Here, at “Holding Space”, the premise is to face yourself and not the problems you think you have. The reason for this is because, from a lifetime of my inner work journey, and then nearly two decades as a therapist, I know that first and foremost, the space to see yourself is the best form of “treatment”. The space to work with tools that capture snapshots of your life experiences in new ways, slow down the “fix-it” and “something’s wrong” mentality. When I was a young therapist, I had no space for myself, and no real space with my patients, working back-to-back with demanding protocols that wanted to prioritize the plan and the outcome, but not always the process of healing.
When you slow this need to know the plan and outcomes of fixing things down, you can feel the inner therapist who honors the process of healing emerge. This person wants to work with you. The space is there now to give this to yourself and slow down the threatening feeling of an outside authority finding your problems. In a space of curiosity for what you will locate, there is no room to look for broken things and damage, wrongness, or toxic behavior. With tools, we allow you to “see things”, rather than Google search for things that may improve your intellect for the various psychological, emotional, and nervous system dissonance and dysregulation we experience, but not provide any felt sense for what tools do in your own hands for your unique patterns of dysregulation and holding onto things.
The Toolbox Approach (TM), which is written about in my soon-to-be-published book, You Are Not Broken, is also a personal experience, and how I created a way to slow down my fixing mentality within. I use it as a therapist, holding space for others looking to go inward and heal things. The phases of healing are cyclical; they are repeatedly used in your life because we tend to first suffer our problems, hold onto them, and then stubbornly need tools to find the lessons. It’s been called a Hero’s Journey, I see it as a perpetual shift from victim to survivor, to self-leadership, but some may call it personal growth or metamorphosis. Today, we focus on a phase I find myself in, called Relational Healing. There are phases I labeled Narrative Healing and Reprocessing Healing that have contributed to where I am in Relational Healing. I had to find the self-sabotage in the stories I tell myself and reprocess the initial emotional content that got locked in my initial emotional experiences and left unattended. Without these phases, we don’t have a great relationship with ourselves because it’s based on dysregulation and quickly hashed stories about the experiences you had.
It takes time to go down into the subconscious, where 95% of our decision-making truly derives from. We may believe that we consciously decide everything in our lives, but research suggests otherwise. According to studies in cognitive neuroscience, 95% of our daily decisions are made by the subconscious mind, leaving only 5% to the conscious thought process. These subconscious decisions are driven by past experiences, learned behaviors, emotions, and environmental cues that influence our thoughts and actions in ways we may not immediately recognize.
The subconscious mind is constantly working behind the scenes, filtering information, guiding our reactions, and automating processes to ease cognitive load. Our predilection for easy processing is hard on us emotionally, psychologically, and in terms of stress and relating. Hence, we have to be intentional and set ourselves to go inward. Then we must bring tools because we will want to flee or run away. We will want to return to safety, where there are quick conclusions that we can act on. So, we have to use a tool that puts us directly in relationship to ourselves. When we have an experience like disrespect rehashing itself and snaking through our minds repeatedly, sometimes for hours, for days, months, even years, so we have to use a confronting question as a tool.
The Questions
What do you say to yourself internally when you keep having someone on your mind who disrespected you?
How do you talk to yourself to confront that this is a metaphor for ways you treat yourself that you need to let go of?
Immediately, you can see these are deeply powerful, emotionally mature questions. When there is a disrespect trigger in your life, and it still takes space in your mind, it may be in your mind in a very specific way. This is an immature or wounded mindset that we subconsciously have because there are hurts “down there” from a younger place, back in time, a previous version of you. Even if you haven’t done inner work before, we mature with time, if we don’t make a conscious effort to park our maturity however, it doesn’t form into internal emotional safety. Some call it a lack of closure from past hurts. Regardless, if you are spinning on the disrespect in your mind, you may be in your less mature self. The questions help start to direct you back to the part of you that can help you and stop immature pointing, “they disrespected me!”. Don’t worry, we all do it!
Your mind and nervous system both hold onto the pain, confusion, longing for justice or closure, but you can redirect it by asking for the truth from yourself. The first question asks you to be honest about what you are saying to yourself. Things like, “I don’t deserve this when I offered so much respect and understanding many times to them”, or “I do deserve this now, why do I keep talking to this person when they don’t tell me the truth about anything?”. In fact, both may be in there in a tug-of-war. That is the next part of this tool.
Acknowledge the Inner Tug-of-War
Tell yourself, “It makes sense that I am still thinking about them. My brain is trying to resolve the injustice. But replaying it doesn’t heal it-it keeps me in the loop. What I really need is safety, peace, and a loving relationship with myself.”
Make the Metaphor Conscious
The second question above asked you, “How do you talk to yourself to confront that this is a metaphor for ways you treat yourself that you need to let go of?”. This is asking you to see this person or situation as a mirror for the parts of you that still have to earn kindness, respect, acknowledgment, loyalty, or love and belonging. There is a part of you that says you have to tolerate pain to be loyal and then get your emotional needs met. There is a part of you that says self-sacrifice is a virtue. This part is a wound that came up with rules to follow subconsciously. No one wants to get kicked out of the club of normal and accepted, but we were at some time and the hurt is still there in “follow this way of being” programming.
In my inner work, I saw I kept giving and even creating third, fourth, and fifth chances with people who were all mirrors telling me that I try harder for connections that are not good over ones that could be. It is a form of self-sabotage that confirms a negative belief. Being a victim of disrespect means I could continue believing that I didn’t deserve an easy, good connection. If I took back my hurt energy and restored it, and believed that I deserved effortless good connection, I would grieve how hard it was to connect with my mother. Her passing is not the grief; her passing was a death to the usefulness of that behavior. Without addressing it, the behavior wants to be used subconsciously. To connect with her, I gave her all the chances, I gave her a sweet and forgiving side of me that understood her confusion and depression, and her need to work to try for that kind of accomplishment when she felt time running out. I would have to face that rather than accomplish our stable connection, she had me in poorly screened situations without her, and forms of daycare that were my days without the care part. This felt disrespectful, and I wouldn’t allow myself to feel it. I was afraid I couldn’t handle it, my own mother. However, a feeling is not a fact, once I faced that it is the truth of how people operate, they think of what could ease their pain quickly, and I became a therapist to help people recognize how self-abandoning that can be, I realized I had a lot of respect for what I did with this pain and forgot to give it to myself.
Reclaim Your Energy
This part of the tool requires you to talk to yourself again. Something like “every time I let my thoughts drift back to this, I am investing in a version of myself that thinks I don’t deserve better”, would be a good redirection and witnessing of the truth from facing yourself. The second step would be to use a body-based method of installing the intention to change that. Placing your hands in an “X” shape over your heart such that the fingertips fall gently on the rim of your collarbone, breath in and gently tap the fingertips back and forth, stating inwardly, “I am learning to give my loyalty and respect to myself now”. This does not mean you drop the ball respecting others, but you break the chain of unbalanced actions. Actions that you want to receive first require you to give them to yourself.
Start a New Standard in your Self-Talk
From now on, tell yourself you want to speak to yourself the way you wish others would when you were hoping your approach would rub off on them somehow. Admit to yourself that your standards need to improve in showing yourself the dignity you offer and that this is vital to your healing and personal growth.
Practice Letting Go-Gently but Firmly
When you recognize that you need your own validation in the present and that you cannot fix the past, you also accept that the past version of yourself was doing the best they could. You accept that you just got the tools to see this and need to live in the present, where you are not defined by anyone’s inability to treat you well. Imagine walking away from that version of you like walking across a graduation stage. You don’t walk away as much as you walk up to the stage and accept you have moved on from the past, less educated version of you.
End Notes
If you ever find yourself drifting back again, try pausing and using a grounding position like the one above. Tap back and forth and say to yourself either of the following:
“I am not going back down off the stage. I honor what I went through, but I chose to graduate from that.”
OR
“This was a great teacher in a hard disguise. But the class is over. I am graduating.”
DON’T FORGET TO FOLLOW THE ENYA, EVERYONE NEEDS YOU ALWAYS, community and podcast on Spotify! Heal on!
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