Hello, dear one! Have you ever wondered why you’re hard on yourself when you most need compassion?
The truth is, we learn how to treat ourselves by the way we’re treated in our early experiences. This is an unconscious developmental process that shapes our brain and nervous system.
By the time you were four months old, you’d already assessed the window of welcome for your emotions in your primary caregiver’s nervous system—that is, how much of your feelings they could tolerate before they went into fight/flight/freeze.
If your parent got overwhelmed, angry, distant, or shut down when you expressed your fear, anger, sadness, or even joy, you dialed down your expression of those emotions to help you fit into your parent’s nervous system tolerance. That was an unconscious, nervous-system-level survival strategy that became your template for all relationships before you even had words.
As you got older, if those around you couldn’t welcome your emotions with warm resonance and responsive attunement, you unconsciously tried to shrink yourself to fit into their nervous system’s window of welcome with self-recrimination, shame, and all manner of self-judgment. This is what all little ones do in the absence of warm resonance and support.
The shrinking of your life energy then creates inner conflict between the parts of you who want to be loved and the parts of you who want to exist in your wholeness. And that inner conflict creates stress anytime your nervous system senses that your emotions may not be welcome, which in turn ramps up harsh self-recrimination and self-judgment that can dysregulate your own nervous system and erupt in distress.
Sometimes, we manage that vicious cycle by turning our judgment, defensiveness, and blame outward. Which can harm our connections and itself trigger another round of self-judgment for being “too judgy.”
If this sounds familiar, it likely also feels exhausting and disheartening. For many people, this painful unconscious tension between belonging and authenticity is also the underpinning of depression and anxiety.
All self-criticism originates when you were in distress and there was no one there to offer you warm curiosity and guidance aligned with your actual needs.
When you engage in self-criticism today, it’s not only retraumatizing for your younger selves who needed and still need love and care and help navigating overwhelming situations, it also just doesn’t work. You can never get rid of any part of yourself, you can only learn to better care for all the parts of yourself.
I can support you in this process of transforming a judgmental inner landscape to a warm and compassionate one–both by supporting you in responding differently to your own judgments, and by offering you a wider window of welcome for all your emotions that, over time, becomes your new unconscious template for welcoming your wholeness.
With me, you won’t have to choose between being loved and being whole, you’ll get to have both.
Together, we’ll rewire your nervous system’s sense of safety feeling all your emotions, which builds resilience you can carry to other connections in your life—allowing you to speak with yourself and others with more compassion, clarity, and authenticity.
Message me today for your introductory session!
Much love and empathy,
Angela