122 The Self-Love Myth: Why You're Still Holding Your Breath

Are you still looking for self love?

You've done the affirmations. You've tried to "love yourself more." Maybe you've even achieved the body, the goals, the external validation you thought would make you feel enough.

But you're still holding your breath. Still monitoring yourself. Still performing acceptability even when you're alone.

In this Valentine's Day episode of Rooted in Presence, we explore why self-love isn't enough and what self-belonging actually means.

Host Carly Killen shares her journey of holding her stomach in even when no one was watching, the exhausting work of constant self-monitoring, and why achieving "the body" didn't create the internal peace she expected. Through a nervous system lens, she reveals why self-love rhetoric often misses the deeper pattern: we're trying to think our way into belonging when belonging is actually a felt, embodied experience.

You'll discover:

• Why self-love affirmations don't address nervous system patterns
• How holding your breath signals danger to your body (even when you're safe)
• The gap between external validation and internal belonging
• Why self-monitoring is protection, not vanity
• How conditioning teaches women that belonging is conditional
• The difference between self-love and self-belonging
• Practical nervous system tools to soften chronic self-criticism
• Breathwork practices for coming home to your body

This episode is for anyone exhausted from people-pleasing, recovering from chronic achievement culture, or sensing that positive thinking alone won't create the shift you're seeking. If you've tried self-love and it hasn't landed, this conversation offers a different path.

Topics: self-love myth, self-belonging, nervous system regulation, people pleasing recovery, body image midlife, breath and anxiety, internal validation, embodied self-acceptance, chronic self-monitoring, conditional belonging

Thanks for listening to Rooted In Presence

If you’d like to get in touch with a question about today’s episode or find out how I can support you with coaching, here’s how to reach me:
📧 Email: carlykillenpt@gmail.com
📱 Instagram: @carlykillencoach

Do you crave unshakable confidence in your strength from midlife and beyond? Would you love to achieve your goals without sacrificing family time or self-care?

Ready to take your strength to the next level? Start building a stronger body and healthier bones with my Strong Bones Starter Kit; your step-by-step guide to safe and effective strength training at home.
👉 Click here to learn more and access today

🌟 Stay connected and inspired with daily wellness tips on Instagram @carlykillencoach
🌟 For tailored advice or personal queries, email me at carlykillenpt@gmail.com

Thank you for being here, and I look forward to supporting you on your journey to strength, health, and confidence! 💪🦴✨

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

0:46

Hello and welcome back to Rooted in Presence. I'm Carly, your host and guide for the next 20 minutes or so, depending how my timing goes. So this week is the week that we'll be celebrating Valentine's Day or Valentine's Day a week as per where I am in the UK as per the general culture around me, which means. I surrounded by messages about love, partnership, romance, chocolates, flowers, and all that. And look, I'm not anti Valentine's, if that's your thing. Lovely, brilliant. And please do enjoy it. But today I would like to turn that lens somewhere else, and that is more inward, and not in that cliche, just love yourself more. Way that gets plastered on Instagram quotes with sunsets and perfect bodies doing yoga on a beach. Again, nothing against these things just yeah, gets a little bit samey. Um, but yeah, I'm looking at a little bit more deeply, perhaps more honest, or at least for me anyway. So I want to talk to you about what it actually means to become your own best friend. To feel at home in yourself to stop spending so much energy trying to belong to everyone else that you forget to look after yourself. And I'll be sharing some of my own story too, because this isn't some abstract theory for me. This is my true lived, messy, hard won work through my life experience and. Much of it is still ongoing actually, because this isn't a one and done thing, it's a practice. So if this interests you, you are in the right place. So let's get started. So let me start with a question as, as I often do, being a curiosity led kind of person, how are you when no one is watching? Really, when you are completely alone, when there's no one there to impress, no one to perform for, no one whose opinion matters in that moment, who are you then? And perhaps a follow up question, how does that change depending on who you're with? Now, I don't mean that in a judgmental way. It's completely natural that we bring different parts of ourselves into different spaces. We are relational beings. We adapt, and that's normal. I think that's what we should do as well. Um, even now I'm on a podcast. This is probably not quite how I talk to my friends, although maybe I'm getting a bit closer, but sometimes the difference between who we are alone and who we are with others does become quite large. And what I've noticed in my own life and working with so many women is that sometimes we're not even relaxed when we're not alone. For years, I didn't realize how much energy I was spending, shaping myself, monitoring, reading the room, adjusting my tones, softening my opinions, tightening my body. Even when I was alone, I often used to joke that I got dressed like I was in a public changing room. Even in my own bedroom. I was always this sense of being observed, of needing to measure up, and it took me a long time to notice. What I was doing and that maybe that wasn't quite how I wanted things to be. 'cause it wasn't just about getting dressed. I've many a times noticed just in my own kitchen, completely alone. Again, still holding in my stomach. I mean, why there is literally nobody there. But I've been doing it for so long, I didn't even know how to not do it anymore. And here's where the breath work. Has come in to support me here. It actually matters more than you might think, but when you're holding your stomach in, you can't actually take a full breath. You'll be breathing more shallowly up into your chest, maybe even holding your breath without realizing it, and that shallow breathing, it's actually a direct signal to your nervous system that something's wrong, that actually you might not be safe. So there I was in my own home, sending my body the message, stay alert, stay tense. You're being watched even when I wasn't. Something else I noticed checking my reflection every time I walked past a window or a mirror, not because I was vain. It really wasn't vanity. It was that assessment. A constant self-monitoring. Is this okay? Do I look acceptable? Would I pass? I mean, pass, what? I don't even know. Some invisible standard I'd internalized so deeply I didn't even question it anymore, and something else that really got me. Which was a quite a big turning point for me because this didn't go away when my body got smaller. There was a time when I was in what many people would call my best shape. I'd lost weight. I was strong. I got plenty of compliments on my appearance, praise, validation, and still something didn't quite feel settled. Those compliments didn't land, right. Actually, they started to jar me. I knew they didn't represent how I really felt, and often I felt like a fraud, like I should feel better than I did. Like I'd done this thing I was supposed to do, but why wasn't I fixed? That disconnects that gap between external approval and our true internal belonging. That's what I'm exploring today. And over the years in my own life and in conversations with clients, I've noticed a bit of a theme because often we might chase goals, things like weight loss, achievements, promotions, qualifications, not because we genuinely want them, but because we hope they will quiet something inside, something that is really bugging us. Perhaps even gnawing away. And when we drill down to it, and we don't do this with force by the way, but when we do gently explore, we often find this common underlying belief that if I just achieve this, I'll be okay. I'll feel enough and then I can relax. And there's nothing wrong with wanting success or wanting strength or wanting to feel good in your body, even wanting to look good in your body. There is nothing wrong with that. I love that we can go after what matters to us. That is what I'm all about after all. But there is a difference between moving towards something and running away from the fear that if we stop striving, we're gonna be found lacking, that maybe we'll be found out that. Not all that in the end, after all. And if we stop achieving, if we stop performing, if we stop shaping, will we still be enough? And that was a really bizarre feeling for me. When I'd achieved, I say in air quotes, and I'd achieved that body. I thought I wanted, I should be happy right now. Right? I've done the thing. People are noticing compliments rolling in, as I said. But instead of feeling settled, happy, like I'd done it, I still felt like I was in a performance of some kind, like I had to maintain this version of myself or be found out. Like this version of me was just some kind of facade and I don't even know what I was worrying about being found out as. But I think at the crux of it all, it was just that feeling of not being enough. So no matter where I moved the goalposts to, there was always something else to fix, to improve, to optimize. And that's when I started to realize that it was never about my body, it was about belonging. I've been trying to earn belonging through achievement, through looking a certain way, through being impressive and. Whatever kind of way I deemed to be needed, depending on what was in front of me, depending what other people were doing, but I've realized very much along my breathwork journey. Belonging just doesn't work like that. You can't earn your way into belonging to yourself, but if you relate to this, this really isn't your fault. There are external factors that have had a big impression quite likely. I don't actually know the life that you are living or living in or growing in right now as an individual, but there is a lot of collective stuff that I feel like we've been to together, especially we are in a similar culture for, in a similar part of the world, but I think this extends even further on some levels as well. When we look back through the lens of nervous system work, breath work, all the training I've done since then, I've gained more of a sense of what's really going on. And when I look back at all the self-monitoring, the constant checking, the shaping, the holding myself in, again, I can see that really wasn't about how I looked. It was a protection. It was my nervous system doing what it had learned to do because belonging equals safety, which makes sense on a tribal level, but for our nervous system, being part of a group, being accepted, being valued, it truly is survival. Literally, we are wired for connection and for women especially from what I've noticed, belonging has often been conditional. We absorbed many messages, sometimes loud, but quite often subtle, and they tell us to be agreeable, but have opinions Be attractive, but don't be vain. Be capable, but not intimidating and be accomplished, but carefully. You're not too ambitious. Be strong, stay soft. I'm guilty of that one myself. Take up space, but not too much. Do you recognize any of those? I have certainly experienced them all, and they're not always explicit. Often they are cultural, generational, relational. Perhaps it's simply what has been passed down, but your nervous system picks them up and it adapts because adaptation is survival, which is a good thing, but sometimes it kind of works against the kind of life we want as well. So if you recognize yourself in this, the shaping, the scanning, the constant self adjusting, the holding your breath, tensing your body, even when you are alone, I offer this to you gently. This is not a flaw. It's intelligence adaptation. Your nervous system learned. If I look this way, if I act this way, if I make myself acceptable, I'll be safe and then I'll belong. And that strategy works. It works for a while until it doesn't, until the effort of maintaining it becomes more exhausting until you realize you've been holding a breath, literally and metaphorically for years., So before I go any further, let's just take a breath for a moment there. 'cause this topic is big. What we're touching on isn't something you wanna do with one mindset shift, or one journaling exercise, or one affirmation in a mirror, especially not enough affirmation in a mirror. Um, this is often years, sometimes decades, of that subtle self-monitoring, learned relational strategies, protective patterns, ways of being that once kept you connected and once kept you safe. And we don't form these in isolation. They're often formed in families, classrooms, and workplaces in relationships, in cultures that quietly shape what is acceptable, desirable, worthy. So if you're noticing yourself in this conversation, please don't interpret this as something wrong with you. It's definitely not a personal failing by no means in any way a weakness. As I said, intelligence adaptation to the environments you've been in. So the process of gently unwinding this at a pace your nervous system can actually tolerate that often takes support. And this is a huge part of the work I do with my clients. It's not surface level confidence work, not just think positive kind of work, but. True nervous system led self belonging work, the kind of work that frees up amazing amounts of energy because you're no longer spending it, monitoring, shaping, holding yourself. And I can't do full justice to that depth in a single podcast episode, but perhaps today I can shine a light on it. Often awareness is where everything begins. So let me share with you a little about my own shift,, because it didn't come through one grand epiphany. There was no lightning bolt moments where suddenly I loved myself and everything was fine. It was much quieter than that, and a lot, lot, lot, lot slower. It did start though with just noticing how exhausting it all was. That constant monitoring, the shaping, the adjusting, the holding on. And I remember thinking, if I treated an actual friend the way I treat myself right now, I don't think they'd want to be around me. Would I really want to criticize their body every time they looked in the mirror? I wouldn't panic if they weren't perfect. I mean, what is perfect anyway? Would I push them to keep going when they were clearly exhausted? Would I tell them they needed to earn rest, food, or space? So as I noticed this, I decided perhaps I might want to practice with a little for myself, practicing friendship with myself and not in a cheesy forced way. Yeah, I've tried that too, but the kind of questions I asked myself was, what would I do if this person mattered to me? That kind of way. And I also started asking myself, who am I? When I stop trying to be impressive? Who am I when I'm not performing? Competence? Who am I when I'm not shrinking or polishing or curating? What if I just put it all down and who am I then? And yeah, they are Big questions. So perhaps we can get a little bit more practical here. What if you've asked yourself, if I were my own friend, how would I speak to myself? Would I criticize my own body in the mirror? Would I say. Something like you are okay regardless of how you look. And again, this doesn't mean you can't change how you look, you can't desire to want changes, but all change comes from a place of acceptance. And I think I've got a podcast episode on that from a while back. Maybe I'll link it in the show notes. But getting back to some questions you might offer yourself, do you really need to panic when you feel like something is imperfect? Again, I challenge you to define perfection and let me know, but perhaps you can remind yourself that perfection never really is the goal. How do you treat yourself when you're exhausted? Would you keep pushing your friend or might you say you're allowed to rest? If you were truly your own best friend, would you monitor your tone quite so tightly, or could you give yourself permission to just be that friendship that I developed with myself that really changed things? Definitely not overnight, but a kind of steady step by step kind of change. I started noticing when I was holding my stomach in and consciously letting it go. Even just for a while because yes, naturally it started tightening up again. That was the habit again, I didn't berate myself or criticize myself, and I noticed I was in the performance patterns again, and I still do things like this now and then, and I still catch them, and I still lovingly let them go and just notice what is that all about? And that just allows me to let my breath drop a little bit deeper. Doesn't allow me to just let my belly soften. And you know what? That simple act of allowing my body to breathe fully, not constantly bracing, but really did change my state deeper breathing, does signal safety. It helps tell your body we're okay, we can settle. And by that I mean the slightly deeper, more gentler, lighter breathing, not big, heavy breaths. But yeah. By doing this, I did slowly start to notice that I really did feel more at home in myself, much less like performing, being for somebody else, but just being for me. So yes, this really isn't about dismantling every habit, every time you notice performance overnight. It's kind of more about being aware enough that you can choose differently. Just one small moment at a time. So I have a few gentle invitations for you. Again, these are not prescriptions. Definitely not anything to fix, but maybe we can think of them as openings. So first you might just want to notice the monitoring and in a place that I can invite you to just start is literally just notice for the next few days. Maybe you can just pay attention to when you notice the shift. When does your voice change? When does your body tense? When do you hold your stomach in? When do you hold your breath? When do you edit yourself? Mid-sentence. When do you feel most at ease? Again, nothing to fix here. You don't even have to understand it yet, but just noticing because awareness, that gentle curious awareness, that is where belonging begins. Next, you might want to ask yourself, who am I when no one is watching? Maybe go deeper if that feels okay to you. How do I dress when I feel relaxed? How do I sit when I'm not being observed? How do I eat when no one's judging? How do I rest when I'm not performing productivity? And is there kindness there or is there still a sense of performance and maybe the way you might notice this? You might notice the word should creeping in, I should eat this, I should do that. And just notices that in your true best interest because yeah, there are things we might want to do for our health, our fitness, our work, but again, noticing your why without criticism, just inviting and that curiosity. And as a third suggestion. Perhaps you might want to allow your breath to lead you home. So this is very simple but incredibly powerful. Throughout your day, can you notice your breath, whether you're holding it, whether you're breathing shallowly, perhaps when you're breathing more easily, then consciously soen your belly. If you're holding, let your breath drop lower. Inhale into your belly, not just your chest, if you can, and try to breathe a little more slowly, letting everything soften. Again, working with your current capacity. We're not trying to change things in big steps. We're not trying to override the signals for what you're experiencing in your environment. I tell you, if I have to quickly run across the road because I didn't notice a car, I will not be stopping to. Breathe easily in the middle of a road. Yes, we do need to respond to our life, but just noticing is how I am appropriate for the real situation of what's present right now. So you don't need to be doing this for 10 minutes. Just even like three breaths can shift your nervous system state because when you breathe fully, you are telling your body we are safe. You can settle if your environment currently supports that. I will add that in. Another practice. I love micro self-compassion. When you notice that self-criticism rising as it does, it naturally does. Those patterns are deeply ingrained. But perhaps try this instead of fighting it or feeling bad about feeling bad, just notice and acknowledge, oh yeah. That protective voice that is trying to keep me safe. Thanks. And that small shift, it changes everything. It can move you from that self attack to staying in relationship with yourself. It can move you from what's wrong with me, to what is my system responding to? Because again, you are doing life. There are things we need to respond to. And finally. We can build self belonging in small ways. Perhaps you can wear something 'cause you like it, and not just because it's flattering. Speak a sentence without softening it or adding, I think maybe, or sorry, unless these really do, unless these words really do fit in a situation. Can you take rest without explaining yourself or justifying it? Just noticing that's what's needed and that's what you allow yourself to have. Can you leave something unfinished without guilt knowing that actually you can come back? Can you eat without negotiating? Feeling like you need to earn? Can you let your belly be soft? And these are just small acts, tiny even. But they are powerful because they say, I belong to myself first. So maybe this Valentine's Day could be about a different kind of love, not the rom-com kind, or the chocolates and flowers kind, although enjoy, if that's your thing, but the kind where you actually show up for yourself, where you belong to you first. Because from what I've noticed, both in my own life and with the women I work with, when you truly belong to yourself, you actually belong more fully with others too. Less performance, less guarding, less exhausting yourself, trying to be acceptable, and that will bring you more steadiness, more authenticity, leaving you more energy for the things that actually matter to you. That is the kind of love that sustains you, not the kind. You chase the kind you already are. So if this episode has resonated, if you're sensing that something deeper there that you'd like to explore, know that this is exactly the kind of work at I support in my coaching and my breathwork spaces. So if that calls to you, you are welcome to reach out through my website, carly killen.com. But for now, take this as an invitation to soften, to notice, to come home to yourself. Thank you for being here. So until next week, may you meet yourself with Compassion Walk With Presence. And remember, you already carry everything you need.