How’s it going where you are? Here in the mountains – it’s been an action-packed couple of weeks. Some good things are happening. Some pretty stressful things are happening.
That’s life right? It keeps changing.
If life is always changing, then what is your true north? For some it is faith. For other’s a practice, a job, a relationship.
For ALL of us it is a relationship to something – that something is our selves.
We like to think of our personality or character as if they are fixed and solid. It’s sort of reassuring unless we don’t like something about ourselves.
In truth, our personality and character it is adaptable and dynamic just like everything else in life. We can work that to our advantage – if we choose to.
Let’s take a look at this…
You have an image of your Self. Your self-image = who you think and feel yourself to be, what you believe you are good at, not so good at, what you think is your ‘personality’, your taste and opinions. In other words, your self-image is HOW you experience yourself in relationship to your environment.
How did you form your self-image?
When you were a baby, in the earliest stages of life, you did not experience yourself as distinct from your caretakers. What Mom felt, thought, and did when you were in her belly, you experienced too. Your nervous systems were linked.
In the field of epigenetics, they study changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression rather than alteration of the genetic code itself. They’ve studied, for example, how trauma or stress, gets embodied and passed along from the parent or caretaker to the infant and child. That passing and influence through relationship with a caregiver, not only influences what genes are expressed, but it literally sets the stage for the child’s interactions with and expectations of the environment. It influences what information the child sorts for from the environment and how they respond to what they find. Thankfully, the good stuff and positive experiences are part of this equation too.
This field and the studies are a wonderful illustration of how we may carry a certain propensity for all sorts of things, but our environment and our inner action with that environment is what influences us the most.
Your sense of yourself and your personality is formed through your relationship to your environment. This includes your caretakers, friends, weather, air you name it. AND since we have such a LONG dependency period on our caretakers (see last blog post) – our relationships play a HUGE role in forming our self-image.
From the moment you existed, you were forming your sense of the world, what it was like, based on your relationship to your Mom through your body, your nervous system and your senses. What she felt, what hormones got released, how she moved, how she breathed or didn’t – directly shaped your experience and your idea of what the world was like and who you were in relationship to the world.
All of that information and experience created biological responses in your body brain. It fired and wired neurons and that becomes part of our habits.
How did you take that information in as a baby in utero? How did you take that in once you were born, breathing independently?
You took it in through your senses –in Mom’s belly and outside of it. You still are.
Your earliest interactions in the world are through your senses. Your sense have the most direct route to your nervous system, brain and neurons. They continue to work the same way your whole life biologically speaking even though most of us have been taught to value reason over sensation. I am not saying that reason does not have its value and place – it does. But make no mistake, sensation and inner action with the environment is always the primary influence in the brain and the neurons.
After birth, your environment shifts from your Mother’s womb to the local environment your family group and the customs of your culture. Your interactions with the environment, and your personal experiences with it become internalized and part of what forms your self image. So, if you shift your experiences and your habits, you shift your self-image.
Your Self Image is ALWAYS capable of changing and shifting with new experience. Remember our amazing neuroplasticity we talked about last time?
That means that no matter what you experienced before this moment, you can always shift your self image and grow it.
Let’s back up… yes we know that your body and mind are influenced by the environment you grow up in and by the culture. But as humans, this stuff, how the culture influences our sense of who we are is sneaky stuff. It is the water we are in – so we can forget it is there. Until…there is pain or a problem that begs our attention.
That pain can show up in a variety of ways… for me, as a woman, for example, I have felt like I could not safely and fully express myself in certain situations. Why? Because I live in a society where women are not treated fully as equals (yet) and there is violence toward women. The reality is that it has been a wise choice for me not to fully express myself in certain situations– it kept me safe to stay small at times. I learned that from my caretakers. I learned those cues about how to be safe from the people around me.
But if I stop there and just stay small and quiet all the time as my primary way of staying safe – a whole lot of me goes unexpressed in the world. I don’t want to be small and quiet – so I seek safe ways to be the person in the world I want to be while in relationship to my environment.
The aim of the body and brain is survival and one of the ways we survive is by adapting and being socialized by our care takers. They are in charge of taking care of me – so I’ll follow their lead. Right? That’s smart.
Once we are no longer dependent on our caretakers for survival – we have a choice to look at the culture and the things our caretakers taught us and decide if it is what we still want to live by and do. Do I want to believe the same things as my family or my culture or other things?
(Another example of socialization is toilet training. I am happy my children learned how to use a toilet;-) Just to be clear – not all socialization is not bad.)
We not only want to survive, but many of us also want to thrive.
Who we are interacting with, and the values we have internalized from our caretakers and culture and experiences are all expressed in how we move, think and feel – in other words they are expressed through our habits. Our habits are a reflection of internalized values and they in turn influence our self-image.
When we find ourselves saying this like – it is ‘just who we are’ and “there is nothing we can do” – that is when we are in deep trouble. It is understandable that you don’t want to change things about who you are, but there are other things that we do not need to give up on if we want to change.
This is the horrible tragedy of what happens to people in domestically violent homes. They form their self-image in relationship to the abusive person. Likely, they formed that self-image and pattern early in life through their caretaker, and the pattern continued. Since they knew themselves and who they were through a certain relationship pattern, it is common that they will repeat the pattern because it is who they believe they are and how they know themselves to be in the world.
So why do some people change and heal? If they can listen to the part of their self-image that knows they deserve a better life, then they can see a glimmer of light – a small opening of hope that things can be different, that they can be different. A vital shift. They must be able to change their relationship to their environment. They need to connect to the resources and relationships that help support building a new life, new habits, new experiences and a new self-image.It can not be done alone – it is done through a change in relationship.
The reason I have dedicated myself to this work for the last 20 years is because I have seen time and time again that the more self-aware we become, the more we can look at our internalized values as see how most of them are based on the place, family and culture we happen to live in. When we see this, when we experience our ability to change, we have a much better chance at happiness as individuals and a more peaceable world for all.
I LOVE watching people as the lightbulbs go off and they start to see that they have not FAILED. They just had not seen how they had been influenced. They had not seen how the values they had internalized from their caretakers, from their societies were in conflict with who they really wanted to be in the world. When a person sees this – and clearly feels it – it is simply amazing to witness. I have the chills just thinking about it.😊
When we are raising teenagers, as they start to separate themselves from their families and find out who they are – as parents we look to see who their friends are. We ask “are they good kids? Will they be a good influence on them? “ We know how much their peers will inspire and conspire with them.
We could ask ourselves that same question about the people we are around, the news we take in, the routines we keep, the books we read. Are they a good influence? Are they asking you to grow in good ways? Do they make you more loving or more fearful?
I am extremely lucky to have a partner who always reminds me to consider compassion. This week when I had a very difficult interaction with someone, as my husband and I talked about it, we really tried to understand why that person was acting that way. We did not excuse their behavior. They were still held accountable for what they had done. Yet we were able to have compassion and still care for them.
I have strived for this in my life and failed many times. Having a partner who always reminds me at every turn to consider choosing compassion has deeply influenced and shifted my relationship to the world. He has helped me form new habits and it has changed me and my world for the better.
For all of our differences, as humans, I do believe we all want the same basic things – we want food, shelter, love, protection. We want enough. We want peace and stability. The more we can align our self-image with those core values – the more joy we experience and the more peaceable the world becomes.
We all grow up socialized. We are humans. And humans are relational social creatures. When we begin to see that we are a bit more vulnerable to the influence of our environment than we might like to believe, we can begin to use that to our advantage.
Notice how you feel when you are around certain people and in certain environments. Do you feel jittery? Nervous? Excited? Calm? At ease? Like whom you wish to be?
Keep paying attention. By paying attention, you start to honor yourself. Your start to listen to the core parts – the essential parts. It may not be comfortable – but I promise you can grow more and more into the person you want to be if you just pay attention and then take one small step in support of that desire. Practice. Again, and again. Astra
