The Missing Link

A boundary can't protect a need you don't believe is allowed to exist. When you've grown up conditioned to make your needs small, setting boundaries is likely to just make you feel more shame and believe something is wrong with you -- because you never actually enforce those boundaries. There's a missing link there, and that missing link is your inner authourity -- the belief that you have a right to take up space and that you are the expert in your lived experience and you don't need anyone to validate you and you don't need to supply "proof" to be credible.

You hold beliefs that support has to look a certain way, because you've internalised the toxic culture you've grown up in. This is a culture built upon the Prove-it Reflex: prove you need support (by pathologising yourself and your damage); prove your pain by submitting yourself to violent cross-examination; and prove your worth as a human by producing things to make money.

The Child Who Felt Everything

There is a demographic of people that I have noticed, that don't quite fit in when it comes to the mental health paradigm. They tend to get slapped with "general anxiety disorder" as their diagnosis, but I have noticed something different. As someone who offers both coaching and therapy and comes from a decolonial and spiritual background, I see that this person is very sensitive. She picks up on unsaid and unseen realities. She picks up on the energetic and emotional realities that shape the material world. I've noticed this most in women and especially trans and non-binary people. It's not trauma in the way our mental health paradigm thinks about trauma, but yet, at the same time it kind of is. It is both and neither at the same time.

The experience often looks like this: the child who feels deeply and has big emotions. She's always been hyper-aware to shifts in emotional energy, and she had parents who cared and reassured her: "It's fine, everything is okay. You are safe." They did everything "right," by the books. You weren't neglected in any way you can prove, and that is exactly the problem. We have a culture built on domination and control, and that gets internalised in different ways -- one of them being people don't often think about intuition, spirit, and emotion. Many parents (if not most) are concerned about survival, and in a material-driven world, that focus goes on supporting their children to make money. As a child you felt the emotion underneath the words -- the unexpressed anxiety or fear -- and with underdeveloped cognitive faculties you interpreted that mismatch in realities as danger. You needed more than material reassurance -- you need co-regulation and a guide through processing your emotions. Someone to let you know that you were absorbing others' emotions, and to show you different practises to shield yourself and discern your emotions from those around you. You may have grown up with supportive parents, and also, those parents may have neglected your spiritual and emotional needs. Both can be true.

When the System Gets It Wrong

Over time you accept the inevitable diagnosis of anxiety and blame yourself for your differences. You tell yourself you just need to push through, you aren't enough, and you shouldn't have different needs from anyone else because your pain isn't bad enough. You go by the material evidence as your proof -- you can push through and perform, get it done, so you should be able to keep doing it. The fact that it takes you twice as much effort and you have predictable cycles of collapse doesn't count as proof. In a culture that mistrusts feeling and intuition you learned to distrust the very sensory system that helped you survive; and yet the sensory system was never the problem.

Chronic Misattunement

This is the experience of chronic misattunement, and it's hard to put your finger on because the experience doesn't fit any of the Western frameworks where your ability to work has to be significantly impaired for your experience to count. From what I have observed, there is the cultural component to this -- in the USA we have standardised the human experience, which means that people expected the human experience to look a certain way. So parents operate from assumptions of care that meet this idea of the "average" or "norm." What this does is exclude a vast amount of people with different neurotypes and nervous systems whose care needs are different. Therein the mismatch is born, when caregivers give their children the care they think they need, and their children actually require different care. What can make it hard (at first) to work through in the therapeutic space is that (in the people i've worked with) the parents were very supportive in other ways and certain emotional ways, but not the specific emotional ways that you needed, because of your neurotype or nervous system. This is where we do the work of sitting with multiple truths and developing cognitive flexibility -- through sitting with the emotions and energetic truths. The people I work with tend to be extremely sensitive, especially energetically, and so the misattunement was felt so deeply as a child and then internalised as self-blame. There is so much grief to process in the journey.

As you move through the grief, what shifts is not the past but your relationship to your own perception of it. You start to trust what you felt then, which changes everything about what you believe now. Maybe you were put in this world to show how oppressive and wrong this socially-constructed world is. There are so many different ways people can choose to live, and the current set up in Western countries works against the human condition and nature itself. Your existence proves the necessity of slowing down, resting, communing, and cyclical activity. You're here for harmony, balance, and reciprocity -- not control and dominance. The key here is discernment. Not every feeling is intuition and not every fact is what it seems.

Discernment as the Third Path

Your body carries intelligence, and discernment is the skill that makes it usable. Discernment is the third path, and it looks like staying present and connected with the feeling and listening long enough to understand what the signal is asking for. Discernment is the balance of head and heart. As Audre Lorde said:

When we view living in the European mode only as a problem to be solved, we rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious. But as we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-European consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes.

This is the lineage of Inner Authourity: learning to respect feeling not as irrational noise, but as one of the hidden sources of knowledge that helps us act. Somewhere in you, you already know this. You know that your intensity, your ability to feel deeply, and your sensitivity is a form of knowing and the intelligence of your body.

Boundaries as Life Force

You see, enforcing a boundary serves such a greater purpose than protecting you. It's not selfish or taking up space -- boundaries are about honouring your life force and protecting your purpose for this lifetime. They are one of your greatest tools for building a new, collaborative, generative, equitable world. You cannot be of service to others if you do not honour your boundaries. The boundaries still exist, even if you don't enforce them, and when you stay quiet about enforcing your boundary and let people do whatever-- you build a self-avoidant and self-abandoning relationship, you build resentment in the relationship, and you give a false presentation of who you are that actually has long-term and damaging consequences. Believing that your needs matter and that you deserve to take up space, is the first step in being able to actually enforce boundaries. All the boundary scripts in the world won't help you if you don't believe you deserve to receive support and care, and changing beliefs always starts at the root: the emotions that the beliefs sprouted from. We get to know your emotions, the thoughts that grew from them as seedlings, that then shot up into full grown beliefs, and we integrate and validate those emotions and then the belief that your needs don't count starts to lose its grip.

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