Walk With Me is an ongoing video series where I invite you to join me while I take some time to check in with myself. It’s all spontaneous, just like Somatic Experiencing — I like to slow down and see where my mind and body take me. I hope you enjoy watching the video or reading the transcript below, and thanks for spending a moment of your day with me.
Hello, it’s me again. So I am out here in the woods again. If you can’t tell from behind me, I’m gonna turn this around before I start walking, because it’s a very pretty image of one of the local little covered bridges from just on the trail. Thought you’d like to see it that way. So let’s come back around, and we’ll walk.
So I was kind of pondering what to talk about today in this beautiful, beautiful fall day. It’s definitely fall. There’s little bursts of wind occasionally, or breeze anyway, and the leaves fall, and I’m enchanted while I’ve been walking, so I’ll probably have to pause and let you all see the leaves coming down when they do.
Where I was walking was quite a bit brighter than here. And I think, actually, technically, this is better for videoing to have it be a little bit more uniform and shady. Otherwise, it’s too bright and you can’t actually see the pretty colors.
I mean, look at this. Look like splashes of orange up there and just the pretty, pretty light through the pines onto the pine needles below. Anywho, I’m a little bit just enjoying the heck out of my walk today.
So I was thinking about trends and an overall trend that I’ve had in clients and myself, because these things are just…I mean, we all are working with the same stuff, even if it means different places for each of us. I’m gonna show a little bit to the right here.
We want to be seen. Or rather, we want to want to be seen. I work mostly with women. I work with some men, and I love working with men as well. But I work mostly with humans socialized or raised as female. And for those of us who were raised in that way, it’s really hard to ask for attention. It is hard to be seen.
We…it’s not even that we believe, we know at the core of our being that we will be judged and found wanting, and we will be judged for even wanting to be seen and taking up space and asking for attention.
The horrible thing is that we’re socialized so strongly this way that we actually do feel that way when we notice another person, usually another person raised as female, we end up thinking to ourselves–just knee jerk reaction, unless we’ve worked really hard–the knee jerk reaction is, who does she think she is?
Like, who does she think she is, to be putting herself out there like that? Who does she think she is, to be talking herself up or putting her work or her art or herself into this world or, you know. And often it comes from an even deeper place.
It comes from more than just socialized, it comes, you know… my work is trauma. And so it comes from this place in our families of origin, wherever that may be, somewhere along the way, we were patterned to understand on a very deep level that we were less important than. Our needs, our desires, our beings are less important than “fill in the blank.”
Could be men, right? Like, that’s the easy one. Or creatures socialized as males. But it’s more than that. It could be the job. It could be… Looking at pine needles and leaves falling. Yes, things are more important, like being in the present moment. I like being in the present moment.
Besides, thinking about all those ways that we are socialized and traumatized, they’re just not as fun. It’s too easy to go down a rabbit hole and feel awful instead. I mean, seriously, who wouldn’t want to look at orange and yellow and green altogether? They’re, like, my favorite colors.
So I work with a lot of humans who are– and this isn’t exclusively for those socialized as female. I have worked with humans socialized as male who are still trying to figure out how to show up in the world and ask for what they need, ask for what they want, figure out what it is that they want and ask for it.
And then this is the important part: deal with the backlash. Sometimes it’s from external– sometimes there’s an external backlash when we are asking for what we want or need, or putting ourselves out there for business reasons.
But my experience, personally and professionally, is that the backlash, the immediate backlash, is personal. We, our gremlins, our socialization, our training comes down and slams down on us. Just tells us how awful we are to have done that thing. Like, “how could you? You should take it down right now.”
You know, the “feeling cute, might delete later.” Like, is that not just the epitome of, “hey, I’m happy. I want to show that I’m happy, and I have some sort of ability to understand that I don’t look ugly. And understanding that there will be a backlash, I will want to take it all back because it’s terrifying.”
And so what I end up working with, like, we all have the modalities that work best for us. What I end up working with for myself and my clients is feeling into it and feeling how hard it is, what happens when we put ourselves out there.
And, you know, I personally was just working on this and I just kept running into anger. My body is holding so much anger from being told, either explicitly or implicitly, that I shouldn’t take up the space that I do.
And so what I was working with was that I was just imagining that I was putting myself out there for something that I really want to do. And this is like a real world thing, but I have such a deep pattern that I was just imagining putting myself out there for this thing.
Knowing to my bones–whether this is correct or not, right–but knowing that there will be other people who want to do this thing and just feeling like there’s no way.
And even though I believe that I would be great at whatever this thing is, like, just immediately, my immediate physical reaction is to hunch my shoulders up instead of down and forward, cast my eyes down, duck my head.
And the more that I paid attention to these sensations, these feelings, the more I realized that it was really different than just actual submission. It was faked.
Look at that. Ah, trees. This, ladies and gentlemen, is how one gets through a really hard conversation like this, by doing it and taking pauses every now and then, because I don’t want to relive that all at once. Yeah.
So I realized that I was full on faking submission, and instead I was angry and wanted to fucking fight about it. And like, even just now, as I said that, I made a fist with the hand, not carrying my camera, because when I, like…
So there’s this, you know, there’s all kinds of statistics on blah, blah, blah, women, people socialized as women, will only put themselves forward for something if they are completely qualified. And folks socialized as men will often just put themselves up, figuring that they’ll do the job fine.
And so I’m like bringing that in as I’m thinking about: dude, I am not going to put myself forward unless I am sure that I can do this and that I can do a great job at it, whatever it is. And that means the groups that I run, that means the one on one individual work that I do.
It means, you know, any workshops that I might do in the future, it means podcasts that I put myself up for. It doesn’t matter. I am not going to put myself out unless I A) really want to do it and B) know that I can do it in a really amazing way.
And then this is a double bind, right? To be shot down and to have somebody tell me no hits me really hard, right? It hits me so hard that I tell myself no before I can even put myself out there.
And no can be a snide comment on Facebook. No can be like, an actual no. No can be, “oh, I don’t have time right now. Can you check back with me?” That comes off as a no.
Like, there’s a lot of stuff that’s really hard and understanding, somehow–and I’m a little ways down the road on this, actually–but coming around to understanding that no doesn’t reflect on me as a human, but instead really reflects only on the person saying no in whatever way they’re saying. And also that– oh, pretty red.
Where was I going? The red distracted me. I’ll take red any day. Look at that. Let’s see if the sun is right on it. Hopefully it shows the depth of that. That’s so pretty. Let’s see. I was talking about what no means.
Oh, yeah. I grew up with an author for a mother. And rejections are part of life, part of this world. And somehow those socialized as female are– we believe that a rejection is about us instead of about whatever it is that we were asking.
And it doesn’t mean that we were wrong. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have the credentials. It doesn’t mean that we don’t get to want that whatever it is. Right? If we’re asking for attention, if we’re asking for money, if we’re asking for an opportunity, for asking for help, it doesn’t mean we don’t need those.
It doesn’t mean we don’t want them. It just means that whoever we’re interacting with isn’t available for that. But the way we’ve been socialized, the way we’ve been trained, the way we’ve been traumatized, often teaches us the exact opposite. And every no leads to shame.
And I am here to tell you, you have nothing to be ashamed of. I mean, you might. Who knows? But mostly for the vast majority of us, we’re just doing what we can. And you get to need things, you get to want things, you get to ask for things, and you may or may not get them, but you get to do that.
Enjoy your day. I hope it’s beautiful. And if it’s not, I hope you enjoyed this walk.
Thanks for stopping by! If you enjoyed this post, you can get on my mailing list and learn more about working with me, or you can subscribe to my YouTube channel to get notified about new videos.