New Year’s resolutions are popular for a reason. Despite the bleak and widely accepted notion that nothing in life is guaranteed beyond death and taxes, part of us knows there is more. We long for meaning, fun, success, and happiness- whatever that looks like to us. So each January, we imagine there’s hope for all kinds of inspiring personal changes, positive new habits, and exciting opportunities. Nothing a little yoga, green juice and lavender bath salts can’t accomplish, right? Those practices are certainly lovely and valuable, but buried beneath behavioral effort, goals, and conceptual aspirations for a wonderful life, unconscious forces act as invisible barriers to our fulfillment.
At the deepest level, we humans need to be seen, understood and connected. That sounds simple enough. Most of us have friends, partners… at least one or two tolerable family members… a handful of people who genuinely care about us- so what’s the problem? The challenge is that despite the proximity we may have to loving, caring others, many of us have no idea how to allow good things to land and remain in our lives, whether they are resolutions, relationships or basic positive regard for ourselves. We don’t see that this incapacity is part of what drives chronic depression, emptiness, loneliness, and a sense that life is irreconcilably painful.
Without knowing it, we engage in strategies that sabotage our ability to be seen, understood, and connected- to have what we want. Not everyone struggles to the same degree, of course. Some of us were fortunate to have received “good enough” parenting that helped create a sense of basic worthiness and deserve-ability. But to the extent that joy is elusive and we continue to bump up against dread-inducing internal and interpersonal struggles, these distortions are impacting us deeply.
One of the most important skills I hope to encourage in clients is the ability to know and express themselves authentically- whether it’s in a literal, verbal way or just in how they engage with the world. Yet this basic capacity is curiously difficult. Why? How is it that what we most need in order to be happy is what proves hardest for us? This is because underneath our desire for connection, love, and satisfaction, a primitive drive compels us instead to stay safe at any cost.
Here are five strategies we employ to create the illusion of safety, that actually fuel our gnawing discontent:
1. Leave, withdraw, get away from others
2. Give up our selves to connect to others
3. Tolerate & endure (but inwardly resist) the will of others, self-sabotage
4. Fight and dominate
5. Tighten up, feel less, be perfect
We experience all of these tendencies to some degree but specialize in one or two. As children, we mistook these strategies for who we are and felt we had no choice- because we didn’t. So now, when we blindly go along with our default operating systems, we remain prisoners of the past, disconnected from our present-moment power and self-agency.
How does this happen?
Imperfect humans raise us all. Despite the good intentions some have, parents fail us in basic and crucial ways. Their unresolved issues are enacted upon us and force us to give up our real Selves in favor of false (more pleasing and palatable) selves. As kids, we sacrifice our authenticity to be who our caregivers or society need us to be. This is not about “attachment”- it’s about survival. We continue to live as if we are still under the same crushing oppression we once survived- and we don’t realize that now, we’re doing it to ourselves.
We know intellectually that in order to create lives we love, we have to express our desires, believe in them, move towards them- but the child consciousness inside is terrified of that prospect, deeply threatened by what was once forbidden. We believe we “can’t”, “shouldn’t”, “have no right to” our biggest dreams because they are aspects of our disavowed and largely unknown authentic selves. As such, each of us lives in a personal world that is gravely distorted. Our perceptions, thoughts, feelings and interactions are all poisoned by these dynamics, and we are totally unaware. We can engage in as many resolutions-inspired activities as we like, but living a fantastic life can’t happen until we address the outworn strategies that obscure reality.
Life-Denying practices we employ without knowing it:
1. Disconnect from ourselves (and thus have no clue what we want)
2. Doubt our worthiness
3. Suppress our authentic voice and expression
4. Conjure endless, unconscious ways of blocking what we want from arriving and/or staying in our experience
Life-Enhancing Alternatives we can practice Now:
1. Cultivate self-awareness
2. Know ourselves enough to determine what we desire
3. Develop our sense of worthiness to receive
4. Ask for what we want, acknowledge & express it honestly to ourselves and others
5. Allow it into our lives (…by noticing when we engage in the self-defeating habits we’ve enacted since childhood- and realize that now, as adults, we have other options)
Someone newly close to me recently remarked, “Your mind thinks in terms of possibilities.” My internal response amounted to a shrug, an un-self-impressed “Yea.” But it’s profound. The ability to think in terms of possibilities forms the foundation for acquiring anything that we want. And in reviewing my life, nothing could have been further from the truth for most of it.
A memory:
Six years old, at an Easter egg hunt where I knew no one. I could feel the energy and excitement of kids all around me searching for candy, running wild, full of appropriate, joy-filled enthusiasm. As usual, I didn’t relate. Cautious and guarded, I took it slow. A stranger saw me, tiny and on my own, and beckoned me towards him. I didn’t want to go, but I acquiesced, figuring he was unlikely to kill me in this crowd of people. With kind intentions, however, and without saying a word, the man lifted me carefully up to view a hanging flowerpot that held a giant bag of candy & chocolate eggs. That thing was impressive. I saw the bag. I registered it fully. Like the others, I was definitely into the idea of an enormous stash of candy, but my arms gave no indication- they just hung pointlessly at my sides as I stared. Time stood still as my confused little self dangled in space, waiting for what should happen next. Incredulous as it sounds, I had no clue what I was intended to do up there. My mini-time warp was soon interrupted by a large boy who was in no way confounded by the moment. Without any reservations, he flew past the flowerpot, snatched the loot, and strode confidently on towards his next series of effortless acquisitions.
The scene was unremarkable. You snooze you lose- basic concept. Yup that’s life. Yet looking back, I remember it blew my childhood mind that someone’s default was the pure self-deserving entitlement to grab an entire huge bag of candy for himself, like it was nothing. Stupefied, I kept asking myself in the moments and years that followed, “Is that what was supposed to happen??” My young self might seem like not the sharpest tool in the shed to you right now, but the problem was one we all impose on ourselves. In our own often hidden and characteristic ways, each of us fails to see the world as it is- full of possibility. We’re caught in false, absurdly self-limiting preconceptions just like this one.
For those of us raised in environments of aggression, abuse, invalidation, neglect- or the more subtle, but no less damaging horrors of parental disinterest or disregard… our default is to freeze in the face of life’s offerings, constrict our desires, resist dreaming, take no risks- never imagine that we can have things we want, so easily. I have thought back to this unsettling memory throughout my life- the sad fact that simply reaching out towards something I desired, what was being offered directly and unequivocally to me, never even occurred to me. Life experience had shown me that I wasn’t part of a warm, welcoming world where people want to help you just out of human kindness. I had been on my own emotionally and adapted by keeping to myself, being self-sufficient, and not expecting much.
Fortunately, my ability to let wonderful things into my life has evolved radically since then. This seismic shift in perspective is actually the most valuable gift I’ve received from all of the work I have done “on”/ for myself through the years. It will continue to unfold this way for all of us who begin taking real care of ourselves and don’t give up.
So, if you haven’t written a New Year’s Resolution list yet, may I suggest including the following:
1. Be kind and loving towards yourself, always
2. Let yourself identify your dreams
3. Accept that you can have what you want
4. Ask for it, express yourself, let yourself & your desires be known, reach for it
5. Allow it in
6. Repeat
You are the only one who can allow yourself to be seen, understood, connected and gratified- this year, this day, this moment. I wish you the best, and I know you can have it.
Happy New Year! <3