Owning Our Experiences Is Our Birthright
By Dr. Hillary McBride
Shared With Permission
Before you ever learned otherwise, before you were ever shown it would jeopardize your safety, you knew how to feel and share your feelings, ask for help and reach towards others, and communicate ‘no’ when something didn’t feel good.
Feeling, connection, and the ability to say no (even if just through body language) are biologically wired-in processes, living in our bodies from the get-go. So is our ability to stay safe through connection and relationship.
Because connection is so important to our survival and development as we are growing up, our nervous systems will always prioritize connection over naming what we feel, think, or telling the truth could threaten our safety relationally.
What this means for us as adults:
If we find it hard to do this, and don’t ever remember being able to do so, we likely learned early how to disavow our experience in order to preserve connection.
Feeling feelings, trusting the body. Knowing how to share that experience with others, , asking for help, or saying ‘no’ is our birthright-- wired in from the beginning, and is not something we have to learn how to do. Rather, we need to unlearn the conditions or belonging that caused us to contract to stay safe.
No matter how long these things have felt far away from you, how unfamiliar they are now, or how young you were when you learned to tuck them away for safekeeping, they are there, hidden under the contractions and defenses you learned you had to employ to stay safe, belong, be loved, and they will still be there, inside you, waiting for the right moments to surface.
We don’t have to learn how to do these things, we only have to unlearn the ways we protected ourselves.
Dr. Hillary McBride is a registered psychologist, a researcher, author and podcaster, with expertise that includes working with trauma and trauma therapies, embodiment, and the intersection of spirituality and mental health.
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