On freeing yourself from your own constraints

On meeting your own needs and on your world not falling apart (yes simultaneously) :: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 3rd 2023

I take about one selfie a month now that I don’t exist on social media and I don’t need images to write captions to. Here I am, back in 2022.

It is always a surprise for me to not be rejected when I say hey I need this, and I am going to give it to myself and that the world does not end. That people just adapt to me having needs and meeting them!

I think about my fear about not being on social media for so long. Now, pretty removed and feeling super safe about not being on social media, I can’t even believe the physical reaction my nervous system went through, yes withdrawing from existing on social media, but also the fear that everyone would just hate me and punish me for doing what I needed to do for myself.

I fully was prepared to have no friends at the end of it all.

I guess I enter meeting my needs like this often - this immense tension I feel between attachment and authenticity is obviously not new - and so I think if I meet my needs, it means automatically that everyone will hate me!

For me, at least historically, probably true for a lot of us, authenticity and attachment is not something I can have together at once. I really have had to pick and choose. For so long I felt my only two options were: be alone or be with people who abuse you or hurt you. Either or. It’s the only two options available to you in this great big world. And in some relationships, I still have to pick between those two things. Which sucks. AND…

Now, when I can keep attachment in my life and also have authenticity, both in relationship to myself and to others, I am like okay yes this is how it’s supposed to be! Great! But there is also a part of me that is truly shocked - like omg really? You’re not mad at me? You won’t punish me? You won’t abandon me? You won’t tell me I am bad? You won’t shit talk me? Wildddd!

Of course, I feel like proving to you, dear reader, mostly because this is highly vulnerable, that yes OF COURSE I have more flexibility nowadays, but at the very elemental level of my nervous system, this is what I am overcoming.

For new years, I decided to do a meditation retreat in which I turned off my phone, my computer and had no access to wifi for about 4 days.

I told the people who I am in frequent contact with where I was going, what I was doing and all of that.

And when I came back to my phone, everyone was not mad at me at all.

In fact, many of my friends told me they missed me and went straight back to connection and others were thrilled and texting me in CAPS: HOW ARE YOU, HOW WAS IT, I AM SO HAPPY HELLO! Nick greeted me with: there SHE is!

If I am being fair, my friends are so legit, that I didn’t really worry that anyone was going to be mad at me for taking 4 days off and not being available because all I was doing was meeting my own needs during this weekend. But at the same time, it is still a surprising thing for me that nothing went bad or nothing was lost when I have just met my own needs.

It is a brand new experience.

Even if I can probably guess it will be okay, it is still completely a surprise when it actually is okay.

I gather that the origins of why I fear everyone will hate me if I meet my needs matter less than the actual wiring in my nervous system that I am attending to. But I do like how story allows us to have more compassion for ourselves, and I recall being so sick in school and coming back to class with all the social dynamics and structures in my peer group changed and often times, at my expense. I would be the one the other girls blamed their wrongdoings on because I wasn’t there to defend myself. This has created a sort of hypervigilance for me where I feel like I cannot trust anyone to keep me safe if I am not there attending and advocating for myself at all times and making sure everyone is always happy with me.

Also, just the plain truth that I would lose attachment to my father immediately if my authenticity, including how I felt about my life, or what I needed to make life easier for me, was shown - which threatened my own survival and in large ways the survival of my mother and my brother so I always picked attachment over authenticity, as we all do as children, as it is our only option you know… to survive.

I realize that because I can tend to feel so fearful that chaos will ensue if I go take care of myself (because I have had real experiences in which yes this did happen), I spend all my time taking care of others to avoid feeling the anxiety of being rejected, abandoned or even betrayed if I exist as a separate entity who is a thriving ecosystem with her own needs and not simply a loyal and reliable tupperwear container to stuff your things in. And then, I expect others to take care of me in return, and it is absolutely devastating if they don’t, because then I have not taken care of me, and they also have not and now I am completely empty. Or rather, completely full in the back of the fridge, perhaps forgotten about entirely by myself and by others who are not responsible for making sure I am meeting my own needs! To make matters worse, if operating under the fear of the chaos ensuing if I meet my needs, breaking the cycle feels impossible so I have often been stuck in this never ending gloom in relationship of having no way to actually feeling met if a partner, or a parent, for example, simply didn’t meet my needs out of not wanting to or out of not being able to. What a nightmare, yknow?

So I have really tried to work on that in the last six months. I’ve been able to withstand the dissolution of relationships where both attachment and authenticity could not co-exist, painful as it’s been, and then I have practiced noticing and staying with the relationships in which they could co-exist and giving my nervous system a new framework to live in.

I’d definitely recommend it. May we all have a blessed 2023 in which we get out of our own constraints - imposed there as intelligent, but perhaps and most likely, outgrown in context. Many nervous system health blessings your way from my way.