A boy without a strong, male figure around to guide him and to let him know that the full range of himself (including all of his emotions) is healthy and welcome will start reading into the world around him for indications as to who he is supposed to be. He’ll look to TV, and advertising, and his friends, and women.
This is confusing as shit. And it creates an internal chaos as we scramble around, trying to always show up as the most digestible version of ourselves in any given situation: with our friends, we’re cool and tough, with our mothers, “good boys,” with our dads and at work, overachievers. We become compartmentalized, and codependent in our relationships, never showing all of ourselves to one person or the world, lest they don’t like the full range of what they see.
Our nervous systems begin to go haywire, anticipating rejection, and what we fear, we end up creating. I can’t tell you how many times I wrote emails, texts, or essays in a state of near paralysis for fear of the potential backlash if I did/said/wrote the “wrong” thing. What if the woman I was texting with changed her mind about me? What if I lost a client? What if I got cancelled?
When my fears inevitably manifested, it was just fuel for my oldest stories: You’re worthless. You’re not enough. You’re unlovable. And for years, I fully gave into them. It was one of those patterns in life that happened so many times I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I knew it was here to teach me something.
Truly, it’s been one of the hardest lessons I’ve ever learned and continue to learn: giving myself permission to be my full, unfiltered self in the world. This includes all my feelings, my opinions and beliefs, my moods (I’m very moody)—the entire spectrum of who I am at any given moment.
Permission is such a powerful concept if you think about it. As kids, we’re constantly granted or not granted permission to do certain things - by parents, by teachers, by authority figures. We grow up believing the power is outside of us. We believe that the world has the final say as to who we get to be.
But that’s a trick that makes us victims. In truth, it’s the other way around: We get to choose how we show up. And when we give ourselves permission to be our full selves, we begin to attract people and situations that encourage us along instead of reject us for it. But we usually have to go through the fire and get burned enough times that we finally bust open and say: I’m so sick of this! I’ll fly my freak flag and see who shows up.
My friend and fellow coach Juliana is one person who has always encouraged me to be my fullest self, and it was a pleasure to join her on her podcast called, appropriately, Too Much, or for the Spanish speakers out there, Con Demasiado. You can listen to it anywhere you get your podcasts.
As Juli and I talk about in this conversation, it all comes back to our relationship with ourselves. Our inner world creates our outer world, every time. So if you’re getting a result you don’t like, or that isn’t aligned with a deeper desire of yours, instead of blaming others, go back to you. Are you giving yourself permission to be all of you in the world and in your relationships? If not, why? That’s the place to look.
Enjoy!