About Authenticity
When we are close to our true self, things that resonate with us and make us alive, we are aligned with our authentic self. Therefore, I would like to help people get closer to their hearts, to trust it, to be able to recognize and honor it, and then have the courage to follow it while embracing their fears and the pain along the way. This is not an easy job, but what it entails is being able to listen to our emotions and let those emotions guide us because our emotions hold crucial information about our authentic self. Once we are in touch with the guidance of our feelings we get to pursue a life that is meant for us, and us only. As Brene Brown beautifully says:
“Don’t ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive”.
what blocks us from authenticity?
However, there is something that blocks us from reaching this state of closeness to our heart, our core emotions, and our authentic self, and that is our childhood experiences of being suppressed, abused and neglected in our emotional states. Therefore, in order to get there we first need to heal the past traumas. I approach trauma healing through a lens of a modality called AEDP that is a neuroscientifically based attachment oriented modality.
what is aedp?
AEDP is a healing oriented, mind/body experiential therapy and transformation-based model that puts positive neuroplasticity into action. It grounds itself on the belief that human’s innate healing capacity, not psychopathology, is first and foremost in the understanding of human nature and leads the psychotherapeutic Work. AEDP seeks to harness the forces of transformance and facilitate authenticity and core state.
What are Core Emotions?
Core Emotions are a compass for life. They ensure the best action tendencies and courses of action that guarantees survival and well being. For the same reason recognizing and trusting our emotions are important in response to different life circumstances and decision points. Accessing emotions that serve an evolutionary purpose are sometimes blocked and inaccessible to us.
Due to early life learning, many of us develop a rather hostile and fearful relationship towards our feelings; fearing to feel sad, angry, ashamed, and joyful. Such suppression of feelings, makes us lose our compass and the gift of having our feelings tell us what is good and true to us. Furthermore, it disrupts our ability to express and share our needs and wants and show up to ourselves to others and our partners with our authentic and vulnerable state of being and feeling ( attachment). In feeling discomfort in showing up as ourselves we lose the opportunity for deeper connections and living authentically and truthfully.
Therefore, our job becomes to remove the blocks that disable our ability to safely and open heartedly access our emotions and their great purpose.
These blocks or old patterns of programming are influenced by our upbringing and attachment experiences with our caregivers and significant others. Only through healing attachment trauma we are able to reach a state of liberation that allows us to experience a life that is uniquely true to us, and that which is called authentic.
Through undoing of aloneness with difficult laden emotions, and through the in-depth processing of difficult emotional and relational experiences, I help to foster new transformational experiences which emerge through healing and open a path to trust (self and other) and expressing of their authentic feelings and their core self, a state that allow with them resources, resilience and a renewed zest for life.
How does it feel to be in your authentic state?
Authenticity refers to knowing, recognizing and compassionately accepting your affective experience. All emotions are natural, and perform as a compass to what we need to attend to at the time. In fact, core emotions are really a bunch of physical sensations that prepare our body for survival actions, which we feel as impulse like fighting or fleeing. Emotional health also entails being able to tolerate the physical sensations emotions naturally evoke. As an example, anger might be a sign of your need for assertiveness and advocating for your needs that were violated or ignored by you or others.
Once we recognize, listen and allow for these feelings to flow in our body we can determine the best authentic and surviving courses of actions. What entails as a result of feeling and processing feelings is a deep sense of relief, calm, and confidence in our body and mind that defines what we mean by authenticity and authentic living.
Once you achieve a sense of integrity with your authentic self you notice qualities of calm, compassion, confidence, clarity, courage, curiosity and connectedness. This ‘open hearted state’ is our birthright.
What blocks authentic living?
What makes most people afraid to follow their true self is fear of affect and one’s belief that they would not survive the pain of feelings. The fears are not out of context, they are the by-product of one’s family of origin inability to accept and regulate our child self feelings, or our attachment history (internal working models).
In fact, what we call psychopathology and what brings people to therapy can be understood as that which results from the individual’s unwilled and unwanted aloneness in the face of overwhelming emotional experiences (Diana Fosha).
When these emotions do not get room to breath and be recognized by our caregivers, we ought to suppress them to maintain the evolutionary goal of staying close to our primary caregivers, as we depend on them. In other instances emotional responses to trauma including abusive and neglectful behaviour experienced in the past get to be buried as the person experiencing the worries to be overwhelmed by feeling or expressing them. These are unconscious coping strategies that though no one’s fault is one’s best way to cope with these alone, overwhelming historical emotional experiences. The outcome is alienation from self, and a sense of dread that accompanies feeling our feelings when they pop up in our relationships, in our day to day life.
We as humans, employ protective and coping strategies to defend against feeling the feelings of sadness, anger, fear, disgust and joy, as they alarms a sense of thread. The thread however may not be related to the actual present experience. The threats and fear is the association we make with feeling the feelings and the rejection that followed as a result of our childhood relational experiences with our caregivers and others. In fact that means we are living on our past programming in the present moment while it may be completely irrelevant to the here and now.
Though old wiring, our brains do not differentiate the past from the present, and that’s how we feel stuck. We are still carrying the fear we experienced many years ago while the object of the fear and its stimulus is no longer there. We are however trapped and triggered.
How can I help to cultivate authentic living?
Facilitated through our relationship with my stance as an actively engaged, emotionally attuned, empathic, affirming therapist, you are guided to process emotions deemed too overwhelming to face. This opens space for allowing your true emotional experience. My approach in therapy rests on a deep faith In clients' innate capacities, hard-wired and always recoverable, to self-right and heal into their authentic True Self; though the authentic self is not always available to us, due to our defences that cover our deepest injuries and the deepest levels of wounding. However in feeling the presence of a trusted and grounded person the defences against feelings dissolve, and the the deep feelings that are then free to emerge. With my active help, we keep on working on developing your trust, courage and your curiosity to look inside your soul and find out what is your deepest yearning at that particular stage of your life.
These feelings are ones that have almost always been too difficult, frightening, or painful for you to experience alone, and those that connect to your core authentic being. Though painful, being met in the feelings is healing. When the full wave of emotion flows through, we feel more courage, lighter and more connected to what we identify as true inside. This process allows for you to easily connect to your feelings outside the session and pursue a life based on the true state of your feelings and their needs.
Therefore, our job is to unlearn the conditional ways we learned to adapt to survive in the world in order to go back to our original core self who holds these qualities. I feel like my purpose on this planet is to help you achieve that, because it is only in this state that we get to taste the real meaning of life and take advantage of our presence on the planet earth. As Paulo Coelho once said,