Losing Touch With Yourself
Throughout my years as being a mental health professional, I’ve worked with women that have lost touch with their ability to actually listen to themselves and their own needs. Usually it’s because they didn’t have their needs met as a child.
So many individuals have experienced something like this so they’re looking to others to meet their needs.
And one of the things that I have seen as being a mental health professional, especially working with women that have experienced Sexual Assault or Human Trafficking, is that they no longer have the ability to discern whether their own internal voice is the right thing or the wrong thing.
What ends up happening is they’re always looking to other people for external validation.
Relearning How to Listen
And one of the things that I work with people in trying to teach them is that you have to listen to yourself. What was that first reaction that you had that told you that this was not a good thing, right?
The reality is we are multi-sensory beings.
When you are driving down the road and say there is a person with a child in a stroller and they’re jogging and you’re going this way and you look at them exactly at the same time, right? Why? Why does that happen?
Because it’s like we intuitively know that that person is looking at us, right? That like extra spidey sense starts to kind of like come up in us and we go, look, someone is looking at us.
And those are the things that we have to tune back into.
When Intuition Gets Silenced
And one of the things that I’ve seen in therapy is that people lose their ability to tune into that part of themselves, their gut instinct, right?
They’re told, I’m doing these things to you and they might be bad, but they’re actually good. No, they’re actually bad. I just have lost my ability to discern whether or not they are good or they are bad.
And it’s because when I was a child, I learned the exact opposite of what was actually true.
So working with people to get them to begin to listen to that part of themselves and go, okay, your intuition is not a lie. Your intuition tells you so much and the more you listen to it, the more that you’ll begin to hear.
The Body Keeps the Score
And that’s the amazing thing about the body is that, you know, it keeps the score, but it listens, it hears us.
That’s why when talking badly about even yourself to yourself is so harmful and hurtful because the body actually is absorbing that negativity and that negativity that you speak out to yourself and or to others actually begins to change the molecules in your body. It changes the parts of you.
And so that’s why like with affirmations, I know that people are like, affirmations don’t work, but they do work, right? It’s changing the mindset. The mindset has to be almost rewired.
Core Beliefs and the EMDR File
And that’s what I love about being an EMDR practitioner is that what you’re doing in EMDR is you are opening up, you know, I like to call it the file, right?
I’m opening up your file of I’m not good enough and I’m going, okay, show me the evidence of the I’m not good enough a part of your life.
Well, that one time I wasn’t picked for the school play when I was in elementary school, right?
The one time that that boy told me that I was ugly when I was six years old, that really, really hurt me.
And you know, I hear people go, well, you know, that wasn’t super traumatic. But maybe for them it was.
Maybe they had a core belief of I’m not good enough based off of how they were brought up in their home.
And then that being six years old and saying, you know, you’re not pretty enough or you’re not enough, that went into the file.
Not being picked for the school play. It went into the file.
Not getting into your top five choices of colleges, that went into the file.
You know, falling in love with your best friend, but your best friend does not like you back. That goes into the file.
And so you’re walking around with this file of all these different memories that say, I am not enough. I need to work hard to gain people’s love, appreciation, affection.
Rewriting the Story
And so one day when you wake up and you go, my goodness, I’m sick of feeling like I’m not enough, how do I fix this, how do I change this, how do I make this different?
You go and you see a therapist and we do EMDR and we look at that I’m not good enough file and we say, okay, let’s begin to process through this information.
Processing basically means that I’m gonna go down into the memory and we’re gonna talk about it, we’re going to think about it, we’re going to make it hurt less using EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.
There’s tons of information out there on it and it’s great.
But basically once we’ve done the EMDR, the brain begins to almost like metabolize those memories and then you can replace them, right?
So instead of I’m not good enough, maybe I say I am worthy of love and affection.
So I changed that core belief to I’m not good enough to, now I’m worthy of love and affection, and then I begin to do EMDR tapping that in to myself.
Thoughts, Feelings, Actions
And the reality is, is who we think we are, we become.
You know, it’s that quote Einstein said, “What you think you can, you can. What you think you can’t, you can’t.”
What we say to ourself really, really matters.
You have to address core beliefs. We have to address your emotional world.
We can be addicted to emotions. I can become addicted to fear. I can become addicted to love. I can become addicted to anger.
Because it’s a feeling that I’m used to feeling.
And that’s what we do in mental health therapy, is we help the individual to interrupt the pattern so that they can be successful in their lives.
Comfort, Resistance, and Change
People want to be comfortable even if our comfort level is hurting us.
It’s like wearing a cozy warm blanket that’s wet, but it’s your blanket.
And even though it’s wet and it’s not actually good for you, you’re still gonna want it because it’s yours.
It’s not until you realize that that blanket is wet and you’re feeling cold, that maybe you should actually take it off.
We really don’t change unless we have to.
We Heal in Community
I think that there are lots of tools. Self-help is great, but there comes a point where, you know, rubber meets the road.
There comes a point when you actually have to tell someone, work with someone in regards to the issues that you’re dealing with.
That is that relational aspect.
We heal in community.
Why do AA groups work so well? They’re still around because they work. They’re still around because they create accountability. They’re still around because there are people there that are cheering them on.
We were not meant to live our lives alone.
If you don’t have an immediate family, you still need a community.
You still need people in your life.
So be with people. Invite them in. Build relationships.
We have to start leaning into one another and recognizing that we need each other.
Emotionally Strong, Fiercely Confident,
Marcie Rey Landreth, LCSW | Heart Development Strategies, LLC