Performance

A theme often emerges in both therapy sessions and workshops: women who feel they aren’t performing to the level that they want and then feeling shame, overwhelm, and ultimately a sense of aloneness in their struggles. 

(This pervasive pattern is one of the many reasons I am passionate about the group experience available on a Rugged Renewal. It’s amazing how seeing others nod their heads as you explain your experience, or hearing a hard working and huge hearted woman berate herself with criticism can ignite a radical shift in your perspective on your own backpack of shame.)

While much of my work is in experientially tending the nervous system, I also find it helpful to address the “why.” Knowing why we do certain actions is not always enough to help us transform, but it is at least a beginning to undoing the shame that lays like a wet blanket, smothering our access to life-giving change. 

So WHY all of this focus on performance? 

Ask yourself how this drive to perform might be familiar. When did you first feel this? For so many it was in early childhood. Perhaps there was chaos at home, and you were the one who was known for being “easy,” keeping the peace, or you were the one who had to take care of younger siblings, or you were the one who had to learn to tend to the emotions of your parents because they weren’t capable of doing it for themselves, or maybe just to numb yourself to your own emotions because no one was capable of tolerating the discomfort of a young child being unhappy. 

Our child selves had to create ways in which to self-soothe, and often that can come in the form of an overly protective part of ourselves, a part that doesn’t allow the vulnerability of sadness, hurt, or needing help. 

Add to this the context of socialization. What does it mean to be a woman? How was that modeled to you by your mother, grandmother, sisters, school teachers, media. How did you hear or see men value women? What implicit story came through into your childlike understanding of the world? Seeing women tend, take care of others first, be expected to smile, valued for appearance over other traits, all while striving to gain cultural power, which means taking on traits that are perceived as better- to be more like the socialized masculine and compete for opportunities. 

Where does this leave you? As a woman with the wiring that to be “ok”, to avoid the feelings that we never learned were actually safe to have, we must strive, perform, smile, put others first, and numb ourselves to the daily hustle with wine and screens. 

What does your body say as you read these words? 

What if it was possible to allow a bit of the sadness in, the grief, the fatigue, even the frustration and anger, because by feeling these emotions we learn not only that we are capable of them, but that they ultimately metabolize and transform into an exhale, a release, and then, without rushing the digestive process, into a new possibility. 

If this feels too foreign, too unlikely, or perhaps you are confused by a visceral withdrawal from that last paragraph, I invite you to reach out for an individual session, or better yet, to consider joining an entire group of women as we play and adventure in the natural world together, and allow ourselves to be renewed. I would also love to hear your thoughts, reactions, and reflections on this concept.