This post shares my own experience and perspective. It is not therapy and it is not a replacement for working with a qualified professional.
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Your Inner Child Waiting for You
We all have patterns. When we are growing up, our brains are very malleable. In any situation where we feel we need to contour ourselves to get more love or more safety, we develop a pattern to try to get it. It is a way of coping.
These patterns can look like feeling the need to prove yourself. They can look like always putting yourself last. They can look like saying “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know” all the time, because making a decision does not feel safe.
I learned about this from Mastin Kipp’s book, Claim Your Power.. Later I went to an event he held in Miami, back when I lived there. He said something that stayed with me. To release a pattern, you have to go in the opposite direction.
Here is why. The old version of you saw the pattern as the way to feel safe. If you have a mountain of evidence that the pattern keeps you safe, you can’t just drop it and move on. You have to create new evidence. You have to give your nervous system new data that you are safe without the pattern.
So if you chronically put yourself last, take every chance you get to put yourself first. Each time becomes new evidence that you are safe without the pattern.
Safety looks different now
In childhood, safety looked different than it does in adulthood. But we tend to act like we are still trapped in childhood. The truth is that as an adult, you have a lot more agency, a lot more power, and a lot more choices. Your nervous system may not have caught up to that yet.
As an adult, there are not many situations where you are in true, actual danger. Say you are in a job you hate. Say it truly feels unsafe. As an adult, you can quit. As an adult, you can find another job. Rarely are you totally, undeniably helpless.
That can be uncomfortable. It means confronting the role we play in our own unhappiness. It also comes with a liberation. And that is the only time real change can happen.
Bad things do happen that are outside our control. They affect us. But when you put all your attention on what is in your control, your life starts to change. Your business does too.
Clean up your side of the street
It is easier to point a finger at someone else. Maybe you have a client who says one thing and does another. They may have gunk to clean up. But instead of looking at their gunk, look at your own.
Maybe I wouldn’t be in this situation if I hadn’t said yes when I actually meant no. Maybe I needed better boundaries. Maybe I needed higher standards. When I clean up my side of the street, I am in a better position to say, “I would like to look at our agreement again.”
My coach taught me that you have to choose your role in your own story. If you’re the victim, you can’t also be the hero. Many of us say we are the hero. Yet in some areas we still act like someone else has to change before our life can get better.
What is underneath
My pattern was codependency. It says" “I need you to be okay for me to be okay.” I still clean up the residue every day.
Underneath every pattern is control. Perfectionism, proving yourself, putting yourself last. All of it is trying to control things that are not your job to control.
In childhood it was innocent. If I do all my homework and get good grades and take care of everything, maybe I can feel safe in this home. There is so much grief underneath that. I’m so sad you had to go through that. I’m so sad you had to develop this coping mechanism.
As an adult, the pattern has a different flavor. It is a grown adult trying not to be in touch with that little child. If you don’t take care of yourself, you try to get other people to take care of you. If you don’t approve of yourself, you chase other people’s approval. It never works. Nobody else can play that role. The power is in your hands.
With codependency, I wanted other people not to be in pain. I didn’t want to feel their pain. I had to learn to say, “Michelle, it is safe for people to be in pain. Their pain is not my pain. Their mess is not mine to clean up.” Codependency says “let me fix your problems so that I don’t have to face my own.” You can’t give to people what you don’t give to yourself.
So I had to stop. Stop trying to save everybody. In that emptiness, my inner child could finally show up. She came to me at different ages - seven, at ten, at twelve, holding her hands together. She asked, “Can you feel this pain now?” And I had to keep saying, “Yes, you can give it to me now. I’ll feel it.”
Two minutes or twenty years
If big emotions are coming up, it is a good sign. It means your nervous system is saying you are safe enough to process this now. Some trauma does need more help. But a lot of the time we are just suppressing emotions. The lie is to believe that feeling sad is going to kill you. It won’t. So many of us avoid two minutes of intense emotion and sign up for 20 years of repressed rage.
This is why I care about the root issue. If we don’t address the root, we go around in circles. No matter how much money, time or effort we throw at it.
The root is your inner child waiting for you to say, “I got you. I can take it.”
Your next step is small. Today, notice one moment when your pattern shows up. Then do the opposite, just once. That is your first piece of new evidence.
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