Healing the split between your mind and body is the way home to yourself.
So many women come to see me with the same complaint; they feel disconnected and disenchanted, cut off from something authentic and vital inside themselves. They describe being hyper-aware of what everyone else wants and needs but out of touch with their own wants and needs—simultaneously knowing who they are in all their roles to and for other people, but not who they are to and for themselves. Women long to connect with their own truth, but when their energy and attention have been so focused on others for so long, their experience and what they want can feel like an empty room they’ve never entered or, alternatively, a room so cluttered with everyone else’s ideas of what their experience should be and what they should want that they can’t hear their own still small voice.
Women often wake up at a certain age and find themselves missing from their own lives—without a self. While this selfless state may have long been heralded by others, and while they may have still created a good life filled with things they want and enjoy, nonetheless, they feel unfulfilled and under-nourished in the deepest sense, disconnected from a greater sense of meaning.
The “Likability Cage”
In The Emotionally Exhausted Woman, I wrote about this disconnection and what I called the “likability cage,” our belief that we need to take care of other people’s needs to be likable at all costs (even if the cost is our truth) to stay safe and be accepted. I investigated the ways we manage and police our wants, needs, and personalities—how we become whoever is wanted because it’s more important to keep the peace, maintain the relationship, and ultimately, be desired and safe from judgment.
As women, we’ve learned to vacate ourselves along the way to all these good things, good relationships, and good lives, to abandon ourselves in an effort to take care of ourselves and guarantee emotional safety. My intention in writing The Emotionally Exhausted Woman was to help heal this disconnection women describe so frequently, to empower women to be truthful, include their own wants and needs in their life choices, and build the courage to live as their authentic selves—not just their likable selves—fundamentally, to discover and connect with their truth and dare to live as if their truth actually matters.
Since writing the book, I’ve given countless talks and workshops and spoken to hundreds of women. Throughout this process, I’ve discovered that my work is indeed needed and wanted, and, at the same time, there’s further to go. To truly claim our lives and live (as the poet Mary Oliver says) our “one wild and precious life” we must do more than just change the way we think and relate to ourselves and others. We must also build a new relationship with and reconnect with our own bodies. We must re-inhabit our bodies and start living from the inside out, paying attention to and honoring our body’s experience and wisdom.
Through all the wonderful and painful conversations with women over this time, it’s become clear that we cannot experience our full potential and life energy, and cannot connect with ourselves in the deepest sense, just by recovering from our addiction to being liked, or just by learning to trust the truth more than being what’s wanted. It’s not possible to come home to ourselves just by stepping out of the likability cage. We must include all of ourselves if we are going to truly come home. I italicize “just” here because the process of learning to show up as who you are and the courage to trade in the guaranteed rewards that come with being likable for some as-yet-undiscovered benefit of being real is beyond brave and profound. To live from want, not should; speak your truth without apology; and stop managing your personality involves an indescribably courageous paradigm shift. If you never take another step on this journey, you’ve traveled an infinite distance, and your life is forever changed. Still, there’s more ground to travel.
Disconnection From Ourselves
Even when we’ve learned to give voice to our psychological and spiritual truth and walk our walk in the world, a fundamental split remains inside us. We’re still disconnected—from ourselves, still not living a fully integrated life, still not living from (or as) the whole of ourselves. The internal split is between our mind and our body. This primary split arises from a multitude of cultural, political, religious, and other factors. It starts from the time we’re very young, when we as women learn that our physical appearance is our most powerful asset when it comes to being accepted and belonging. If we can look a certain way and get our body into a particular shape, we can matter to others. With the right packaging, we are desired, successful, and, ultimately, happy. Who wouldn’t want all that? At the most basic (primal) level, physical attractiveness guarantees us survival.
And so, we start managing and policing our bodies, using our bodies to serve our primal need for safety and to belong and feel self-esteem. We objectify our bodies, turn them into things that are separate from who we are, valuable only in so far as they can make us powerful and popular, and wanted in relationship with others, all of which is far more important than staying connected to ourselves. In the process, we abandon our bodies and vacate the premises; our bodies then become mere calling cards to advertise our worth. In so doing, however, we leave our true embodied home, close the door on its riches, shutter the premises and move up into our head, and take up residence in the mental landscape, where some of us, sadly, live out the rest of our days.
We’re born connected to our own body. But we end up disconnected and disembodied for many reasons including, for women, the value placed on our appearance. To survive in this culture, we shift from an integrated life in which we listen to our senses and intuition and directly experience our life (rather than just interpret it), to a life as our body’s PR agent, managing the body from the outside but not actually living inside it. Our attention and energy are poured into the adornment and beautification of this self-object, but, sadly, we forget (and are rewarded for forgetting) that the body is also our home and an infinite source of our emotions, longings, wisdom, experience, and truth—in short, who we are.
