Practicing Self Expression
July 20, 2022
CEN 8: Practicing Self Expression
Click here to download the worksheet
Hi everyone, this is Ludemia, aka Mia, and welcome to Heart-Mind Equation.
This is Episode 8 of our CEN series. Now, we have reached our recommendation #5, to overcome people-pleasing, to help us recover from childhood emotional neglect.
Don’t forget to go to my website, heartmindequation.com, to download the worksheets I’ve put in place to accompany you throughout this episode.
Recommendation #5 is to Practice Self Expression, or should I say, Practice Authentic Self Expression. It goes even to most simple details, such as how we talk, walk, or dress. Indeed, we say: “Dress the way you want to be addressed”.
Although, very often, some of our actions or behaviors are based on a set of habits we have developed over the years.
We should take the time to be more conscious sometimes of how genuine we are at expressing our personality or character to the world.
Let’s not confuse personality and character, BTW.
Personality is mostly a combination of our qualities, our flaws, and behaviors, based on the way we think, feel, and act. In comparison, our character reflects the reasons behind our motives, actions, and behaviors (just like moral standards of values, and beliefs).
We can say that people perceive who we are through our personality but get to know who we really are through our character.
To be at ease enough to express our true selves to anyone, there should be a congruence between our personality and our character. Therefore, it becomes easier for us to be assertive.
What we mean by being assertive, is to carry ourselves as confident people would. We say what we mean and mean what we say. This is when there is coherence between our words and our actions, between our personality and our character.
Although, despite this congruence, it is more difficult for someone with an introverted personality, shyness, or social anxiety disorder to be 100% comfortable demonstrating assertiveness.
It is imperative for us to voice our needs and desires. Sometimes, we have not, because we ask not.
One of the things stopping us from communicating our authentic selves is fear. Precisely, fear of other people’s perception of us. This is to say that it is easier for people who don’t have fear of judgment, to be more assertive. They can be themselves without having to micromanage other people’s perceptions of them.
There is another way we can justify why some of us cannot totally express ourselves to others. It’s mostly based on our feeling of mistrust towards some people in general. We reveal ourselves to someone in the proportion of how much we trust that someone. Of course, it depends on that person’s reliability or loyalty. It’s only common sense. It is a way to protect ourselves against any potential dishonesty from people. Prevention is often the best protection.
Someone even mentioned to me one day, that he would only share a particular opinion or personal experience with another person, depending on what he perceives this person can potentially understand. In that case, it is safe to say that it depends on this other person’s rational or emotional intelligence. Or simply, whether or not he or she can relate to his opinion or experience.
In the context of adults who were victims of CEN (childhood emotional neglect), many factors influence their capacity to easily express or reveal themselves to the world.
Since we carry out through our adulthood the effects of our CEN (childhood emotional neglect), those factors influencing our true self-expression, are feelings that we held on to from our childhood. We are talking about: feelings of insignificance, incompetence, being unlovable, and even to the core, feelings of unworthiness.
As I have mentioned in my previous episodes, those negative feelings we have, are often subconscious reasons behind our behaviors of people-pleasing, attention-validation-approval seeking.
On a subconscious level, we engage in these behaviors, to ‘’make up for those unmet emotional needs we had, growing up’’… so to speak.
As a child, this justification comes from the fact, that some of his emotional needs were overlooked by a parent or significant authority figure. So this child has learned to distrust that parent who couldn’t respond to his emotional needs (such as being nurtured or reassured, acknowledged, encouraged, or simply appreciated and supported).
So he does not fully express who he is or what he wants since it is going to be dismissed or overlooked anyway, he might think.
The adult, this child has become, has difficulty showing his true self because he got to falsely believe some negative feelings he has about himself: such as insignificance, when feeling underappreciated at work, for example. Or unlovable, when a spouse is not demonstrating any loving gesture towards him or simply ignoring him. Or feelings of incompetence every time someone doubts his recommendations in a consulting matter. Or feelings of unworthiness when his grown- kids prefer getting advice from anyone else but him…. and many more examples.
Now, to be able to practice self-expression, we need to overcome behaviors of people-pleasing, stopping attention-seeking behavior, validation, and approval seeking. Removing those reactive behaviors helps us communicate more genuinely.
For some of us who dealt with people-pleasing, our authentic self could be hidden behind a persona. A persona whose job is to protect the individual from risking rejection from others, from risking confrontation, or simply from being judged.
The first thing to consider, to be able to express ourselves genuinely is to cultivate awareness about who we really are. Sometimes, our persona is so strong, that it can get mixed up with our true personality, leaving us with a lot of confusion.
Cultivating awareness about ourselves, simply mean to know ourselves, to be able to distinguish our true self from our persona.
At every interaction with someone, when we tend to engage in people-pleasing, we should ask ourselves these questions:
Why do I feel the need to please this person? What is my motivation for it? Do I need to respond to an emotional need or act out of fear?
The answer to these questions sets the tone for the next ones:
What emotional need am I trying to meet by pleasing this person?
Is it acceptance, appreciation, acknowledgment, recognition, validation or approval, the need to be liked, or simply to be seen or heard?
What am I afraid of by expressing my true self at this moment? Am I afraid to be rejected or misunderstood, confronted or judged?
Most of the time, those fears are more present when we don’t trust ourselves enough. Basically, the world is a projection of who we believe ourselves to be, in the first place. In other words, people mirror what we believe about ourselves. The late Eleonor Roosevelt once said: ‘’Noone can make you feel inferior without your permission’’.
Instead of counting on other people for us to feel appreciated, acknowledged, or validated, we should look inside of ourselves, to touch base with our qualities and values.
In those cases where we fear being judged, rejected, or confronted, we need to shift our mindset from those negative feelings to empowering ones. One way to do that is by detaching ourselves from that fear. I would invite you to listen to my CEN – Episode 7, called ‘’Addressing Our Fears’’ suggesting a simple method to help us overcome some of our fears. To be able to express ourselves easily, the only thing we need to fear is fear itself.
Once we have convinced ourselves that we gain more from expressing our true selves than giving in to our persona, it becomes easier for us to remove our social masks and our mental filters.
Our persona feeds itself from fear, while our true self
comes from our hearts. Whatever is expressed from our hearts is always congruent with us. That way, we can get appreciated, acknowledged, and respected, knowing it is for who we really are and not for who we pretend to be.
If that episode resonated with you in any way, feel free to like, share or comment. Stay tuned and get a notification for our next episode, on recommendation #6, which is: Establishing boundaries, to cultivate our self-respect
You can follow me on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or simply on my website: heartmindequation.com, to unlock hidden potentials.
We also have to learn to stop compulsively apologizing for everything, often reflecting an irrelevant self-blame.
Self-blame prevents us from fully accepting ourselves. If we don’t completely accept ourselves, how can we expect anyone to accept us? This is another reason why we would be afraid to show our authentic selves to people
We practice self-expression also when we establish our priorities: contrarily to the people-pleaser, we should never make someone our priority if all we are to that someone, is simply an option