Thankfully, “Be Authentic” has become more popular these days. I’m not always one to choose what’s popular, but I am one on the quest for authenticity, and living in a climate and culture that has made more room for it than in the past, makes it a tee tiny bit more accessible. Not altogether easier, but perhaps a tiny bit more.
Earlier this year, in a training I’m taking on Compassionate Inquiry, I first heard Gabor Maté discuss the literal why it is so hard to be authentic.
Why? Because when we are so very young, we have two primary needs:
- the natural need to be authentic
- the natural need for attachment (to be connected, loved, and cared for) with our parents/caregivers.
These two needs aren’t always in competition. Occasionally they exist parallel.
But they DO repeatedly end up in competition, and when a child has to choose (consciously or subconsciously) authenticity or attachment, they will naturally, biologically, choose attachment every single time.
Ultimately our drive to be connected and loved is more innate and stronger than our drive to be authentic.
This gets repeated and wired into our way of being as young ones, and developmentally, as adults, we have the opportunity to consider (and learn the skills of) NOT disconnecting from ourselves to maintain a faulty attachment by only allowing ourselves the most narrow and constrained expressions.
Judgment. Shame. Rejection. Isolation. These hook into our subconscious programming and drive so many of our behaviors and ways of being. These are our coping skills – some obvious and some subtle. For a long time, they serve us. They keep us safe and connected until they don’t. Stepping out of these patterns can be liberating, yes, but can also be excruciatingly uncomfortable. To our subconscious minds and muscle memories, comfort is safe. Even if that comfort is miserable.
Stepping out of these subconscious patterns and building the mental, physical, and emotional skills of self-connection and internal safety take more than a mindset shift; they take experimentation, discomfort, practice, practice, practice, regressions, and more practice, and are certainly helped way more with both self-compassion and community-compassion than the common community “air” of shame, ridicule, comparison, and rejection.
We’ve been taught to turn away, and now it’s time to turn toward your own innocent heart and build the skills of self-connection, self-presence, and, ultimately, self-trust.
This is the work I teach and coach, and practice. My coaching communities, podcast, book, and teachings hold the energy and intention of this compassion for your authenticity and for your humanness. My work can give you a space to build these skills and new muscle memories of self-trust for a better life and better work – for wholeness in your whole heart and being.
