Tolerating poor treatment no more
You are infinitely worthy of respect. Period.
dis·cern·ment
/dəˈsərnmənt/
noun
1. the ability to judge well.
(In Swedish: Urskiljningsförmåga)
Last Thursday I had a session with my friend and mentor Jennifer Love who said that the most important thing to embody in 2022 is healthy boundaries. “Boundaries” has been a buzzword for a long time, but the way she said it this time made my bones vibrate.
Then I got Bethany Webster’s new article for this month where she speaks about Discernment vs. Judging. In her article she writes:
“It’s still considered taboo for a woman to be discerning, selective, and strict about who gets access to her. This is a taboo that must be broken if we are to realize the vision of true self-love, self-respect, and self-actualization that we deserve and long for.”
I wrote about my need to be needed and how my codependency showed up in my relationships here. For much of my life, I thought it was my duty to over-function for others. I would sniff out any weak links in other peoples’ behaviors toward me and rush to fill in the gaps. Because of my empathetic nature and training to be there for my traumatized parents (who were doing their best!) at all costs, I would create relationships that seemed functional – but it was at the cost of MY time, MY energy, and MY resources. As my somatic therapist once said to me “Karna, you are like a sun that’s radiating out, but nothing is going IN.”
This pattern has been healing, especially last year as I devoted myself 100% to no longer accepting being treated poorly. This included things that I had tolerated for decades like being minimized, disrespected, constantly being available, giving free coaching at all hours of the day, being ridiculed, etc. Healing this pattern has changed the landscape of my relationships with clients, friends, family members, my husband, kids – no relationships have been untouched by this transformation.
And I finally feel like I can simply exist without having to perform, earn my worth or be pleasant and/or available at all times.
(I still treat people with kindness and respect and value those expressions of love highly. This is very important to me. But I’m also more clear and direct.)
One HUGE aspect of my healing has been the ability to DISCERN who I am, what I stand for, and what I tolerate and set BOUNDARIES in accordance with my own needs.
So, how do we practice more discernment?
Lucky for us humans, we have a built-in tool that tells us exactly when we are outside our “window of tolerance”.
It’s called YOUR BODY!
Your body WILL tell you when something in the external world that you need to pay attention to.
Unfortunately, there are a few aspects of life that can make your body’s cues very challenging to pick up on.
Here are a few examples:
You may have grown up in a dysfunctional environment that has trained you to equate poor treatment as something akin to air – it’s just there and you don’t even know it. This means that your comfort zone might not be the most trusted source of information about what’s best for you.
Our fast-paced culture that emphasizes and values doing over being can make you move very quickly so that you don’t even notice what’s happening in your body. I call this the “walking head syndrome”.
Societal, patriarchal norms might be telling you that you “should” perform caregiving because you’re female. So you might override your body’s signals to you without knowing it since it’s so expected you can’t even tell you’re in over your head. Classic “boiling frog effect”.
Overconsumption of stimulants may be interrupting your natural body cues.
The very good news is that there is a way out of your invisible prison and odds are you have already shed tons of false programming already.
Nope, we might not ever get to any finite destination other than, well, death (of the body) but we can certainly learn to become better stewards of ourselves over time. We CAN let love transform us into people who can hear ourselves, know our needs, and choose healthy, flexible yet fierce boundaries.
I know when I need to give my child food, a hug, a break, a distraction, a listening ear, a celebration, a song, a walk in nature, or a firm no. I’m learning that I need to give myself so much more space and so much more time and so much more attention to BE ABLE to be discerning for MYSELF. Again, the focus has been on external needs, not internal ones.
So I ask you, my fellow human on the path, is there a way that you might need to make space to hear yourself?
Some thoughts to reflect on:
Is there anything that’s been trying to get my attention lately? Any physical symptoms, feelings, gut nudges, or recurring thoughts?
What might *that thing I’m noticing* be trying to tell me?
Are there any adjustments I need to make in my life to honor myself more?
Is there someone in my life that isn’t truly treating me in a way that feels right? (Even though you love them, is there something about someone that’s been nagging you.)
How can I play a little or have more pleasure in my life? (Play and pleasure can soften the places where you have unknowingly been defended and show you what you do and don’t tolerate.)
I invite you to take a deep breath with me now, and hear this:
You are infinitely deserving to live a life where the people in your life treat you with kindness and respect.
You are valuable simply because you exist and there is nothing you need to do, prove or tolerate for anyone or anything.
Period.
I am saying this now because this is the message that’s finally emerged from inside my heart after thousands of hours of inner work to the hurting, exhausted, and abused parts of me that I have finally listened to and the message I got when I asked myself the questions above.
It’s nothing short of a miracle to go from being externally referenced and codependent to internally referenced and free. I’m not all the way there, but sometimes I am, and that is fucking incredible.
I’ll end today with another potent passage from Bethany Webster’s article.
“There comes a time when you can no longer allow yourself to be held hostage to crappy relationships when you know your worth. It takes a lot of work to get here. You can’t expect others who do NOT possess a consistent, strong drive to walk this path themselves, to understand you and you stop needing them to understand. You stop conflating your worth with their capacity to understand you.”
With love and care,
Karna
Below is an excerpt of a powerful piece for anyone who has experienced early childhood trauma and has lived a life outside of normative standards due to hypersensitivity to the world.
I see you and you are good and important as you are.
The Body is a Doorway by Sophie Strand
The body is a doorway. And for survivors of early trauma and abuse that doorway is always open. Wide open. Hypersensitivity (both cognitive and physical) has been tied to early trauma and sexual abuse time and time again. A 2019 study published in the journal of Rheumatology showed that in a sample of 67,000 women, those with the highest incidence of childhood abuse, were at a three-fold greater risk of developing lupus than those who had not experienced abuse. Survivors are also at an increased risk for developing serious autoimmune illness, chemical sensitivity, and allergy disorders. The correlations between early abuse and illness, disability, and neurodivergence are too many to list. The takeaway would seem to be that childhood experience of trauma registers not only emotionally, but physically.
This was something I understood intimately as a child. I seemed to notice more. More bugs. More smells. More texture. More noise. More micro expressions on adult’s faces. More birdsong. More temperature fluctuations. I knew something terrible had happened to me and that I was quite good at keeping it hidden. But I didn’t connect my radical hypersensitivity to the abuse. I just knew that, for better or for worse, I seemed to be highly attuned to my surroundings. Yes, I watched doors, constantly monitored adults around me, and scanned rooms for signs of danger. But I also was transfixed for hours by dirt spangled with mycelia, air scintillating with dust, slugs leaving behind starlight-slick stories on the porch. I could read the breathing patterns of our cats and dogs, keyed into the smallest fluctuations in their wellbeing. Blue was more blue. I could feel a cat’s purr in my belly. Frog song vibrated below my tongue. The blooming lilac was so bright a smell it almost made a sound. A song. Life was often agonizing. But, much to my confusion, it also seemed more available to me than it did to others. Why was this?
Sensory Gating is the neurological process whereby we filter out “redundant” stimuli from our sensual experience to create a homogenized reality. The experience, while necessary to function, has been tightened by patriarchy and civilization. Research at MIT, especially the work of Michael Halassa, has shown that we receive an outrageous amount of sensory data. Yet we manage to hear our name in a crowded room and spot a friend’s face in a sea of people. These stimuli don’t show up more “brightly”. They show up because we learn to “dampen” and gate out the sensory information we deem to be redundant. As a child we learn from our parents and our social environments what information is redundant. And as that sensory information gets classified as “non-goal oriented” we stop noticing it. Children see the world as magical not because they are naïve, but because they are actually more neurologically open to it. They haven’t been taught yet to “gate” out the aliveness of the more-than-human world. One strange aspect of abuse is that it opens those “gates” even wider, showing you that you are permeable. It also creates a need to remain “hypervigilant”. To shut down sensory stimuli would be to put yourself at risk. This is why so many survivors of childhood abuse experience a constant alertness to their surroundings.
Sophie Strand also has Substack that you can subscribe to here.
Wonderful article Karna. Gives a lot of food for thought and introspection. One question where do gaslighting come in here and how can we prevent people from gaslighting our self confidence and self esteem. I would love your thoughts on the same.