’s feelings were our responsibility, of course we are going to try to save people from feeling disappointed now as adults.
At some point in our development many of us got the message that not disappointing our caregivers was our responsibility. While of course it’s important to teach children that their behavior impacts others... it is not on children to make their parents happy.
These words by Neil Strauss are 🔥 and remind me of the fact that often we filter the world through our wounds and trauma.
I have been really digging the word “capacity” lately as it relates to our ability to be in care for ourselves and others. it’s a topic that my friend and I dive into in my latest RECLAIM podcast episode and a concept that has helped me shape whether the invitation lies in inward or outward movement. Let me explain:
Right now it feels like many of us are having to hold extra space for the complexities of being in our bodies.
One of the things I learned during my eating disorder recovery was that I was never really taught how to exist in my body. I thought my body was just a tool for the mind, an object to criticize and demean until it looked the way I wanted it to based on social conditioning.
When things feel uncertain and crunchy and anxiety laden in our lives, it makes sense that we unconsciously resort to using old skills and tools to get through. some are more obvious, like numbing with food or alcohol or TV. Some are less obvious but still insidious, like obsessive thoughts or a louder than usual inner critic.
Food and body and weight have been on my mind more frequently these past weeks due to all of the things happening in the world right now. For people such as myself with a past disordered relationship with food, seeing empty shelves and constant “jokes” about gaining weight have stirred up old but familiar food anxiety and obsessive thoughts about my body.
I am turning 30 in about a month and spending a few hours going through my FB brought to the forefront of my mind my entire 20’s. As I scrolled I saw myself change and grows in unexpected ways, and I thought I would share some of my experiences with you all in the form of words of wisdom I would have loved to tell myself when I turned 20.
As far as I could remember, January meant one thing and one thing only - resolutions. It was a time for me to set the tone for the year by creating big audacious goals and committing to them, no matter what. It takes 21 days to create a habit, I reasoned, so I just had to stick to this for 21 days and the rest of the year I could coast off the hard work.
As we begin to go on our inner healing journey, however, we start to receive messages that you are enough, that you don’t need become a new person, that resolutions don’t work and what you need is self-compassion.
While that message can feel like a relief, it also offers a bit of inner conflict. Does feeling worthy mean we are not allowed to want to grow and change? And if both things are possible, then how do we endeavor to become better while honoring that we are enough?
