Reconnecting with your inner voice

A few years ago, my dear friend Sabrina shared with me a study that she found interesting. The study had been conducted by psychologists from UCLA who were examining different ways men and women may respond to stress.

The researchers suggested that, while “fight or flight” is a well-known stress response, some women may also be inclined towards what they called “tend and befriend”. That is, when stress mounts, a woman may feel drawn to protect and nurture those close to her, and then turn to a social network for support.

The full impact of what my friend shared with me didn’t resonate at the time as earth-shatteringly important, but I feel I am starting to gain glimpses of the meaning behind it.

“No man is an island, entire unto himself,” wrote the poet John Donne. Many of us know this instinctively. The human species has survived because of community, connection, protection, care and the sharing of food, resources and information.

Women and connection

Our connections and relationships are not always separate from our sense of self. They can feel part of us, included in our experience of ourselves as much as our talents and abilities, or even as much as our arms and legs. Chances are, you can feel a tear in the fabric of one of your relationships right in your body.

The desire for connection and relationship is something our society can sometimes put women down for. Women may be labelled “needy” or “dependent”, and women who care more about connecting than competing may be overlooked. In our interconnected world, it is becoming clearer that success often depends on sustaining good relationships, not on ruthlessness. But old attitudes can die hard.

When women don’t feel their needs for connection are met, they may feel it is their fault, or that something is wrong with them; that they are too needy, or want too much. This is unfair. It’s like someone starving and thinking they should simply adjust their appetite.

But the pull towards connection can also leave women vulnerable. So vital was connection to the survival of our foremothers that many women have trouble disconnecting, even when they want to.

If you can feel a tear in the fabric of one of your relationships right in your body, then losing an important relationship, even a bad, unhealthy or harmful one, can feel like losing a limb. Doing or saying something that could cause a break in a relationship can bring up a strong feeling of fear, even if your rational mind tells you that you “shouldn’t” feel this way.

At those times, the need to connect and be connected with can become so strong that it overrides other impulses that arise from the inner self. Because of this, many women, including smart, intelligent and competent women, may let go of their own inner voice rather than risk the loss of connection.

Inner voice

What do I mean by inner voice? The inner voice is the wisdom of your whole self as it makes itself known to you.

It may express itself as impulses, urges, body feelings, a sense of knowing what you need or what to do, a deep desire, or sometimes as a wisdom that seems to come from beyond the physical realm.

Even when you don’t listen to your inner voice for years, or even decades, it doesn’t reject you or disappear completely. It simply goes into the background, becoming softer, ready at any moment to show you the smallest step back towards living in a way that feels truer to yourself.

If you are filled with strongly critical or attacking thoughts, then, no matter how accurate those attacks may seem, what you are hearing is not your inner voice.

Your inner voice includes what you know, feel, sense and want, whether you are conscious of these things or not.

Mirroring

When a person loses touch with their inner self, when they believe their inner self is destructive or untrustworthy, or when they feel it would be impossible to live according to it, they suffer.

Some people feel like they can’t remember a time when they were in touch with their inner self. Some feel they lost it in adolescence, and others feel they lost it slowly in a relationship with the wrong person or through a lifetime of compromises.

In each case, the connection to the inner self may have been lost because, time after time, the person reached out for connection and, instead of being mirrored, they were deflected.

What is being mirrored? It is looking in another’s eyes and knowing that you have been seen.

Being deflected is the exact opposite. It is offering the gift of a part of yourself to someone and having that person be unwilling or unable to receive it. While deflection can sometimes be angry or hostile, more often than not, it is done without any conscious intent to harm.

It may be expressed as a simple lack of listening or acceptance. It can be felt when someone changes the subject when you share your hopes and dreams, or in a silence that says, “Don’t tell me you are still feeling upset. You should be over this by now.”

Since the sting of deflection is something everyone wants to avoid, we soon learn what will be mirrored and received, and what will be deflected. In many relationships, the inner self is not mirrored. Instead, what gets mirrored are the actions you take to satisfy other people’s needs and expectations.

If those who share your life don’t see you, you are in danger of becoming invisible to yourself. If they don’t hear you, your desire to connect with others starts to battle with your desire to be true to yourself.

How does this happen? When does it start? For many of us, the foundations begin in early childhood.

There is a way back, and it doesn’t come from fixing, improving or changing a single thing about yourself. Living from the forgotten self comes from losing connection to our inner selves, to what we know, sense, feel and want.

While these passageways may seem asleep, they are still there. We just need to know how to open or reopen them, travel their lengths, and listen to what the inner self is trying to tell us.

Then we can come back to knowing what we know, sensing what we sense, feeling what we feel and wanting what we want.