Do You Trust Yourself To Rise?

Tattooed woman sitting with head in hands, reflecting inner turmoil and the fear of rising alone.

Ever wonder why your life feels overmixed, underbaked, or stuck in someone else’s flavor?
You might be borrowing too many ingredients.
Do you trust yourself to rise?

This is what happened: I was stewing on a pattern that I’d noticed with a client:

She keeps talking about her frustrations in a particular area. More specifically, she keeps talking about how she is perpetually disappointed and her resentment and anger toward the people in her life. She keeps talking about how they aren’t doing this or that, which has left her feeling like she is holding the bag. She feels like she is always getting less than what she is giving.

Then, I saw how she’d heard my words, but hadn’t caught my point: she is mad about all the disappointment she is carrying when the issue is that she’s not certain about what matters to her! She keeps making herself available for disappointment because she doesn’t respect her own boundaries. She is afraid of what it means to insist on honoring them. She worries that being clear about her boundaries will translate into being alone. All the while, she’s failing to realize that she’s already alone…IN HER MIND AND IN HER HEART. She’s trapped by silence and fear. She can’t even articulate what she wants; therefore, she stews in constant anger and resentment.

She doesn’t trust herself to rise.

So, I framed the issue in a different way: “What good does it do to keep people in your life and spend the majority of your time talking about where they come up short? Why not be clear about what matters to you so that you can place them where they belong in your life – so that they can choose to stay in your life, change lanes in your life, or leave your life?” Making these types of shifts isn’t about “getting somebody told”. Rather, it’s about integrity and personal honesty. Wouldn’t you be hurt or otherwise disappointed if you knew that one of your friends or someone with whom you spent a lot of time not only felt unseen or unheard, but unfulfilled and afraid to speak up? Wouldn’t you wonder, “Am I that bad?”

Here’s what I know:

This client is normal! Like so many people, she’s afraid of truly exploring herself! She’s worried that she might learn that she isn’t happy with just herself. She has anxiety about ditching (cutting off people) or pausing (stepping back for clarity) her external life while working through her internal life – she doesn’t want confirmation that she isn’t happy with just herself. She’s never had the chance or motivation to live by her own values. She’s always been surrounded by others and has always folded them into the batter of her life. Her life has always been a shared recipe—her values diluted, her voice moderated, her self measured by others’ tastes. So when it comes time to bake with only what’s inside her pantry, she’s terrified the cake won’t rise.

Here’s what I also know: she’ll never know if her recipe is a good one or if her baking powder needed to be replaced or if she likes chewy cookies or crunchy ones if she won’t even try to the base recipe. She might worry that it’s a waste to use ingredients for a recipe that she thinks is going to turn out poorly. I would argue that continuously searching for ingredients that she isn’t sure she needs is the greater waste.