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Chapter One -- The Forgotten Self | 1, 2, 3, 4 This desire for connection and relationship is something our society often puts women down for. Women are labeled "needy" and "dependent," and women who show they care more about connecting than competing frequently get passed over for promotions. It’s crazy—in our interconnected world, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that even in the business world, success depends more on sustaining good relationships than on ruthlessness and cunning. But old attitudes die hard. When women don’t feel their needs for connection met, they often feel it’s their fault, or that something’s wrong with them. I can’t count the number of women who have told me that maybe they’re "too needy" and they want "too much." This is unjust and unfair. It’s like a man slowly starving to death thinking he should adjust his caloric needs, that maybe he’s being "too hungry." But the pull toward connection leaves women vulnerable. So vital was connection to sheer survival for our foremothers that most women have trouble disconnecting, even when they want to. If you can feel a tear in the fabric of one of your relationships right in your body, then losing an important relationship, even a bad one, can feel like losing a limb. Doing or saying something that could conceivably cause a break in a relationship can bring up a strong, visceral feeling of fear, as if you were indeed risking injury or death. It doesn’t matter if your rational mind tells you you "shouldn’t" feel this way. Something within us sets off this powerful reaction. At those times, the need to connect and be connected can become so strong that it overrides all other impulses that arise from the inner self. Because of this, many women—including smart, intelligent, competent women—will let go of their own voices rather than risk losing connection. We’ll talk a lot throughout this book about the "inner voice" and "the inner self." What do I mean by those terms exactly? Your inner voice is the wisdom of your entire self as it makes itself known to you. It expresses itself in many ways; as impulses, as urges, as body feelings, as a sense of knowing what you need and what to do, as a deep desire, and sometimes as a wisdom that can seem to come from beyond your physical body. Your inner voice directs you toward greater fulfillment in your life the way a flower turns toward the sun. But even when you don’t listen to your inner voice for years or even decades, it doesn’t reject you or disappear completely. It simply goes in the background, becoming softer, ready at any moment to show you a way to take the smallest half-step, if need be, back toward living in a manner truer to yourself. Though you may be afraid of your inner voice, in fact it is always loving and supportive of you. If you are filled with strongly critical, attacking thoughts in your mind, then by definition, no matter how accurate those attacks may seem, what you’re "hearing" is not your inner voice. Your inner self is something a little different. By inner self I’m referring to your true inner experience. To begin with, it is the person that you experience yourself to be in your private moments, when no one else is around. It is made up of the things you think and feel and remember, whether or not you express them to anyone else. But your inner self is not limited to what you are consciously aware of. Rather, it includes everything that you know, feel, sense and want, whether you are conscious of these things yet or not. Beyond even that, the inner self includes your connection to what I call the Larger Self, which we’ll get to later on. When we are born, and when we’re very young, the inner self is the only self we have. But over time, of course, we naturally develop a public or "outer" self. The outer self is the face you show to the world. It is what you actually say and do, and it includes the various roles you play. When you are in harmony with yourself, your outer self serves your inner self. It translates what your inner self wants into a form the outside world will most likely respond to. It helps you find the best way to get what your inner self wants. It does this because your inner self holds the blueprint for how to live the happiest, most fulfilling and most generative life you can have. What’s more, since maintaining the outer self is a tiring job, it’s necessary to have places and people in your life where you can relax and pretty much drop the outer, public self and show what’s really going on—what you are really thinking and feeling. When a woman loses touch with her inner self, when she believes her inner self is destructive or untrustworthy or when she feels that it would be "impossible" for her to live according to it, she suffers. Some women feel like they can’t remember a time when they were in touch with their inner selves, others feel like they lost it in adolescence, and still others feel like they lost it slowly, gradually, in a relationship with the wrong person or in a lifetime of compromises. No matter when in life it happened, in every case, the easy, natural connection to the self was lost because, time after time, the woman reached out for connection from her inner self and, instead of being mirrored, was deflected. What is meant by being mirrored? It is to look in another’s eyes and know that you’ve been seen, to listen to another’s words and know that you’ve been heard, to feel another’s touch and know that you’ve been felt. It’s in the pleasure of a shared sense of humor or a shared passion for the environment, in the joy of being encouraged by someone who believes in you, in the comfort of arms wrapped around you when you cry. It is a primal need, an essential nutrient, like food, water and oxygen. Like these other needs, it never truly fades away, though there may be times in your life when you feel you don’t need it as much from others, but revel in your own company. Being deflected is the exact opposite. It is offering the gift of a part of yourself to someone and having that person unwilling or unable to take it. While deflection can sometimes be angry or hostile, more often than not it is done without any conscious intent to harm at all. Mostly, it is expressed in a simple lack of listening or accepting. It can be felt when someone changes the subject when you share your hopes and dreams, or in a silence that says, "You’re making me uncomfortable. Don’t tell me you’re still feeling upset. You should be over it by now." What’s clear is how being deflected makes you feel. It feels like someone is shutting the door on you. Or hanging up the phone. It is a "disconnect," and it doesn’t feel good. Depending on the nature of the relationship and the deflection, it can feel like a vague, inexplicable feeling of distance that leaves you thinking, "What happened?" Or it can feel like a real blow, or sting. Yet sometimes it’s hard to know what stings, or why. All you may know is that something feels bad, and you may blame yourself for feeling that way. "I’m too sensitive," you may say to yourself, or "I want more than he is willing to give me yet. I should back off." Since the sting of a deflection is something everyone wants to avoid, you soon learn what will be mirrored and received, and what will be deflected. In many relationships, the inner self is not mirrored. Instead, what gets mirrored are the actions you take to satisfy others’ needs and expectations. If those who share your life don’t see you, you’re in danger of becoming invisible to yourself. If they don’t hear you, your desire to connect with others starts to battle with your desire to be true to yourself. If connection wins, you take from yourself the right to know what you know, feel what you feel, sense what you sense and want what you want. How does this happen? When does this start? Clearly, for most of us the foundations start.... —Reprinted from I Know I'm in There Somewhere: A Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner Voice and Living a Life of Authenticity by Helene Brenner by permission of Gotham Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © 2003 by Helene Brenner. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission. |
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