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Book Excerpt

Introduction

I laugh to myself when my clients tell me how calm I am, because, like many women, I am an emotional person. I easily get my feelings hurt. I have deep needs for connection and intimacy. I have always been this way and I still am.

We women constantly get the message that our feelings are something we need to rise above or get over or think differently about or somehow fix. They’re fine if we keep them in check and don’t let them "affect our thinking." But we have to be on guard to moderate our feelings, and deny our anger or sadness, lest we be called too emotional, or hysterical, or "hormonal." We have to be careful about showing our desire for connection and intimacy, or we could be labeled "needy."

Yet our awareness of our inner selves and our desire for connection are great gifts. I would never for a moment want to give up the incredible richness of my inner life, or the blessings in my outer life, that my emotions and desire for intimacy have brought me. As one of my clients said to her husband after seeing the movie Pleasantville, "I live in Technicolor—you live in black and white."

I love helping women find and live from their true selves, which is what I get to do every day in my psychology practice at Women’s Counseling and Psychological Services. As a psychologist, I’ve worked with over a thousand women in one-on-one therapy as well as in workshops on the east and west coasts. Early on in my career, I decided to devote myself to finding the best ways to help women be both as feelingful and as effective in the world as they wish to be, and to claim their own selves yet develop and maintain the intimate connections with others they so deeply desire.

Women have such amazing stores of passion and compassion. Almost all of them, deep down, are motivated not only by what is best for themselves but by what is best for other people, indeed, for all of life. Yet they’re twice as likely to be referred for treatment for depression and anxiety disorders, because they’ve been deprived of the tools they need to make their natural gifts work for them rather than against them.

Almost all women live their lives standing outside themselves, always ready to judge their bodies, their feelings and their thoughts from an external standard, and find themselves wanting. Why do women do this? After all, supposedly we have all won equality with men, and are free to follow our dreams and do anything men do. But, though women’s lives have changed dramatically from what they were only a few decades ago—in countless ways, big and small—women do not operate on an equal footing with men. What’s more, women’s ways of feeling, knowing and being continue to be relegated to second-class status, treated as inappropriate for the "serious" business of the world. Women still are given the message that to succeed in life, they must be more like men, be attractive to men, or be both.

Practically every woman, at some point in her life, has felt that she has lost track of herself and is living according to what other people wanted and expected from her. Part of the reason, of course, is the many real-world pressures affecting women. But women also carry within them an inner legacy, shaped by thousands of years of women’s experiences, that tells them to accommodate, adapt and mold themselves to serve others at their own expense.

What causes lasting change? Pursuing the answer to this question has been a passion of mine for nearly thirty years. One thing I’ve learned is that women don’t usually change their lives, or begin to feel permanently better about themselves, by adopting self-improvement regimens or telling themselves to change their thoughts and beliefs. Real change occurs when a woman has a different experience of herself.

I call this a "self-acceptance" book, rather than a "self-improvement" book, because I truly believe that you don’t have to change or fix or improve yourself in order to be happy. I believe that living a fulfilled life comes from learning how to listen to your inner voice, to the truth of your inner being in all of the ways that it speaks to you, and to live from it.

Of course, everyone knows that they should love and accept themselves. It may be the most common piece of psychological advice in the world. It sounds good, but if you don’t know how to accept yourself, it becomes just another item in that long list of things you "should" do to be a better person.

Self-acceptance is not something you tell yourself to have. It’s something you experience when you discover that you can pay attention to your innermost feelings and desires with care and compassion. You can also pay attention in the same way to the feelings you block because they cause you pain, and to the parts of you that you think are unacceptable. Then these aspects of yourself can be welcomed back into your conscious self with the life-giving message they are holding for you. When you do this, you become more spontaneous and alive, quite literally more full of yourself, as you once were as a girl, before you learned that girls and women can’t live from their inner selves and follow their own inner lights.

Working with my clients, I found that at some point in therapy, they would have moments when a switch would occur in their consciousness. Sometimes these moments were dramatic, sometimes they were subtle, but always they were meaningful. Women would go from seeing themselves and their lives from the outside to feeling them from the inside. They’d feel a surge of good feeling about who they were, and whatever they thought they had to change about themselves they’d see in an entirely new light.

Until that moment, important aspects of these women’s true inner selves were inaccessible to them. Without that access, they had nothing to counter the influence of what I call "outside voices"—the opinions, desires and expectations of other people, or the critical, judgmental voices in their own mind that told them what was wrong with them and what they needed to improve. Once they reconnected to their inner selves, however, they had a new reference point for how they could feel. It became easier for them to understand the signals that came from their inner selves, and so they trusted them more. The outside voices had less of an effect.

I saw these experiences as central to the therapy I was doing. I saw women come more alive as they trusted more and more what their own hearts, minds and souls were telling them. And I looked for ways to help women come to their inner voices more quickly and predictably.

Reconnecting to your inner voice is one thing; staying connected is another. Living from your inner voice is in a great sense a matter of learning what, and what not, to pay attention to within yourself. In the process of doing therapy, I identified five distinct passageways to lead you back to your inner self again and again. I call these the Five Pathways to the Inner Voice. The first four are Knowing, Sensing, Feeling and Wanting. The fifth is the Voice of the Larger Self, the "spiritual guide" within. What comes from the Voice of the Larger Self is something quite remarkable: a quiet, clear message that seems to emanate from deep within your body, accompanied by an extraordinary sense of inner rightness and peace.

The techniques I describe to access these inner pathways are effective because they work with the grain of most women’s natures. All the messengers of your inner self—your knowing, your sensing, your feelings, your wanting, and your larger self—are there to help you become more whole and live a life that’s most rewarding to you. Once you begin to trust them again and continue to do so, it becomes easier and easier to use them in your life. In every chapter except the first I’ve provided "innercizes" to access your inner voice based on the work that I do with my women clients. I think you’ll find them useful and enjoyable.

I’ve divided this book into three sections. The first, The Inner Voice Experience, shows how women come to lose themselves and then shows how they reconnect with themselves again, re-experiencing the feeling that they lost of living from their inner voices. After learning what the inner voice is and some of the fundamentals about how to regain it, we then go back to explore in more detail what the outside voices are, how they function to block your inner voice, and what you can do to begin separating yourself from them so as to hear your inner being.

The second section of the book, Aligning with the Inside, teaches you, chapter by chapter, how to use each of the Five Pathways—Knowing, Sensing, Feeling, Wanting and the Voice of the Larger Self—to connect with your inner voice again and again. The third section, Living from Your Inner Voice, goes into more specific detail about how to use these principles to build a life of authenticity from your inner voice, first by being your true self in your intimate relationships, and then by bringing your inner visions into your life. Finally, I’ll take a few pages to look at how to relate our inner voices to the larger world around us and the times that we live in.

I’ve aspired to write this book in a way that will evoke for you this very different way of feeling and being. To do this, I’ve included many stories from my therapy practice to help make these ideas come alive. Though the particulars of these women’s lives have been changed to protect their privacy, and some stories are composites of several women’s experiences, the feelings and words are true. These women have generously allowed me to share their stories and feelings with you so that you can be there with them during the moments when they turned toward their inner voices, in the hope that their stories might awaken the inner voice within you. I invite you to notice as you read their experiences whether they affect the way you see your own.

You might wonder whether, in talking about living from your inner self, I’m suggesting you only listen to your inner self. Nothing could be further from the truth. Growing and developing as an adult means increasingly opening to the world around you and letting other people affect and change you. I would be just as concerned about a woman who never let other people affect her or change her mind as I would be about one who always let other people affect her. The more you feel anchored in your inner being and can validate your own opinions, feelings and desires, the more you can give to others and truly listen to others without fear of losing yourself.

This book can help you if you feel that you’re doing more and more with less and less and feeling worse and worse about yourself; if you spend most of your day responding to what your boss, kids and husband want and wonder why you don’t seem to know what you want; if you have had fleeting feelings of wanting to bring some inner vision or dream to life but immediately tell yourself to be "practical"; or if you yearn to close the gap between who you feel yourself to be on the inside and who you are on the outside. It also can help you if you are already following your own path in life and would like a guide and affirming companion to accompany you on your journey. Though this book deals a great deal with women’s issues, much of this book can also help men of heart who’d like guidance on how to live from their authentic selves.

The message of this book is as simple as it is radical for women in any era: You can trust yourself, your feelings, your thoughts and desires, your own goodness and authority. Let the power of your own spirit guide you. The world literally needs you to find and live from your inner voice. Indeed, never has your inner voice been needed more.

 

Chapter One

The Forgotten Self

I believed, at twelve, that I could be a scientist. I read a book a day. I believed I could be a writer, an actress, a professor of English in Rome, an acrobat in a purple spangled outfit. Days opened for me like the pulling apart of curtains at a play you’ve been dying to see.

My life was like a wild, beating thing, exotic, capable of unfolding and enlarging itself, pulling itself higher and higher up like a kite loved by the wind . . . There in front of me, my own for the taking. And then, suddenly, lost.

—Elizabeth Berg, The Pull of the Moon

Several years ago, I was on a plane to California to attend a family celebration when I happened to sit next to a very engaging woman in her thirties. We struck up a conversation, and as women sometimes do, we told each other about our lives. "Val," as I’ll call her, was thirty-four, had two young children, and was flying to a business convention. She had also recently separated from her husband. As she told me her story, I couldn’t help but think how much she spoke for so many women I’d met and worked with over the years. Though her story is her own, so universal were many of her feelings and conflicts that she seemed almost to speak for the dilemma of women in our time.

"Until six months ago, I ran everything I thought and felt through the filter of ‘What would Richard think?’ " She paused and looked at me, looking to see if I understood.

"Don’t get me wrong. I had my opinions. I didn’t submerge them for his. But whatever I thought, whatever I felt, always, it went through my mind: ‘What would Richard think about this? What would Richard want?’

"I had another filter, too," she continued. "It was ‘not good enough.’ I’d worry, ‘Is the house clean enough? Is my cooking good enough? Did I help the kids enough with their homework?’ Even though I worked full-time at my job just like him, I’d think, ‘Am I doing a good enough job being a wife and mother?’ "

"When I discovered that he was having an affair, after he insisted over and over again that he wasn’t, I was permanently freed from ever having to make him happy."

But she wasn’t free—not really. "I’m never content or satisfied with myself," she told me. "I reevaluate everything at the end of the day. I’d get together with a friend, for example, and then afterward I’d think, ‘Should I have asked her more about her kids, more about her?’ I’m always second-guessing myself. And I always think I’m short-changing something or somebody. If it’s not my family, it’s my job.

"And I keep trying on other people’s feelings and opinions for size. I’m glad that I do, in one way," she reflected. "I want to be open, I wouldn’t want to be rigid and hardened so that other people don’t affect me. But it gets exhausting, to have that much static and so many voices in my head. What a relief it would be if I could listen to others but stand by my own feelings with more conviction!"

We spoke about other things for a while. Then she went back to telling me the rest of her story. "Richard’s been seeing a therapist," she said, "and he wants to get back together with me. And if I just follow my heart, I will let him. There is a part of me that still loves him. Also, he is the father of my children. But there is the part of me that says, ‘Here is your chance to have something better.’ I can feel how exciting that might be, but of course there are no guarantees. So I can feel both of these parts of me, but what I can’t get my hands around is the gray in between.

"How does anyone really know what to do? It’s so easy for me to lose track of myself," she said in frustration. "Much of the time, I feel like I’m in neutral, ready at a moment’s notice to go with the flow of someone with a stronger opinion."

 

As women we are destined to confront a fundamental challenge that colors practically every day of our lives. On the one hand, we must respond to, notice and be true to who we genuinely are, what we genuinely think and feel in our own unique and inimitable way. For many of us, the pulse of our internal lives beats strongly. We are aware of how we feel—sometimes, perhaps, more than we want to be. Yet this is our gift, one that we must find a way to honor.

At the same time, we are drawn to connect. We are drawn to follow that urge inside us, that pull of the tide to respond to others, to take their feelings and needs into account, to reach for that moment of intimacy and communion, to tend the web of relationships that sustains (and sometimes smothers) us, and, if we are responsible for dependent children, to fulfill our responsibility to take care of them to the best of our ability, even when it extracts a great cost from ourselves.

Somehow we must balance these two forces. We must bring them together so that neither one cancels the other out. We must find a way to make them work in tandem so that who we truly are enriches all the people we touch, and so that the connections we have with the important people in our lives mirrors, validates and makes stronger the woman we are inside.

Unfortunately, very few women have been taught how to balance these two forces. Very few have been encouraged as young girls to hold on tightly to who they really are; very few have been told that they have an inner voice that is theirs and theirs alone. Instead, they often learn the intricate arts of developing and maintaining connection at a high cost—at the expense of their true selves.

 

Tend and Befriend

A few years ago, a group of six psychologists from UCLA announced the results of a study showing that, while each person is an individual, in general men and women react in very different ways to stress. Specifically, the psychologists said that under stress, men’s bodies automatically turn to the strategy known as "fight or flight" (gearing up either to fight or to make a hasty retreat), whereas women’s bodies automatically prepare them to do what the researchers called "tend and befriend."

That is, when stress mounts, a woman’s own hormonal system naturally inclines her first to protect and nurture her children (tend) and then to turn to a social network of supportive females (befriend). This, the researchers said, was the biggest difference between men and women in their responses to stress.

This finding didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me, though perhaps it shouldn’t have, was that the research team, headed by a woman, was nervous about publishing the study because they worried that it might be used to stereotype women negatively.

"I hope women don’t find it offensive," Shelley Taylor, the lead researcher, told a Washington Post reporter. "We’re trying very hard not to have people say, ‘Aha! We always thought that women should be at home taking care of their children.’ "

How sad! Here was a study showing that under stress, women are more likely than men to try to make friends instead of enemies, and the researchers still felt the need to worry that it could be used to support keeping women in a circumscribed, traditional role. If only this tendency could be bottled and given to men!

"No man is an island, entire unto himself," wrote the poet John Donne. Rare is the woman who needs to be told this. Most women, in fact, would probably find it laughably self-evident. The human species has survived because of communities of women tending and befriending, protecting and sharing food, resources and information with each other.

Your connections—your relationships—are not separate from your sense of self, as they usually are with men; they are a part of you, included as much in your experience of yourself as your talents and abilities, or even your arms and legs. Chances are, you can feel a tear in the fabric of one of your relationships right in your body. Why can a man go for months without calling his family, or forget to send birthday presents, and not have it bother him? Of course, part of the reason is that less is expected of him because "he’s a man." But it’s also true that he literally doesn’t feel the break in the relationship the same way you do.

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 it start? Clearly for most of us the foundations start in early childhood.

 

The First Mirror

There were no mirrors in my Nana’s house
The beauty I saw in everything
The beauty of everything
Was in her eyes.
—Sweet Honey in the Rock, "No Mirrors in My Nana’s House" (Still on the Journey, 1993)

You came into this world already a unique individual, with your own true ways of seeing and being. But you couldn’t see yourself. That comes much later—the first inklings at ten or eleven. You first learned who you are from seeing yourself in the eyes of those who cared for you. If they mirrored back who you really were, then you came to know yourself. If they didn’t, you may have lost yourself, because they were the source of your life and well-being.

From the moment you were born, you initiated intense interactions—"conversations"—with the people in your life, starting with your mother, and then expanding to the other members of your family and to all the other caretakers, teachers and friends you met. It is through these conversations that you grew up and learned who you were. You brought all the raw energy and exuberance of your inborn nature to these conversations, all of your feelings, your child’s perspective, your weaknesses and strengths.

Even before you knew language, you had an enormous amount to "say." And because it was so critical to your flowering as a human being, you had a tremendous drive to be met, to connect and to be heard. But sadly, this may not have happened. While there are exceptions, to the extent that parents do not allow themselves their own feelings, they will not allow their children’s feelings. To the extent that they judge and condemn themselves, they will judge and condemn their children. And to the extent that they believe in rigidly controlling themselves, or feel controlled by others, they will attempt to control their children. "I got the feeling," said one client, "that my mother had no power over anything else, but she had power over me. So if there was one thing in the world she could make happen, it was that I was going to do her bidding." As another woman expressed it, "The message I got growing up was, ‘Don’t grow the way you want to grow, grow the way I want you to grow.’"

Judging, controlling, and denying feelings are all forms of deflection. They slowly shut off the flow of who you are. They communicate that huge aspects of you do not deserve love or attention. When people do not know how to listen to their inner selves, and when they don’t feel listened to, they tend not to listen to or take seriously the feelings of their children. Then they focus only on the outward behaviors of their children—on whether they are "being good" and "behaving"—and all of their efforts go into correcting what is "wrong" with their children.

Yet the biggest and most common form of deflection, more than all of the judging, controlling and correcting, is simply not responding and mirroring the wonderful sparks of life that announce, "This is who I am."

I saw this happen recently in its purest and most elemental form while stopping to get an ice cream cone.

I was sitting in a nearly empty Dairy Queen when a young couple—they couldn’t have been older than twenty-five—came in with an especially cute little two-year-old girl. Rock music from a radio station started playing over the speakers, and this little girl started dancing. And I mean dancing! She twirled, she hopped, she skipped, she bent down to drum her hands on the floor, she spun, she waved her arms and then she started hopping again. There was such sheer joy radiating from her, I felt uplifted just watching her.

"Your daughter is quite a dancer," I said to the father, admiringly.

"Well, she loves goofing around," he replied.

I detected just a tad of disapproval, or at least not real approval, in his voice, so I persisted. "Well, she sure does love to dance, and she’s really good at it!"

"She loves attention," said the mother. It wasn’t said in an angry or nasty way, but still, she didn’t mention her dancing, and there was in her tone a sense that this was something just a bit wrong with her.

By this point, the therapist in me wanted to make some small impact on the situation. "Oh, yes, don’t they all!" I said. "She’s so gifted! I bet she takes after somebody in the family."

"I don’t know who," said the father. The mother then pointed at him, and for the first time she had a faint smile on her face. He grinned a little and said, "Well, you know, at home we goof around together, dancing and stuff."

"That’s great," I said. Something happened to break our conversation, but I kept watching the girl. When she looked at me, I started moving my head and shoulders in time to the music. Her face exploded into the biggest smile. She felt understood. She beat the floor with her hands, and I beat the table a few times with mine. Her whole body shook with delight. She was thrilled.

But in the next few minutes, the only response her mother gave her (her father said nothing) was to tell her a few times not to sit down on the "dirty" floor. (It was actually rather clean.)

As I said, the store was nearly empty and she wasn’t dancing wildly or bumping into anything. Yet the mother was acting as if she was doing something a little bit wrong.

To their credit, the parents didn’t stop her from dancing. I could imagine that the mother may have felt a little uncomfortable at her daughter’s "wild" behavior in public. Many mothers feel extremely vulnerable to other people’s judgments of their parenting based on their children’s behavior. In a recent column, Washington Post columnist Jeanne Marie Laskas called this "the Parent Police"—the people who judge how good a mother you are by how groomed, safe and controlled your toddler or preschooler is.

So it was good that they let her dance. Yet they took no pride in the girl’s coordination and exuberance, even to an admiring stranger! What’s more, there was no acknowledgment of her spark. Without that acknowledgment, there’s a good chance her spark will dim, and with it some of her aliveness and ability to live according to her inner voice.

I wish I could teach all parents that one of their most important jobs, especially in the early years, is to fan the sparks, all the big and little things their child does that make her feel good about herself. You fan them by noticing, responding to and mirroring them, showing the child that those sparks are good and important (without, of course, turning around and exploiting them—by making her perform for grandparents, for example). That is the most powerful thing you can do for the first six years or so to ensure that your child, when she grows up, has the inner strength to face everything life will confront her with.

A child whose sparks are fanned and whose feelings are treated as valid becomes "more." For many people, it is hard to accept a child, especially a girl, who is too "full of herself," one who "knows her own mind." A girl like that will be honest with her feelings, including anger at a parent. She may be "too" loud, "too" exuberant, "too" full of feelings and opinions. She is not held back by fear or by resignation that no one will pay attention to her. She expects to take up space.

This issue of taking up space is important. I’m struck by how often women use the metaphor of space to describe whether or not they felt their inner voices were heard and honored. "My mother wouldn’t let me have any space for myself," a woman said to me one morning. A few hours later, another woman, talking about an ex-boyfriend, said, "I didn’t feel like there was any space for me in the relationship." Women talk about "shrinking" or "contracting" in their lives or with certain people, all metaphors for the amount of space they feel they can take up.

Our inner selves want to be large. They want to move. They want to be seen, heard and responded to. A frightening or unapproachable father, a controlling and critical mother stops movement, restricts the space where the inner self feels free. So does a parent who doesn’t "hold the space," and who doesn’t respond to a call for help, because then the girl’s movements can’t safely expand into new areas. She either loses her way in a world beyond what she can manage, or she restricts herself to the areas she already knows, where she feels safe.

I sometimes ask my clients if anyone knew them as a child—knew and cared how they really felt, knew what concerned them, knew their likes and dislikes, knew what made them happy. I also sometimes ask what they got applause for. Was it for being alive and exuberant, courageous, showing your budding talents? Or was it for being "nice," compliant and controlled, for helping out, staying quiet and following the rules?

Of course, there are no hard and fast rules to explain why one person loses her inner voice while another holds on to it. There are people who manage to keep their inner voice through the direst of childhoods. Often, it’s because they were able to seek what they needed in their environment the way a blade of grass seeks a crack in the pavement. Sometimes it was because of certain books, or a pet, or a teacher who came along at the right moment to mirror and validate who they were. A few had some exceptional talent that brought them recognition and gave them something to organize their inner selves around. Or they simply drew upon some unfathomable inner resource that kept them going.

But generally, to grow up without forgetting your inner voice, you need to have at least one significant person in your life literally listen to your voice—to take what you think, feel and want seriously. Too many parents believe with the best of intentions that the parents are the ones who should talk and the children who are supposed to listen, to "mind." But in homes where parents want their children to grow up in possession of their inner voice, the parents know that children have only a limited capacity to listen, and it is the parents who must listen much more, and who must model listening and empathy, so the children develop their own minds—and their own selves.

 

Modeling

All children are affected by whether or not they have been listened to, mirrored and treated as though their feelings are valid. Yet girls often begin to forget themselves for another reason: They begin to believe that keeping their voice is incompatible with being a girl, or a woman. At home, this happens in two ways: by watching how their parents relate to one another, and by seeing how their father relates to them.

Most girls are consummate students of relationships, as keenly observant as any anthropologist studying an aboriginal tribe. And the first and most important relationship a girl will ever study is the one between her parents. Every aspect of that relationship, every interaction, good or bad, gets recorded unconsciously as the model for how men and women "should" relate. How open and outspoken is her mother with her father? Are they equals, or is Dad the "head" of the family? What do her parents expect from, and give to, each other? If a woman subsumes herself to keep peace with her husband or to "serve" the family, that becomes part of the model. If a girl grows up identifying with her mother, she will tend to replicate the patterns of her parents’ relationship in her own marriage, even when she thinks she’s rejected them.

"I had a very normal, happy childhood," said Faith, a forty-two-year-old mother of four teenagers. "I was close to my mother, I loved my older sister except when we fought, and I tolerated my younger brother." She loved her father as well and thought that he loved her, though "we didn’t have much of a relationship."

Until she was an adult, she thought her parents never fought. "I couldn’t remember my parents ever having a single argument, or even speaking a harsh word to each other," she said. But as she grew up she started to realize that her father always had the final say. "I tried to talk to my mother about it," she recalled. "When I was a freshman in college, I’d come home on break and argue with her that she shouldn’t let Dad get the last word all the time." But she ended up marrying a man every bit as calm, rational and quietly domineering as her father.

Parental modeling is an extraordinarily powerful influence on women’s relationships. Researching depressed women, psychologist Dana Crowley Jack found that most of the women grew up in homes where the father was dominant and the mother deferred to his authority, and they continued that pattern in their own marriages. It works the other way as well. Two psychologists, Dorothy Cantor and Toni Bernay, interviewed twenty-five women politicians to find out what features in their history and upbringing made them able to become the national leaders they were. They found that, even though most of their mothers didn’t work outside the home, invariably, their fathers treated their wives as equals. In their book, Women In Power, Cantor and Bernay write:

It is extremely important that women see their mothers as equal partners to their fathers, not as second-class citizens who can’t control their own lives. As children, the women we interviewed constantly received positive messages about women, which contributed to the positive image they developed of themselves as females.

As for conflict, from working with women I believe that girls need to see some healthy conflict between their parents. The first times Faith fought with her husband, while they were still engaged, she felt so "ashamed" and embarrassed that she couldn’t tell her mother about it in their weekly phone calls. "I felt like our love was now flawed, broken, and that it was my fault," she said. I’ve heard many women say similar things.

Of course, young lovers are always going to believe that theirs is the one perfect love that will never have conflict. Yet it seems that when the bubble bursts, many young women think it is they who have failed. Somehow they should have been able to maintain the harmony between them. They don’t realize that conflict is vital to love. Either they, like Faith, were "protected" from conflict, or, more typically, they saw bruising battles where their mothers were cowed, or endless, pointless battles where they nagged and scolded to no effect while their fathers defended and deflected. In all of these cases, a girl never learns about the power a woman has in her relationship. Without that power, love is only surrender, nothing more.

Equally important to a girl’s ability to keep her voice is how her father treats her. Girls need a lot of practice being themselves with fathers who follow their lead, who get their own egos out of the way. Unfortunately, fathers like that have been the exception rather than the rule for my women clients. Most had fathers who were well-meaning, but distant. Some didn’t think it was their job to be closely involved with their daughters. Others were afraid of doing or saying the "wrong" thing, of feeling overwhelmed and helpless in the face of their daughters’ emotions, as they were around their wife’s emotions. But without that interaction, girls do not learn that who they are, as they are, deserves love, respect and attention from a man.

Some fathers paid attention to them only when they were being cute, pretty and sweet, or joined in what the father was interested in. In other words, only when they behaved in ways that were traditionally feminine and made the father feel good. At its most extreme, this included sexual abuse. Getting attention for meeting a father’s needs, whether it’s to fulfill his "male ego" or worse, sexual gratification, is always terribly damaging to a girl’s inner voice, and to her spirit.

A father who sees his daughter as a person, however, who shows he cares by stepping out of his own needs and into her world, who believes in her and lets himself be influenced by her, can have an impact that affects her entire life. "My dad was a Ward Cleaver, woman’s-place-is-in-the-home, conservative kind of guy," said one client of mine. "But he wanted me to grow up to do anything I wanted, so he had to change his opinion." The greatest gift that this father gave his daughter, besides his support, was letting her know that she had changed him.

 

Chameleon Training

Once they have reached five or six, there is a new place girls go to learn the art of girlhood: Other girls.

I remember when my older daughter was only five and in kindergarten. She was talking about Chloe, her closest friend in the class. "I like other kids, like Tammy, but I have to sit near Chloe or she feels sad. One time, when Chloe wasn’t around, I said to myself, ‘The coast is clear. I can play by myself, or do anything I want.’ "

I was fascinated—and a little alarmed! This was a girl who’d been encouraged from birth to follow her inner self. How did the feelings of a little girl like her friend Chloe hold such powerful sway over her already?

Think back to your girlhood friends. After your parents, they were probably the most important people in your world. They understood you. They supported you. They were the ones you figured out the world with. And with friends, you developed the skills of caring, empathy and cooperation that you will use your entire life. You learned how to establish and maintain the networks of relationships that women have been relying on from the beginning of time.

Girls teach each other the language of connection, belonging and intimacy. They share secrets and feelings; they tell each other, "you’re my best friend." As sociologist and linguist Deborah Tannen has shown, girls as young as in the third grade have already developed the ability to chime in with their friends’ feelings, even to the point of exaggerating their similarities. They learn to say in effect, "I know just how you feel; I feel the exact same way!"

But there is a dark side to this education, just as there is a dark side to belonging as a woman. It teaches girls to blend in, to accommodate, to tune into what everyone else thinks and wants—and tune out what they think and want. I call it "chameleon training."

By fifth grade, girls have expanded beyond friendships with one or two girls to form tightly knit "communities" of girls. Where you stand in these communities—based mostly on your social skills—is a very important matter.

Tannen described in her book, You Just Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation, another researcher’s observation of a game fifth-grade girls played called "Doctor Knickerbocker Number Nine." In it, a group of girls formed a circle. One girl would start the game by getting in the center of the circle, twirling around with her eyes closed, stopping and extending her arms. The girl she pointed to had to join her in the circle, who then twirled and pointed to another girl, until nine girls were in the circle.

From the outside, Tannen noted, it looks like a rather strange game. What’s the point of it? The researcher, Janet Lever, explains:

Shouts of glee were heard from the circle’s center when a friend had been chosen to join them. Indeed, a girl could gauge her popularity by the loudness of these shouts.

Dr. Tannen points out that the game is "indeed a contest . . . a popularity contest" and that it is an "experiment in shifting alliances." (pp. 180–181).

But these "shifting alliances" are no game. I’ve been surprised at the number of women who can recall horror stories of being ostracized sometime between fifth and ninth grade, cruelly teased and even hated with a venom by girls who used to be their closest friends. The cruelty often starts with some absurd social faux pas, like wearing the wrong sweater on a certain day or saying the wrong thing to the wrong person.

Or simply saying your true feelings. For Dale, one such incident turned into the most painful experience of her childhood.

When I was in fifth grade, I was friends with three other girls—Claudia, Cindy and Jenny. For some reason, we made it a rule to rotate who we considered our "best friend." Sometimes it was supposed to be Claudia and me, Cindy and Jenny. Then it would be Claudia and Jenny, Cindy and me.

One day the kids in my classroom passed around a notebook. It was called a "slam book." At the top of each page was a kid’s name, and below it were the comments about that kid from every other kid in the class. That week I was supposed to be Cindy’s best friend, but I didn’t feel that way. So instead of writing "best friend" on Cindy’s page, I just wrote "nice girl."

The next time I saw them, they had all turned on me. From then on, they’d call me at home at night, get me on the phone and say things like "You’re ugly" and "We hate you. Everybody hates you" and hang up. In class, they wouldn’t look at me. If I looked at them, they’d say, "Take a picture, it will last longer."

This went on for months, all the way until the end of the term. I apologized, over and over, but nothing I did would get them to stop.*

These incidents are devastating to the girls who are its victims. Yet those who are successful at the blending game lose out as well. Like Vivian, a thirty-four-year-old real estate broker and divorced mother of two. "I was very popular as a kid. I always seemed to know ahead of time what other people wanted to hear. I was great at getting with everyone else’s program. Right in my high school yearbook, a boy wrote, ‘Everyone always feels good when they’re around you!’ "

She shook her head ruefully. "I didn’t have the slightest clue who I was. I don’t think I ever expressed a single opinion of my own to anyone. But I don’t think anybody noticed."

Chameleon training teaches girls to be nice, be modest, belong. It punishes girls for being smart, honest and outspoken. "Here comes Miss Smarty-pants," a friend of mine was taunted. "She thinks she’s so big," another friend recalls. Many women remember "hiding their light" as girls, trying not to speak out in class, concealing their grades, and becoming mortified when their teachers read or drew attention to their papers.

*There is nothing "inevitable" about this. In fact, there is no excuse for such cruelty to occur in public schools. Today, there are programs run in a few American elementary schools, both public and private, where such a concerted effort to ostracize a girl would be discovered and stopped—the "culture" of the school would not allow it. This event happened and lasted as long as it did only because the parents of the girls and the teacher ignored it and allowed it to.

In early adolescence, girls begin to censor not just their actions, but their very thoughts and feelings. As younger children, they knew when they were pretending in order to act the way they were supposed to and hold onto their friendships. But now they start to disconnect with what they know inside to be true, rather than risk isolation. Of course, some girls don’t. They’re willing to be loud and outspoken. But many girls actually start to forget their inner selves—what they know, what they sense, what they feel and what they want. And what they don’t forget, they reject. As Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan describe in their book Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development:

adolescence is a time of disconnection, sometimes of dissociation or repression, so that women often do not remember—tend to forget or to cover over—what as girls they have experienced and known . . . girls come to a place where they feel they cannot say or feel or know what they have experienced.

Of course, adolescence is a time of enormous change. Even if you do censor yourself, at the same time you are becoming aware of yourself in an entirely new way. And as soon as you are aware of yourself, you become keenly aware of how separate you are, from your parents and everyone else. You’re consumed with asking yourself, "Who am I? What am I? How can I be me in this world?" At the same time, you wake up to a loneliness and incompleteness you never felt before, and you wonder, "Will I find love? Who will love me? Can anyone love me?"

This fledgling separate self is terribly unreliable, full of painful and perplexing emotions and seemingly irredeemable flaws. It needs more support, and more mirroring, than ever before. Yet most girls don’t get it. One reason is that they feel they must reject, or at least keep at arm’s length, the mirror their parents hold up for them. They look to their friends, and to the media, to be their mirrors.

What they see reflected there, unfortunately, is a fun-house image that tells them to be obsessed with popularity, social status, their weight and appearance, and boys. Teenage culture, almost totally unanchored to the adult world, takes its cues from the media that feeds off it and exploits it. And that media—the movies, music videos, commercials and magazines pitched to teenage girls—is filled with images of skinny, impossibly pretty girls panting after boys.

It’s as if the media is saying to teenage girls, "Remember all those kid TV shows you used to watch that told you you could be any way you want to be and become anything you want to become? We were just kidding. You can be a lawyer, a scientist, or whatever, but what’s most important is that you look gorgeous, act simpering, and fall in love with a confident, good-looking hunk."

A sane society would create some kind of institution available to all teenage girls (and boys) where they can ask, and answer, the real questions of their lives in order to become autonomous, self-aware women (and men). Today’s large middle and high schools don’t do this. If anything, these impersonal schools filled with thousands of students, where teachers can’t really get to know their students, much less mentor them, where cruel social hierarchies abound and drug cultures easily go unchecked, are perfect examples of what shouldn’t exist. Many girls, of course, do find places in school where their inner selves are mirrored, especially if they have strong families behind them. But many others don’t.

If it becomes too difficult or frightening or painful to feel or trust the self, a girl may abandon the effort and avoid facing herself completely. There are many ways to do this, but the most common is through connection—through relationships. But these kinds of relationships are not in service to the inner self—they’re a substitute for it.

 

Giving Yourself Up, Giving Yourself Away

Of course, of all the relationships women use to define themselves, our intimate relationships are by far the most important. Most women desire intimate contact, and it’s not essentially about sex. It’s about getting past the barriers to where two people are not hidden from one another. It’s about knowing someone and being known in a way that takes the edge off the aloneness of life. And it’s intensely satisfying. There is so little opportunity for such intimate contact in our culture, so little space to be safe and undefended. Is it any wonder we want to find that tender place in an often lonely and callous world?

But there is almost always asymmetry in the intimate contact women seek from men. Women yield more of themselves than men do. Women, generally, open themselves more completely, seek to be more vulnerable. They see changing themselves for their beloved as a gift of love.

Men change in a relationship, but they don’t offer change as a gift of love. If a man changes, it must be because he has decided to for himself. Anything else strikes too close a blow to the autonomous self that most men believe they must have to survive and succeed. Men in love offer affection, gifts, and the comfort and protection of their presence. But they don’t try to mold themselves for the sake of a relationship. The very idea sounds ludicrous to a man.

Women, on the other hand, use the skills they learned as a girl—to sense the mood of someone close to them, and bend ever so gently to more neatly fit around that person. If it is done well, they do it so seamlessly that not only does the man not notice, neither may the woman herself. From here it’s a very slippery slope. How far can a woman go to smooth the edges of her selfhood before she risks losing something vital?

We can’t ignore the history and economics behind all this. It hasn’t been much more than a single lifetime since wives were effectively the legal property of their husbands. Until the late nineteenth century, if a marriage ended for any reason, the children went automatically to the husband, and it was legal for a man to beat his wife—and, as we know, the laws against wife-beating weren’t really taken seriously until the 1970s. Until 1918, contraception of any sort wasn’t legal; until 1921 women couldn’t vote. Divorce was stigmatized and difficult to get until the late 1960s. Until 1965, classifieds were divided in the paper between jobs "for men" and "for women," and married women were unable to establish credit on their own. Is it any wonder that women learned survival skills based on the husband being far more powerful?

It’s amazing to me that the very TV shows I watched as a child showed husbands lording over their wives in ways that today would be considered mentally abusive. In the show Bewitched, for example, husband Darrin actually forbade his wife Samantha, and later his baby daughter, from using their witchly powers. Talk about symbolism!
But if relationships have changed greatly on the surface, at the core they’re much the same. Fifty years ago men clearly were expected to lead, and women to follow. Today, most men and women still operate from the assumption that men are supposed to lead—just not so obviously or dictatorially.

Of course, there are many more egalitarian relationships today than ever before, where men don’t lead and women feel like they are being completely themselves. Yet I’d say the majority of women still hold themselves back with their partners. The major reason for this is the strong, unspoken and culturally pervasive belief that it is a woman’s job to take care of a man emotionally. "I didn’t dare challenge my first husband, for fear he’d get upset," said Gillian, a fifty-year-old import businesswoman whose work takes her to three continents. "I believed that my worth as a woman depended on how calm my husband was, because that proved I knew how to make a happy home," she recalled. "Deep down I think I believed that men were extremely fragile, that they couldn’t handle equality, and if shaken they would break."

What made Gillian fear her husband’s fragility? Even though Gillian was childless and fully self-supporting at the time, her actions were embedded in the age-old contract between men and women: that women provide emotional care-taking in exchange for men providing for women and children financially. There is an equation that both men and women believe in without realizing it: that the higher the "quality" of the woman’s emotional care-taking, the better and more stable a provider the man will become.

And part of caring for a man in this way traditionally has been to bolster his position as "leader" even at the expense of your self. I have seen many young women do this, innocently setting the pattern for the future of their relationship. Jessica, a client in her twenties, told me recently that she stopped watching Jeopardy! around her boyfriend because she knew so many more of the questions than he did!

"I didn’t want him to feel like less of a man," she said.

On one level, Jessica is concerned about his feelings, and not "competing," following the girlhood rule that "friends don’t make their friends look dumb." But on another level, in this tiny way, she is telling him that she accepts that a man must feel superior to feel and act like a man, and that she is willing to take a secondary role in their relationship; she will not be the star, she will not outshine him. If she doesn’t outshine him, then she won’t make more money than him. If she doesn’t make more money than him, then, should they get married and have kids, his career will be more important than hers.

She’s not thinking all these things consciously, of course. She’s simply following the patterns and assumptions of our times, based on hundreds of movies and television shows and conversations with friends. It is the cultural sea we all swim in, so ubiquitous that it becomes invisible.

In fact, a great many couples start out with supportive and fairly egalitarian marriages only to run into problems when children come along. In the book, When Partners Become Parents, authors Carolyn and Philip Cowan point out that even couples who consider themselves fully equal and modern most of the time fall into sex-role stereotypes after the first child is born: He becomes more serious about his career and works harder to support the family, while she becomes the primary parent and puts her career on hold, or at least de-emphasizes the role of her work in her life. The result is that they start living in very different worlds, at the same time that there is less opportunity to talk about those differences.

There is nothing inherently wrong with following these separate life-paths. American families are responding to a reality that nobody talks about—that in a society that expects most "career-oriented" people to work fifty or more hours a week, it’s a colossal challenge for two people to be fully committed to their separate careers and still have time to adequately parent their kids.

But there are two ways this arrangement endangers a woman’s ability to hold onto her voice. The first is in her marriage. Only if a woman is very strong in insisting that her contribution is equally important, that her husband be deeply involved in parenting, and that she have a say in how he divides his time in work, parenting, housework and other pursuits, and only if her husband validates and respects her contribution, can this arrangement work without subtly eroding her sense of self and her position relative to him.

The second difficulty is inherent in the nature of raising children. Of course, parenthood is one of the most profound opportunities for growth anyone can have. Motherhood offers us a different kind of mirroring: it shows us our capacity to love. We see what we give reflected back in the growth and development of another. The mother-child relationship is intimate and powerful in a way like no other. For many years, our children give us what no one else can: their pure, uninhibited, open-hearted responses to everything and everybody, including us. Our relationships to our children, in all their nuances and ups and downs, become a part of who we are and expand our sense of self.

But motherhood is also one of the hardest jobs on Earth. For all of the validation that motherhood can bring, children place tremendous demands upon us, and they aren’t capable of relating to their mother as the woman she truly is; they only relate to "Mommy" or "Mom," that part of her that provides for their needs. And for most women, especially after a second child, there’s very little breathing room.

Especially when children are young, motherhood can be so all-encompassing that it may seem easier to merge with the job and forget or ignore any feelings that conflict with it. Yet no matter how devoted you are, being a mother is not the totality of your self. Your more multifaceted adult self needs mirroring somewhere in your life, or you may lose touch with your own spark. I have worked with many women, including many who had full-time jobs, who so fully identified with their role as mothers that they could tell you everything their children needed to develop but nothing about what they themselves felt or wanted.

After a while, many women simply "hear" their husbands’ and children’s feelings and wants much more loudly than they hear their own. And while they will fight if the relationship begins to be in jeopardy, if it’s "merely" their own selves that are in danger, they become afraid to rock the boat. Even if they complain loudly and even bitterly about the impositions placed upon them, they don’t truly expect anybody or anything to change; they become, in the words of one of my clients, "a loud doormat."

 

Severed from the Self

I have such a little self, such a small spark. I’m like a ball—all I know how to do is bounce off of things.
—Faith, thirty-six

When women lose themselves in connection, when they no longer see their selves in the mirror, they begin to reject or ignore who they truly are in favor of who they believe they are supposed to be. Living from an image of who you should be rather than who you are causes a great deal of suffering.

One of the most common ways women lose themselves is by over-responding. Believing that they should do everything in their power to take care of everyone else, they begin to live on automatic, consumed by the daily tasks of living and responding to everyone and everything around them. "I was in cruising mode with my family," said Faith. "I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t unhappy—I wasn’t anything. I just did what had to be done for everybody else. When I wasn’t doing that, I watched TV. My kids were living and growing, but where was I? I wasn’t even in the picture."

"I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t unhappy." I hear about this numbness often. Below that usually is hurt, anger and disappointment, which comes from knowing deep down that they want something more. Yet those feelings are rejected in favor of being adult and "realistic." "This is the way life is," they tell themselves, "so you better get used to it." The hopes and dreams of childhood have been totally forgotten, or dismissed as childhood’s chimera, something to grow out of along with Santa Claus, Halloween and Easter egg hunts.

Other women experience a vague yet terribly painful sense of having lost their inner bearings. "For months I felt either weepy or unreal," recalled Alysse, a thirty-six-year-old wife of a very successful advertising executive. It had happened eight years earlier, six months after their son Max was born.

I loved being home with Max, but I had given up a job I enjoyed, where I was well liked and respected. Tom and I used to meet for lunch and discuss our work. Suddenly I was changing diapers and waking up three times a night. None of my friends were mothers yet; I couldn’t explain to them what I was going through. They didn’t really understand. It was a tremendous shock, and I was exhausted.

When Max was six months old they moved to Minneapolis, the first of four moves for Tom’s career.

I didn’t want to move right then, but I knew it was good for his career, and I didn’t want to get in his way. I told myself, "I like challenges. Maybe it will be an adventure."

It wasn’t. She felt overwhelmed—and found Tom mostly unsympathetic.

I remember this one time when I started to cry, and he really snapped at me. And I felt for the first time in my marriage that I couldn’t talk to him about this. I felt as if he was saying, "Shut up and live with this." I didn’t feel strong enough to oppose him.

After that, it felt like everything I thought my life was about had shifted under my feet. I didn’t know what I wanted, I didn’t know what was true for me. Nothing fit together any more. I looked okay on the outside, but inside was a vast void.

Although Tom later became more understanding of Alysse’s feelings, the easy camaraderie and equality of their pre-child relationship was broken, and she no longer felt as safe with him. That, combined with all the other stresses of that year, caused a break inside her that affected her for many years afterward.

When women’s connection to their inner selves is broken, many women then try to live from the pretense of always being "fine," putting a positive spin on everything, pretending to be feeling and doing better than they really are. A British-born client of mine called this jolly hop-sticking.

Joan, a client struggling with a severely alcoholic husband, told me this story of going as a family to attend a football game with the family of her son’s best friend:

It was fun—sort of. I felt like I wasn’t at that game at all. We were all pretending to be okay, but of course, we’re not. The truth is, it made me feel very lonely. They had no idea what was going on.

Many women live this "as if" life all the time. Often they sincerely believe that if they look good and pretend to feel the "right" feelings long enough, then everything will be okay. But this just brings them further and further from making the connections that would truly make them feel better.

Actually, feeling the "right" feelings is something many if not most of us have been taught to do all of our lives. From early childhood on, most of us learn that there are parts of us that are "good," and parts of us that are "bad." We’re told that we must discipline ourselves to pay attention only to the "good" parts of us, and ignore, deny, imprison or "exile" our "bad" parts.

 

It doesn’t work. All parts of you are you. You can’t make the ones you don’t like go away—they’ll fight just that much harder to live and be accepted. The more you try to shut out parts of your inner self as "unacceptable," the more conflicted and fragmented you feel. But the more you realize that every aspect of you—even those you don’t like or aren’t "good" enough—deserve care and compassion, the more whole and at peace you become.

I think there is more pressure than ever on women to be practically superhuman. Television constantly bombards us with the illusion of people who look and sound perfect. Some spiritual leaders seem to suggest that if you’re having "negative" feelings or thoughts, you must not be "right with God." We’re all expected to do so much these days: Make money and excel at our careers. Keep our kids on time, on track, well fed and well adjusted. Have a close marriage. Have great sex. Maintain a gorgeous home. Be responsible for aging parents. Fit into a size eight or smaller. Exercise. Manage our retirement funds. Care about the world. Be active in the community. And—in our free time, of course—relax and have fun!

And on top of all this, we’re supposed to manage our feelings, never break down, never take things personally, never feel just plain rotten or complain that it’s all too much. And if somehow you drop the ball in any one of these areas, you can end up feeling defective, like you need to work on yourself to make yourself better.
It’s a recipe for forgetting yourself.

When you live from the forgotten self, a vicious cycle can form. You feel bad, which is a signal that something is happening that doesn’t feel good to your inner self. But you think, "What’s wrong with me? I should be feeling better." So you try to figure out what’s wrong, you try to fix and "improve" yourself, you try to live up to other people’s standards or expectations, you try to ignore, deny or rise above your feelings. And you may feel better temporarily, but then the bad feelings return, maybe stronger than before. So you criticize yourself even more strongly than the first time, and the cycle continues.

There is a way out. And it doesn’t come from fixing, improving or changing a single thing about yourself. We have seen that living from the forgotten self comes from losing connection to our inner selves, to what we know, sense, feel and want. Like the princess in a fairy tale, something essential within us seems asleep and unreachable, locked behind closed doors and blocked passageways.

But those passageways are still there. You just need to know how to open, or reopen, the pathways within and travel their lengths, and listen to what your inner self is trying to tell you. Then you can come back to knowing what you know, sensing what you sense, feeling what you feel and wanting what you want.

—Reprinted fromI 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.