How To Be Yourself in a Relationship (Even If Being Yourself Makes You Feel Terrified of Losing It)
(Love, Sex and Soup Q & A)-On being your authentic self-the cutting edge research plus some practical tips.
Thanks Luisa from Texas for this question: When I’m in a relationship, fears of losing my partner often get the best of me. Often, I have trouble expressing what I really need or I act in a way I think my partner expects me to. I’m scared I guess that if I assert myself fully, if I show my real needs, even my imperfections, I’ll be left in the dust. I want to learn how to be more true to myself. Do you have any tips on how to navigate these fears which can be overwhelming when they come up? Really, how I can go about not losing myself?
Intimate relationships evoke our deepest, most disturbing fears when it comes to love. Another way of saying that is adult relationships bring up our early childhood attachment patterns. Even if well-meaning, they are the dysfunctional ways our caregivers required us to be and act as a child in order to receive their love and attention.
Inevitably, many of us end up questioning how worthy we are of love because as children not every part of ourselves was allowed expression.
Sound like a bunch of psycho-babble?
Hear, hear….The last several decades has produced mind blowing research on the brain when it comes to this topic of early childhood experiences and its effects on our mental health.
What’s obvious (research or not) is that we are social animals: we feel and do better, mentally and physically, when we have people in our life that we connect and feel safe with.
The science is not only showing why, it’s now become clear that our biology is interpersonal!
Whaaaat?!
That is, the interaction of our genes with the environment shapes our brain’s circuitry and is critically influenced by the mutual responsiveness of adult-child relationships. In other words, emotional rather than intellectual interaction serves as the mind’s primary architect where brain structures and neural pathways get activated and develop only in relation to the other. -Gabor Mate, from The Myth of Normal
Feeling and hearing each other out is king! Rather than smart, fancy pants intellectual, culturally sophisticated convos which, nonetheless, are still fun and have their role in the food chain, albeit much lower than our cultural narrative has placed them.
Let’s break down this “interpersonal brain” bit some more.
We Have Two Primary, Biologically Wired Social Needs: the Need for Attachment and the Need For Authenticity.
Attachment
is the drive for connection, closeness in the physical and emotional sense. Its primary purpose is to facilitate caretaking. Without reliable adults moved to take care of us and without our impulse to be close to these caregivers, survival would not be possible. Our drive for attachment is hardwired into our brains and is mediated by complex neural circuits governing and promoting behaviors (crying and cuteness, for example) designed to keep us close to those without whom we cannot live.
Authenticity
is the quality of being true to oneself and the ability to shape one’s own life based on the deep knowledge of oneself. Authenticity’s only rule is that we, not externally imposed expectations, be the true author of our life. As children, we often receive the message that certain parts of ourselves are acceptable while others are not.
You could have come from a loving family and still suffer from degrees of deprivation because the truth is most of us, parents included, were never taught to truly value our emotions. On top of that, we are living in a culture that does not encourage authenticity.
Each family has its own script that gets played out where roles get assigned (scapegoat, helper, victim, etc) and rules about how one must be and act in order to be loved get established. Unless you come from a self-aware family, these patterns get played out almost always unconsciously.
Some family stories don’t allow anger to be expressed, in others being logical or self-sacrificing gets rewarded. For some, anger and emotional expression might be allowed but without boundaries or intention. Family members “connect” emotionally but no one feels really heard or understood.
The Kicker
When young, attachment comes first so if the choice is between “hiding my feelings even from myself and getting the care I need and being myself but going without care, we all chose the former.”
Attachment reigns king in this regard.
We don’t consciously choose to hide from ourselves or be inauthentic. It’s a coping mechanism that gets us through our early years forming personality traits that later cause us pain and strengths that sometimes lead to problems (think the exhaustion and loneliness of the overachiever).
The Consequences
Back to the bio
When there is an ongoing and persistent lack of responsiveness (no major trauma needed), neglect, emotional and/or physical abuse, parts of our developing, biological hardware gets frozen in time or wired in wonky ways. Our nervous systems stop functioning properly as a result, we chemically and hormonally begin to pingpong, our immunes system gets compromised and it all manifests in those dark rabbit holes we get trapped in and illnesses that confuse the hell out of our doctors—
We are petrified of being abandoned, a state so unbearable, we’d rather lose ourselves in our partners. Or, we over-communicate and push our partners away. We withdraw and shut everyone, including ourselves, out leaving no room for intimacy to develop. We blame others for our problems, we escape into our work and become wildly successful and also deeply depressed, we suffer from autoimmune problems and other ailments that science has yet to find the cure for, we acquire eating, drinking, drug, gambling, sex addictions…
So, What To Do?
Take small risks
It can feel unbearable to show parts of yourself that have been hidden for a long time, especially if you were made to feel ashamed of them. So start by identifying what it is that you are scared to express but want to nonetheless and come up with small, somewhat uncomfortable but not overwhelming actionable ways to execute it.
For example, if it is hard for you to express anger, than telling your partner directly how angry you feel might be setting the bar too high. Instead try one or several of these approaches:
-Write a letter or an email to your partner but don’t send it.
-Write a letter or email and do send it, maybe checking with someone you trust first if what you are saying is clear and not passive aggressive.
-Read books on your topic if both of the above feel too far out of your comfort zone. You may need time to have your feelings and situation normalized in the safest way possible. Shame is a real mo-fo. Baby steps is the way through.
-Have a conversation with your partner. Tell him or her how hard it is to express anger but that you want to learn how. Simply putting it on the table can help. You may find that your partner is completely open to it or even welcomes it.
-Use humor! With yourself and with your partner. Find funny ways to name and deal with your fears.
-Walk and talk! Facing forward rather than maintaining eye contact can make any situation feel less intense. This more relaxed approach can empower you to talk more freely and easily – especially when discussing difficult or sensitive issues. There’s a whole therapeutic approach based around this concept.
-As you get comfortable working with and expressing parts of yourself that feel uncomfortable and/or an imagined threat to your relationship, this new way of being will become second nature.
-But first! Be prepared to feel as awkward as hell and sometimes, scared shitless. Expect messiness…for quite some time actually.
-Speaking of time, give yourself that. Patience and compassion too. Show up for the journey. There are no short cuts to healing old parts of yourself that have been wounded.
-Feeling vulnerable is not a bad thing, it’s a sign you are perfectly human. It’s okay to feel shy when you bring to the table parts of yourself you’re not sure will be welcomed. Make sure you are with someone who you feel safe with. Which brings me to…
Get some help
If you’re emotional states are too hard to bear or difficult to decode, it might be time to seek professional help. Often our early stories are embedded so deep within us, that in order “to know thyself”, we need the mirroring, mutual responsiveness and reflections of another human being to help us become more conscious about our patterns and how they are living inside our bodies. Not that I recommend ever going without the aforementioned, sometimes we just need it in a more concentrated and therapeutic form.
There are some amazing forms of therapy doing some pretty amazing things: EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, Psycho-energetics, Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy, and Neurofeedback, Walk and Talk Therapy to name some.
I would love to hear your thoughts and especially your questions! To ask yours, shoot me a message by replying to this post or via my contact form.
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