Beneath The Armour

Who are you beneath the armour?

In this episode, we explore how the strategies that once helped us stay safe can sometimes make it difficult to hear ourselves clearly.

A gentle conversation about self-connection, curiosity, and what becomes possible when we begin including ourselves in the conversation again.

If today's conversation stayed with you, you'll find more reflections, resources and ways to continue the conversation at lisawestgate.com/exhale I'd love to see you there.

Music credit: Trolldans - Ström

Transcript

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Last time we spoke, we explored the possibility that you may not be broken, that many of the things you've judged most harshly about yourself may actually be adaptations. But if that's true, then another question naturally emerges. Who are you beneath the armor? Because I suspect there's more of you there than you realize. Before we get into it, let's breathe in and out. Welcome to Exhale. Let's begin today's conversation by exploring a little around how and why we lose touch with ourselves. We learn pretty early that it's important to fit in, that it's important to belong, whether that is in a family unit, at school, in a peer group. We learn that we need to perform a certain way, behave a certain way in different environments. And maybe it's important to succeed, whatever that word brings up for you. And it may mean a lot of different things. And ultimately, all of these adaptations, if we you permit me to generalize for a minute, come from a very primal understanding that we need to stay safe. And so these adaptations, these parts of ourselves that we dial up or dial down, we we do it for good reason. So I don't want you to use any insights you may be having or awarenesses that are coming up for you as another reason to condemn yourself. Okay, that's absolutely not the intention. The intention is to bring these into conscious awareness so that we can become more analytical in the adaptations that we choose to keep and hold on to that are still useful for us and consider letting go of some that may no longer serve us. So over time it's really reasonable that we become more familiar with our adaptations than our authentic signals. Because for a lot of those adaptations, for safety purposes, we have to argue with or ignore or rationalize signals that we may be receiving from inside of ourselves. So if you I'll give you an example, if you grew up in a household like many of us did, that had a story around food and food being scarce, and therefore whatever food was presented to you, you had to eat, right? Regardless of how hungry you were or how full you were, you had to eat everything that was given to you on your plate. And that's you know, a lot of us come from a generation where our previous generations came through war times, came through scarcity, and so um food was a really um important commodity to previous generations. And if you're a similar age to me, uh we didn't have that, right? So we we we were raised in relative um abundance, um obviously not knowing everyone's individual circumstances, but a lot of us grew up in this you'll eat everything on your plate, whether you want to or not, type of household. And to do that, to adhere to that rule in the house, to stay emotionally safe, to be included in the family and not to other ourselves, we would. We would eat everything on the plate, and to do so means that we had to deny or suppress or override the signals that we were getting from within ourselves when we had had enough, when we were feeling full. Um, that wasn't as important as um, you know, adhering to the rule that kept us safe, which was just push it in and eat everything that's been given to you. So that's an example of where the adaptation relies on us or therefore creates a situation in which we have to dismiss or suppress those authentic signals that are coming from inside. So I want to talk about what that sets up for us in terms of getting used to or getting practice in not listening to ourselves. So what we begin to do, and if this doesn't resonate with you, that's okay. It may be someone you know that you can think of that this uh speaks to. If it's not you, that's alright too. Remember, you don't have to agree with everything I say, we're just exploring. So what can happen is that we begin outsourcing aspects of ourselves. So in that example that I used, we're now outsourcing our hunger, we're now outsourcing when we've had enough, and we're giving that uh power, so to speak, or that determination to, in that example, a family member, all right, someone who's going to tell us when we've eaten enough and we're allowed to leave the table. And if we take that idea of outsourcing and we expand that beyond something like food and our relationship to food and sidebar, I don't want to diminish that because that example that I used can absolutely um lead to significant issues for people. So I'm not dismissing it as a minor example. But if we take it more broadly and we think about what else we begin outsourcing as we move from childhood into teenage peer groups, friendship groups, uh relationships, workplaces, as our world broadens, as the influences on us get wider and wider. And in this day and age, we cannot discount social media as part of that widening circle of influence, right? As that happens, we begin outsourcing other things. We may begin outsourcing our worth, our value, our identity. You know, we we adapt who we are to fit in with the people that we want to fit in with. I think that's almost fundamental to teenage development. Perhaps you've experienced outsourcing truth. Maybe you've had somebody remember an event different to you and convince you that their recollection is the truth. We may begin outsourcing belonging. That sense of belonging. We may give that to groups of other people. And I'm going to give you the contrast of this in a minute, so stay with me. We begin outsourcing authority and decision making. And again, maybe it's to family, maybe it's to peers, maybe it's to culture. Maybe you let your cultural background or religious influences determine who you are. Maybe that you've outsourced identity to cultural. Perhaps you've outsourced to experts who seem to know us better than we know ourselves. Perhaps you've outsourced to institutions the risk that we run, or the inevitable side effect of these adaptations leading us to outsource, is that we are inevitably giving away our power. We're giving away our autonomy. And maybe you know someone like this who will use it in their language. You hear this in people's language. I'll be happy when my kids are happy. I'll be happy when my partner is happy when they get their promotion. Or I'll be happy when I get the promotion and I get a higher paying job, or you know, whatever it is. And you hear it in people's language when they align their internal state, in in my example, happiness, to something outside of themselves, so another person or a pay rise or something else that is outside of their sphere of influence, right? It's not up to an individual when they get a pay rise, wouldn't that be nice? Right? It's it's gonna be up to somebody else. So attaching our internal state, I'll be happy when, or I can relax when, or I'll take time for myself when, or whatever, and then attaching that to something that is absolutely not within our power, whether it's the weather or a job, or or you know, finance related, or the um, you know, somebody else doing something or feeling a certain way, that's when we will feel a certain way. That's outsourcing. You're giving away your power to all those other things and people, and then possibly not feeling great about that, right? Whether that's you know, down in the dumps or disappointed or frustrated, you know, that you're just not feeling how you want to be feeling. So I want to introduce to you a concept called in-sourcing, which is pretty much what it sounds like. It's the practice of returning those things to ourselves, it's the practice of reclaiming that autonomy and that self-authority. Not because nobody else has wisdom or insight or useful information for us, but because somewhere along the way we've forgotten to include our own wisdom and insight and information, so I suspect your next question is well, that sounds great, Lisa. But how do I do that? How do I find that within me again? And the answer is it starts with small signals, little things that let you know when what you're hearing is coming from within you. So it doesn't require grand, you know, high-level philosophical questions like what is my life's purpose? What am I here to do? It begins with really small, smaller questions, seemingly smaller questions, that allow for small signals to come back to you. I'll give you some examples again. So we're thinking about allowing yourself to ask yourself, what do I actually feel about this? What do I actually think? What do I actually want? Tiny questions that create tiny moments of self-reconnection. And what you're gonna notice if you ask yourself these tiny questions is that to hear the answers, it helps to be quiet. It helps to be still and to create a space that allows you to really hear what you are telling you in the answers. There's all sorts of different ways that techniques that you can tap into to hear yourself. Maybe you have meditated in the past, maybe you pull an oracle card or do or do tarot cards or go and see someone that gives you that connection. Um maybe you do a physical practice like yoga or tai chi that brings a stillness that allows you to hear yourself. However, you do it, wherever you do it, maybe maybe you can have that conversation with yourself while doing an activity like mindful colouring, for example, or the dishes, or hanging out laundry, it really doesn't matter. It doesn't matter when and where, you know, gardening, um, wherever you can create a little space inside you, a little quiet place so that when you ask yourself those questions, what do I actually feel? What do I actually think? What do I actually want? You've got some space to hear the answers. So if you've spent years wearing armor, you don't need to rip it off overnight. The invitation is simply to become curious about what's underneath. To become to begin listening again and to begin including yourself in the conversation.