At a very young age, I learned to sacrifice parts of myself in close relationships, convinced that this was the way for receiving love, belonging and safety.
The early messages I received, often subtle, were that my own wants, deeper desires and needs were unwelcome, something to be ashamed of or feel guilty about. The belief, that my life wasn’t meant for my desires, was deeply ingrained in my cells. I’ll share the two key events that gave me the imprint for this belief later in this post.
All the little and bigger messages taught me on the other hand to become very sensitive for others’ needs, a dynamic I share with many sensitive women. It drove me often further from myself, leaving me with a quiet self-hatred for even having desires, as they seemed to serve neither my relationships nor societal expectations.
Ironically, this also cultivated a powerful strength: I became adept at reading and connecting with others. Combined with knowledge and the right tools, this skill has become invaluable in my work. However, it also ingrained a pattern of disconnecting from myself (and my body) in private and intimate relationships, naturally disappearing into what I perceive to be the other person’s needs and desires. This latter pattern ultimately serves no one, especially those striving for sovereignty within their own bodies and beings.
So, I learned to “serve” what I believed was best for others or the system, despite my own needs, clinging to the childlike hope that this would finally earn me the love and validation I humanly craved for. This (mostly invisible) inner struggle accompanied me for much of my life, manifesting as deep feelings of loneliness, depression, feelings of scarcity, neediness, self-doubt, paralysing perfectionism, struggles with body image, and periods of exhaustion. My inner compass, guiding me toward natural, balanced, and mutually respectful intimate relationships, was somehow completely disrupted, buried beneath inherited layers of guilt and shame.
This deep, hidden dynamic was inherited from my family lineage and an intergenerational thing. Within my own lineage but also in the culture for women I grew up in.
I finally decided to break free from this cycle a while ago. Initially, the motivation was for my children – something that still feels easier to articulate than saying I’m doing it completely for myself. But the truth is, I am doing it for myself. I got so tired of living with this dynamic.
And my goal is to inspire other (sensitive) women to break free from this deep-rooted pattern and to shine in their full power, embracing everything they are. Body, mind, emotions, spirit, heart, and soul, everything.
As I mentioned earlier, I can pinpoint two significant childhood events that contributed to my belief that my life wasn’t meant for me – for my deeper desires, needs, and wants. It even made it difficult to believe I was allowed to have desires, that it’s a natural human experience, and that I could pursue them, fully. In my head I was, but in my body I wasn’t. Reaching a point where I could publicly express my desires without guilt, shame, or fear of judgment took a long time.
These two events, which effectively stopped me from fighting for myself and drove me into internal hiding, were:
My Birth: Yes, my birth. I was delivered via emergency C-section while my mother was under general anesthesia, and my father was excluded from the room. During the procedure, they accidentally cut my back (and I’ve always had a fear of being attacked from behind!). I was placed in a hospital crib and taken to the nursery. My father could only watch and wave from behind the glass. I was separated from my mother for at least 24 hours due to her c-section wound (this was 51 years ago). We remained in the hospital for ten days, and I slept in the nursery at night. My mother later told me I was an “easy” baby who slept through the night from the start when we got home! It wasn’t until much later, through my studies and personal growth, that I realized no one was there for me during those first painful life threatening moments after birth. Attachment theory wasn’t prevalent then, and the belief was that babies “didn’t feel” much yet. They even trained babies to adapt to day/night schedules from the start. By the time I came home, I had already given up on my need and desire for skin-to-skin contact and the comfort of my mother’s heartbeat. I believe this was the root of my disconnection from my body’s sensations and feelings, as there was no one to co-regulate them with me. It had not been about my sensitive needs and desires as a freshly newborn to be held, fed, and reassured by present and caring parents. I needed to adapt to survive my new beginning and I believe I did, by numbing out my body.
My Parents’ First Divorce: This event stands out vividly as a profound fall from my childhood paradise. Before, life was clear, a certain status quo existed – an important and natural part of my happy child’s world. Afterward, I completely had lost trust in life, and everything turned grey. My father disappeared from my life, and my mother’s personality changed drastically. Suddenly, I saw worried eyes everywhere. I fell into a deep well of sadness, disappearing into my inner world, convinced that adults couldn’t be trusted for my needs to feel well. This was the 1970s, when separations weren’t as common as they are today, and child coaching or parenting plans didn’t exist. From that moment on, I was convinced that life wasn’t about me and my needs. I adapted to my environment, suppressed my feelings and tried hard to avoid causing more trouble. (But inside, I wanted to scream, shout, and be incredibly unreasonable! And yes, now I remember an incident in kindergarten when I was angry, cried, and screamed. They put me on a table in front of the whole class! Shame on me! I also remember telling the class during circle time that our dog had died, because I saw how much love and attention another child received when their rabbit died. Then my mom came to pick me up with our dog…and I was shamed again for trying to express the sadness in my inner world. I just didn’t know how. I guess I gave up after that.)
I believe this is where I stopped opening myself up and built a massive protective wall around my vulnerable parts (and started to become the clown from some point on). My feelings were too intense to handle without adult guidance, connection, compassion, reassurance, and co-regulation. I disconnected from my deeper feelings and started living mostly in my head. Doing life from my head, analyzing life from my head, judging life from my head, being strategic from my head. I no longer saw my heart as a trustworthy place, and my pelvic area held no meaning at all.
It was a long journey back to safely inhabiting my body and allowing myself to lovingly feel everything! Turning hidden greyness back into color and allowing life to enter all parts of me again. Loving myself fully back into the web of life.
The road back to our own deeper desires, needs, and wants can be an adventurous one, requiring us to break free from survival mechanisms – mechanisms we may not even recognize as such, because they’ve become part of our identity. These mechanisms and thought patterns have shaped our world so far, and we cling to them because they’ve kept us safe and helped us categorize and understand life. But mostly we do feel or suspect something is off or have other kinds of issues we deal with and we don’t really relate those things together.
But meanwhile, things are eating away at us inside. Our soul may begin knocking on our door, disrupting our familiar world with its deeper desires for our lives. Hey woman, there’s more to life than this…more juiciness and less hard work. More flow and less hardship. More loving, living and enjoying, and less showing off. More depth, poetry, and pleasure. And sometimes, for that, we need to let go of things we’ve believed for so long. Often, we need to take the time to listen to our body’s wisdom, our body’s intelligence, and our body’s poetry. Open up with all our senses and let life fully in. Breathing deeply through the layers in which our breath stayed stagnant. Over and over again. Loving our frozen pieces back to life. Finding a deeper inner peace and wonder again in a more connected and rich way.
It’s a beautiful journey of recollecting those lost parts of our lives and weaving them back into life and reconnecting them with the desires, aliveness, and dreams that are still waiting for you to be fully expressed.
