Expressing Our Experience
Hello Everyone –
We hope you are all doing well and are practicing good self-care during this busy time of year. December and early January can be joyous for some and highly stressful for others – or even a combination of both. In addition, loneliness is quite common during this season. Therefore, getting enough rest, relaxation, and support from others is vital, as is eating healthy foods and moving/exercising if you can.
This time of year can also be a nice time to do some self-reflection, which is what we have been doing ourselves. As we have been reflecting on 2022, we are celebrating that we’ve gained many new insights, and there is one we want to share with you:
To show up as our best selves, we must be able to EXPRESS OUR EXPERIENCE of life with someone else. Being truly seen, heard, and known is essential to happiness.
This means that we must be able to honestly express our past hurt, our current pain, our joy, our concern, our frustration, our confusion, our love, and every other experience we encounter in our lives. We must have someone to see, hear, and know us – our true authentic us.
Many of us know how it feels to keep our experience of life pushed down and bottled up inside. There are many reasons we do this, the most common being that we don’t have someone SAFE with whom to share. In previous blogs, we have discussed the importance of having a SAFE SPACE and the support of a SAFE PERSON.
However, there are other reasons for holding in what needs to be witnessed. We might:
Be scared to bring up the past
Consider ourselves to be a burden to others if we share our truth
Feel embarrassed and worry about what others may think of us
Try to maintain an image of strength, toughness, or invincibility
Believe we are weak or too sensitive and harshly judge ourselves
Have been shamed in the past or have had our feelings minimized when we did share, making us quite vulnerable to more rejection
Become triggered, so holding in our truth seems like a safer option (this indeed might be the case – if you have been severely traumatized, please protect yourself by finding a professional you trust and express your experience to them)
What we hold in becomes poison within us. What we leave unexpressed and buried can literally make us sick! It can also make us mean, anxious, defensive, and a host of other outcomes that do not support us – or serve the people we care about and love.
There is no way for us to truly show up as our best selves when we are holding in the poison of our unexpressed experiences.
We are not advising you to always say whatever you want to whomever you want – that would not turn out well. Instead, we are saying that cultivating relationships or finding people to support you to get what is inside of you out is an indispensable part of the healing process. You can do this in many ways:
Make sure the people closest to you are SAFE. If they are not safe, they do not deserve to be close to you.
Seek out professional help and support. As coaches, we are honored to be there for our clients and provide a safe space to express their experiences. We know that most counselors and therapists feel exactly as we do: We WANT to support you!
Ask a TRUSTED friend if they would like to be your sharing buddy. The two of us are sharing buddies, and it is a gift to support one another in this way. When one of us has something we need to express, we ask: Would this be a good time for you to witness something I am experiencing? If it is not a good time, we make arrangements to come together later – this is a must!
If you don’t have someone SAFE and you don’t have a relationship with a professional, your journal will witness you, which can make a huge difference in your life. Expressing your experience on paper, in art, and through story-writing can all be ways to ease the poison of buried emotion.
If we can support you in any way as you begin this practice yourself, please reach out!
Before we go…
We want to share some exciting news. On January 1, 2023, we will launch our new podcast, MORNING INTENTIONS. We have been working hard on this offering and look forward to having you all join us. Our intention is to build a community of support and learning. If you’d like more information, please visit this page.
Lots of love to you all,
Annette and Ada