A lava lamp bubbles in the corner of a tapestry covered room. The air is thick with smoke as I sit nestled between the band members. That was back when smoking was still considered cool.
We had just come back from watching the Ithaca-based band, Plastic Nebraska, play their latest gig. I felt so cool hanging with talented musicians and their friends who were all working on degrees in art and literature.
But, impostor syndrome was my trusty side-kick in those days.
“You have nothing to say. Nothing interesting to add to the conversation.” I was always internally uncomfortable as I listened to each of the hip twenty-somethings tell story after story that left the room enthralled in conversation and laughter.
Then, the moment I had been dreading came, and the attention turned to me, the silent side-kick to my extroverted and naturally interesting cousin Molly, who was dating the drummer.
“What about you, Carly? Tell us a story!” I was 16 years old and felt like I wanted to crawl out of my own skin.
I had stories, but nothing felt worthy of this crowd. After all, I grew up in a small town on a farm with three brothers and some animals.
I froze.
The stress response started to kick in… “No No No!” I thought to myself, “Not here, not now!”
My face got bright red, and I started to sweat; my throat started to close up, my thoughts swirled, and I searched for the perfect thing to say.
All I wanted was to be a part of this group and to feel like I fit in. But, I did not like having the attention on me — the silent impostor, spotted! I searched for the quickest way to get everyone’s eyes off of me and recall sharing something about saving our goat from the swimming pool, which when I think back on it, was actually a pretty good story!
It did the trick. It got a few laughs, and more importantly, it was enough to move the room’s attention on to something and someone else.
Then, the post-freeze response mind chatter took over my brain for the rest of the night.
“You will never be cool or interesting. Everything you have to say is boring. Why can’t you be more like Molly and just relax?”
Why am I telling you this?
Healing the chronic freeze stress response pattern has been a deep and profound internal journey for me in allowing myself to be seen. I’m sharing it for those of you who might relate, in hopes that you too will begin to heal the part of yourself that feels like you need to protect yourself from being seen.
I also want to acknowledge that others have endured the pain of physical injury or illness, traumatic loss and/or experiences that I have not, and it is not lost on me the privilege I hold in sharing an experience that was not, in fact, life threatening.
The fascinating thing is our body does not know the difference. Our physiology is still operating with internal programming of the flight, fight, freeze life-saving responses from the days when we literally had to fear for our lives on a daily basis with predators lurking in the bushes searching for their next meal.
For twelve years in my massage practice, I saw all kinds of physical manifestations of the chronic stress response. From digestive problems to back pain to medically induced trauma to what the medical world calls idiopathic illness, which is usually related to the body stuck in a chronic stress response.
Massage therapy was the gift I discovered I had that helped people feel relief from these physical and emotional discomforts, and I didn’t have to speak for most of the session! I scored the perfect career!
But a few years into my career, I realized my clients were not getting better. Massage was just a temporary band-aid for what was really happening internally.
It led me to question what was required for real healing to take place, and it ultimately led me to BodyMind coaching. Through conscious conversation, focused attention, and action, my clients actually started to heal.
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I found that the body heals best when there are five conditions present.
- Attention: Awareness and attention so that you notice when the stress response is occurring so that you can consciously make a different choice
- Safety: Choosing to put yourself in a safe environment so that your body feels safe enough to let down your guard so the stress chemicals can turn off and the body’s natural healing process can begin.
- Healing: Giving yourself what you need to heal. This could be something physical like rest or emotional like self-compassion
- Repetition: Allow a new habit to form through repetition, replacing the chronic stress response with your new healing habit.
- Time: It takes time to rewire our nervous system. When you consciously choose the steps above, over time your new neural pathway will become the default process.
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Essentially you are creating a new environment that allows you to rewire the default stress response in your body so that your new go-to response is not firing off stress chemicals that, when chronically showing up in your system, can cause damage and illness.
So what does this have to do with my story about being a quiet teenager hanging out with people much older and cooler than I was? (Yes, I was under-age hanging out in bars. That is a story for another time!) Because, when I share about what it feels like to have a fear of being seen and the fiery internal process happening on the inside, I’ve found many people can relate and feel the same way.
When I started receiving BodyMind coaching, I was able to rewire the fear of being seen and it has been a profoundly healing internal process for that little girl who felt like she was boring, uninteresting, and would never have anything important to say let alone make a big positive impact in the world.
In hindsight, it’s only been a handful of years, and I now lead group coaching programs, actually enjoy doing live interviews, and even teach live in front of a room full of people at the BodyMind coaching retreats!
I won’t pretend that the internal flutter is completely gone when I’m about to have all eyes on me. I still get a little sweaty and red in the face when it’s my turn to speak. However, it is no longer the paralyzing agony of stress chemicals pumping through my system, my voice shaking and making my heart feel like it is going to beat out of my chest.
The process of moving through the discomfort of being seen and valuing myself enough to believe that I have something to say and add to the conversation has been a beautiful internal healing process for me.
Each time I show up and speak up, I heal a little more. I keep going even though sometimes I still get a zing of fear through my entire system that feels kind of like an electrical shock. And I know it’s temporary and I won’t actually die!
This has cultivated a deep trust that allows me to dance without the fear of being seen instead of letting it prevent me from showing up, speaking up and doing the work I know I’m meant to do.
Even if I falter, I will be there for myself.
And that has been the most profound healing journey so far in my entire life.
I wonder what the world might look like if all of those heart-centered people who have a huge desire to make an impact in the world actually allowed themselves to be seen and heard?
Who would heal and what ripple effect would that have on society?
These are the questions I ask myself daily and my motivation for helping the quiet souls of the world move through their own healing journey so that they can finally be seen and make the impact they know they are here to make!
