Practices of Relational Intelligence within Yourself
Self-Awareness, Self-Acceptance, Inner Secure Base
The curious paradox is, when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
— CARL ROGERS
Self-awareness, self-acceptance, and trust in your inner capacities are essential to resilience. These capacities create a home base, a secure sense of self from which you can respond flexibly to all of life’s difficulties. When you turn your focus inward, you feel safe, at home, and at peace, trusting your capacities to engage skillfully and competently with the outer world. When you face a challenging situation, even when you have no clue of how to best respond to it, this inner secure base of resilience allows you to move forward and risk trying something new.
The neural circuitry for this inner secure base initially develops, as all capacities in the brain do, through your earliest interactions with your caregivers. It can be modified and rewired later with the help of encouraging and supportive others.
The roots of resilience are to be found in the felt sense of being held in the mind and heart of an empathic, attuned, self-possessed other.
— DIANA FOSHA, The Transforming Power of Affect
Just as we first learn to regulate our nervous system through others regulating it for us — just as we learn to manage our emotions by having those emotions validated for us by others, soothed if negative and amplified if positive — we develop a healthy sense of self when we experience being truly accepted, valued, seen, heard, and understood by people around us for who we truly are. Acceptance by people on whom we depend and from whom we learn our essential sense of self-worth enables us to trust that we matter and that we are competent.
We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us there is something valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
— ATTRIBUTED TO E. E. CUMMINGS
Our earliest experiences of feeling seen, accepted, and trusted not only shape a healthy sense of self and its inner secure base; they also kindle and strengthen the maturation of the prefrontal cortex, which in turn sustains that development. The central challenge of parenting is to help children develop an inner secure base by accepting them as they are; the central challenge of maturing into our resilience is to discover and rediscover that inner secure base and become who we are meant to be.
The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt.
— MAX LERNER, The Unfinished Country
That larger, authentic experience of self is actually an integration of many inner parts, voices, or facets. An inner warrior, inner flirt, inner pleaser, and inner critic, for example, are subpersonalities that coexist, interact, and work together to form your personal self. Just as you have learned to value and manage all emotions as signals of something important to pay attention to, you can choose to value, integrate, and even embrace all inner parts of yourself as contributing to who you are — including those parts with the bad habit of disrupting your resilience. It’s the prefrontal cortex that integrates these various parts of the self, fostering an authentic sense of wholeness and allowing you to experience your integrated self as more and more capable, flexible, and resilient.
This chapter presents tools to help you strengthen your self-awareness, self-acceptance, and trust in the capacities and strengths of your inner secure base, as well as to help you work skillfully with your inner critic or inner judge, who is the biggest disrupter of your inner secure base. You’ll learn how to integrate all inner parts into the magnificent complexity that is your authentic self.
A BRIEF ASIDE ON SHAME AND THE INNER CRITIC
Strengthening self-acceptance and trust in yourself as resilient, turning momentary experiences into reliably steady states and then into long-term permanent traits, can be a daily practice. Learning to hum along in your range of resilience, and to recover when you’re thrown about by choppy seas or full-scale hurricanes, is literally a lifelong practice. You practice, little and often, forever. You hope to eventually preempt being thrown.
Challenges to your sense of self-acceptance and self-trust can come at any moment. You might hear negative messages about yourself from others, whether they know you well or not at all. You may carry very powerful negative messages about yourself that come from early or recent experiences. You are vulnerable to messages from your inner critic or inner judge because, as human beings, we are universally vulnerable to the powerful, conditioned messages of shame.
Shame is one of the emotions intrinsic to being human — like anger, fear, sadness, surprise, and delight. We are hardwired to want to feel safe, to feel loved and lovable, to belong, to feel accepted and valued. These feelings are not about ego; they’re part of being a social animal. We depend on the love and affection of others to experience love and affection for ourselves. We need to feel we belong, to feel comfortable with our place in the tribe and in the world. When we feel rejected or excluded by others — when we’re blown off by a friend, passed over for a promotion at work, criticized in front of coworkers, or ridiculed at a family gathering, we are hardwired to feel shame.
Experiencing shame occasionally is inevitable. All tribes, clans, cultures, and societies have to teach their young the norms of acceptable (and lifesaving) behaviors and how to stay deserving of the group’s protection, if not love. Shame arises when we pick up signals from people around us, especially people we depend on for our survival, that we have done something they don’t approve of, or that we are something they don’t approve of.
It’s impossible to be perfect and meet other people’s expectations or plans for us all the time, and it’s impossible not to feel shame when we feel we have done, or we are, something wrong or bad. That sense of being wrong or bad is easily internalized: we begin to hear others’ negative messages as our own; we begin to listen to and believe the voice of our own inner critic. Every human being on the planet is vulnerable to the harsh messages that can come from a well-practiced inner critic or inner judge.
The derailing of resilience that results from shame is what most of my clients come into therapy for, what my workshop participants are most curious about, and what draws the most responses to my blog posts about recovering resilience.
Shame has been called the great disconnector; the inner critic is its relentless messenger. You can begin to counteract the effects of both shame and the inner critic by practicing self-awareness, self-compassion, self-acceptance, self-appreciation, and self-love.
Just that action of paying attention to ourselves, [knowing] that I care enough about myself, that I am worthy enough to pay attention to, starts to unlock some of those deep beliefs of unworthiness at a deeper level in the brain.
— ELISHA GOLDSTEIN
New Conditioning
Learning to integrate all the diverse components of yourself, including the sometimes corrosive inner critic, involves directing your own neuroplasticity to develop a healthy new relationship with yourself, based on deepening self-awareness and self-acceptance. You harness the integrative capacities of your prefrontal cortex to form all these inner voices and parts into a coherent and resilient inner secure base that supports further reconditioning and rewiring.
Level 1. Barely a Wobble
If you feel you know your strengths pretty well and generally accept yourself lovingly and courageously, these exercises can deepen your trust that you are capable and resilient. You begin by identifying core strengths and core values you already have, or aspire to have, in order to strengthen the inner secure base and begin rewiring your relationship to other parts of you that are less easy to accept.
EXERCISE 4-1: Identifying Personal Traits of Resilience
1. From this list, identify five traits you know and trust you already have, or list other traits of your own.
accountability
approachability
calm
cheerfulness
clarity
commitment
compassion
composure
confidence
connectedness
cooperation
courage
courtesy
creativity
curiosity
dependability
determination
discernment
discipline
enthusiasm
equanimity
fairness
flexibility
focus
forgiveness
friendliness
frugality
generosity
gratitude
happiness
honesty
humility
idealism
imagination
industriousness
joyfulness
kindness
knowledge
love
loyalty
magnanimity
mercy
modesty
open-mindedness
optimism
organization
patience
perseverance
perspective
playfulness
prudence
purposefulness
reliability
resourcefulness
respect
responsiveness
reverence
self-acceptance
self-awareness
self-compassion
selflessness
sincerity
spontaneity
thoughtfulness
tolerance
tranquility
trust
warmheartedness
2. For each trait you identify, write down three specific memories of moments when you actively expressed these traits. Maybe you were generous to a coworker, your neighbor, or your brother; you were prudent about paying your utility bill on time, driving within the speed limit, filling up the gas tank, and so on. For each example, consciously acknowledge that indeed you were exhibiting that trait.
3. After you’ve written three memories for each of the traits you’ve identified, set your reflections aside for a few hours or days, and then reread them.
4. As you reread these recollections of your own traits of resilience, notice any shifts in your view of yourself. Can you accept these traits as real, valid, and integral parts of you, as contributing to your own inner secure base of resilience? Practice and repeat steps 1–3 until this feels real to you.
5. Reflect on how these five traits of resilience might reinforce and strengthen each other, building your inner secure base of resilience and deepening your trust in yourself.
As you experience and claim your traits of resilience, you deepen your trust that they are parts of who you truly are.
EXERCISE 4-2: Deep Listening to Core Strengths
Being accepted for who you are by others kick-starts the self-acceptance you need for resilience. Allow thirty minutes for this exercise — the time deepens the practice, the learning, and the rewiring.
1. Recruit a partner — a friend or a colleague — to do this exercise with you. You can switch roles later, if you wish.
2. Tell your partner which of your five traits of resilience you want to explore first.
3. For each of your five traits of resilience, your partner will ask you, “When have you experienced [your trait] in difficult or challenging times?” and listen quietly as you answer.
4. Answer the question with examples that feel authentic to you. You may want to share your reflections from exercise 4-1, if they seem appropriate.
5. Your partner listens receptively and acceptingly to your answers, without commenting. Then she repeats the same question again and again for about five minutes. This repetition allows your brain to go deeper into memory and into your own wisdom.
6. When you have finished answering the question about this first trait, identify for your partner the second trait you want to explore.
7. Repeat this exercise for all five traits, with your partner asking you the question, repeating the question and listening receptively.
8. When you have responded to the question for all five traits, take another five minutes to silently reflect and notice any shifts in your view of yourself, any deeper integration of your sense of yourself, and any stronger awareness of your own inner secure base of resilience.
By recalling traits of resilience you have already called on, you are reinforcing the sense that this is, in fact, who you are.
Most of the time, you receive far more positive than negative messages about yourself as you go through your day. You hear “Thank you” as you open the door for someone, or “That’s very kind of you”; “Good catch!” as you almost trip but don’t; a friendly smile from a stranger on the sidewalk; a puppy trustingly waggling up to you to be petted.
The trouble is, you may not notice or take in these positive messages, these affirmations that you exist, that you’re noticed, that you matter. It’s easy to get caught up in your own worries or negativity and miss them completely. But each of these messages and moments has the potential to create a resource of self-acceptance in your brain.
EXERCISE 4-3: Taking In the Good, Reprised
You learned in exercise 3-10 to take in the good of moments of kindness from others or awe about the world we live in. Here you practice taking in, accepting, and treasuring the goodness of your own self.
1. Pause for a moment and reflect on any message of acceptance and belonging you encountered today. Your five-year-old took your hand as you crossed the street; your neighbor brought over some extra tomatoes from his garden. Your friend emailed a “miss you” message and suggested getting together for brunch.
2. Notice the felt sense of receiving this message: a warmth in your body, a lightness in your heart, a little recognition of “Wow, this is terrific!”
3. Focus your awareness on this felt sense for ten to thirty seconds. Savor it slowly, allowing your brain the time it needs to register the experience and store it in long-term memory.
4. Set the intention to evoke this memory five more times today. This repeats the neural firing in your brain, recording the memory so you can recollect it later, making it a resource for your sense of self-acceptance and self-worth, thereby strengthening your inner secure base of resilience.
As you register and take in these experiences, you can also register and take in the fact that you are learning how to do this. You are becoming competent at creating new circuitry for resilience in your brain.
EXERCISE 4-4: Working with Symbols of Traits of Resilience
You can use reminders of your growth and learning to prompt your brain to refresh and strengthen the neural circuitry associated with these changes.
1. For each of the five traits of resilience you are working with, which may change over time, begin to gather symbols that represent you expressing that trait. They might include
• a photograph of you and a person to whom you are loving
• a postcard from a trip where your flexibility really showed up
• a stone with a word relevant to the trait carved in it
• the printed agenda of a city council meeting where you found the courage to speak about an important neighborhood issue
2. Gather these symbolic reminders of your traits in a box, a bowl, or a bag. Or display them on a windowsill, a bookshelf, a kitchen counter, or your desk. You might even label the collection “Reminders of My Resilience.”
3. Revisit these symbolic reminders once a day for a month. Then revisit them whenever you want to strengthen your sense of yourself as a stable, secure, resilient person.
Repetition, little and often, lays down and strengthens new neural circuitry. It doesn’t rewire old circuitry, but it creates the resources needed to do that rewiring.
Level 2. Glitches and Heartaches, Sorrows and Struggles
If we don’t experience being fully loved and cherished for who we are, we can sometimes hide or split off parts of ourselves that we have been told, or have come to believe, are less than acceptable. It takes an enormous amount of the brain’s energy to maintain this splitting off.
By letting yourself become aware of these “unlovable” parts of yourself, accepting them and reintegrating them into conscious awareness and into your sense of yourself, you free up that energy to let yourself be more fully engaged with your world and to be more resilient when facing any problems.
EXERCISE 4-5: Seeing the Goodness That Others See in You
This exercise creates a resource to heal your sense of self when your view of your self is already “less than.”
1. Sit in a comfortable position where you won’t be interrupted for at least five minutes. Allow your eyes to gently close. Focus your attention on your breathing. Rest comfortably in the simple presence of awareness. When you’re ready, let yourself become aware of how you are holding yourself in this moment. Are you feeling kind toward yourself? Are you uneasy with yourself? Are you feeling critical of yourself? Just notice, just be aware and accepting of what is, without judgment — or if there is judgment, noticing that.
2. When you’re ready, bring to mind someone in your life who you know loves you unconditionally, someone in whose presence you feel safe. This could be a teacher or dear friend; a partner, parent, or child; or a beloved dog or cat. It could be a spiritual figure — Jesus or the Dalai Lama, or your compassionate friend. Or it could simply be a memory of anyone, living or no longer living, who ever accepted you for exactly who you were in that moment. When a client occasionally insists that no one has ever loved them in this way, I ask them to make someone up in their imagination. That imagined someone can be as real to the brain as a real person, and we go from there.
3. Imagine yourself sitting with this person face-to-face. Visualize the person looking at you with acceptance and tenderness, love and joy. Feel yourself taking in their love and their acceptance of all of who you are. Nothing needs to be hidden.
4. Now imagine yourself being the other person, looking at yourself through their eyes. Feel that person’s love and openness being directed toward you. See in yourself the goodness, the wholeness that the other person sees in you. Let yourself savor this awareness of your own goodness.
5. Now come back to being yourself. You are in your own body again, experiencing the other person looking at you again, with love and acceptance. Take the love and acceptance deeply into your own being. Notice how and where you feel that love and acceptance in your body — as a smile, as a warmth in your heart — and savor it.
6. Take a moment to reflect on your experience, noticing any shifts in your relationship to yourself.
This exercise helps you create new pathways of self-acceptance in your brain. Set the intention to remember this feeling any time you need to.
EXERCISE 4-6: Allowing Inner Parts to Be There
This exercise helps you not only see and integrate the positive traits that others see in you but also acknowledge and allow parts of you that you don’t necessarily want other people to see, and which you may not want to acknowledge either. This process frees up some of the enormous psychic energy that it takes to keep these parts hidden or split off, so that your brain will be less fatigued. It also frees up the energy it takes to clean up the messes that these parts of you can create when they act out and derail your resilience, so that you have more energy to live your life.
Your larger, wiser self (see exercise 4-15 below) can manage the behaviors of your various inner parts when you are aware of them and tolerant enough of them to stay in charge of them, even when they really, really want to act out and run the show.
1. Find a place to sit and work where you won’t be interrupted for five to ten minutes. Come into a sense of presence. As much as possible, come into a felt sense of your own inner secure base of resilience, stable yet open-minded and flexible.
2. Read over this list of traits commonly deemed negative, the parts of the self that are related to these traits, and the related messages that can derail your resilience. This is not an exhaustive list; I learn new examples from clients and workshop participants every week.
TRAIT |
PART |
MESSAGE |
Giving up |
Discouraged part |
I might as well not try; this is too hard. |
Grouchiness |
Curmudgeon |
Life sucks, and it’s not going to get any better. |
Complaining |
Whiner |
I don’t like this, and I’m not happy. |
Rigidity |
Stubborn part |
I refuse, and you can’t make me. |
Being judgmental |
Inner critic |
Who do you think you are? |
Lacking confidence |
Smallifyer |
Better to settle for less than to risk another failure. |
Creative block |
Procrastinator |
No worries; I’ll show up for this tomorrow, maybe. |
Shyness |
Withdrawer |
If I don’t engage, I won’t be disappointed. |
Pretending |
Fantasizer |
If only [whatever] were true, I would be happy. |
3. Identify one example from this list that is relevant to you. You wish it weren’t a part of you, but you know it is. You may choose instead to work with a trait that’s not listed here; if you do, identify the related part of self and its message.
4. Notice any reaction in your nervous system or felt sense of your emotional landscape as you begin to work with this trait. If these reactions become overwhelming, you may want to use tools from chapters 2 and 3 to regulate the reactivity and return you to your physiological and emotional equilibrium.
5. Recall one specific experience in the past when this part of you was triggered. Remember the message this part was sending at the time, whether it was one of the messages listed here or something completely different. When this part is triggered, what is it likely to say to you?
6. Notice your reactions now as you remember this experience. Can you simply allow the part of you and its message to be in your awareness, without further judgment or criticism? It is what it is, and there’s always an understandable and forgivable reason for it being what it is.
7. Try to identify one possible positive contribution this part might make to your larger self. No worries if you can’t yet; additional exercises in this chapter will assist you. If you can do this, you might express a preliminary sense of gratitude to this part of you for its contribution.
8. When you feel comfortable acknowledging and allowing this part and its habitual messages to be part of your sense of self, repeat the exercise with other memories of this part and its message, or with other traits on the list, or with other traits altogether.
9. Notice and reflect on your experience of this exercise. Claim your own growing capacity to skillfully acknowledge and allow any part of you to simply exist, to be there. This is an important step toward accepting and integrating that part into your sense of self and recovering your resilience and well-being.
Integration — one of the main functions of the prefrontal cortex – frees up an enormous amount of psychic energy, enabling you to move toward a more coherent, resilient sense of self. The prefrontal cortex gets to drive the bus, no matter how intrusive or rambunctious these inner parts of you may be.
EXERCISE 4-7: Finding a True Other to Your True Self
Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.
— Dinah Craik, A Life for a Life
Your entire self can gel and blossom when every facet of it is seen by someone else as acceptable, and when you yourself come to believe that all of these facets are acceptable. This rewiring of your neural circuitry to enable self-acceptance happens most efficiently and most reliably with the help of another, trusted person.
A true other is someone who sees the inherent goodness of who you are and accepts you exactly as you are, even in moments when that goodness is obscure. This true other is often someone close to you — a parent, spouse, or child — but not necessarily. Family dynamics can sometimes be too fraught. Fortunately, many people in other roles — friend, teacher, coach, therapist, or mentor — can also function as a true other. Even strangers can act as true others in the “moments of meeting” we’ll explore in exercise 5-2.
1. Ask a trustworthy friend to help you with this exercise, somebody you already feel safe and comfortable with. You’re looking for an empathic, attuned, and self-possessed other, someone who can stay anchored in her own secure base and won’t be triggered or need anything from you during this exercise.
2. Come into a sense of safety and trust with this person. The safety primes the neuroplasticity of the brain for learning and rewiring.
3. Choose one of the traits that you identified in exercise 4-6, or any other trait you’re concerned about.
4. Begin to share your experience of this trait, its associated part of self, and its associated message with your partner. Share anything that feels relevant; if possible, share details of your experience that you may feel reluctant to share. This exercise is the opportunity for those qualities and their messages to come out of the shadows into the light of awareness and acceptance.
5. Your friend listens deeply and empathically, without offering a lot of comments.
6. Notice your own reactions to the sharing, feeling heard, and feeling accepted. Notice your own opening to acknowledgment and acceptance.
7. When you are ready, take a moment to reflect on the entire experience of this exercise. Notice any shifts in your relationship to this part and to yourself as a whole.
8. You can repeat this exercise with as many parts of yourself and as many true others as you wish.
This exercise helps you build your inner secure base, strengthening your secure attachment to yourself and your resilience in the world.
EXERCISE 4-8: Expressing Loving-Kindness Even for Unlovable Parts
About 2,600 years ago, the Buddha taught his followers the practice of loving-kindness, metta, as a way to keep the mind and heart open to any of life’s experiences in any circumstances, including pain and suffering. This practice recognizes and honors the deep nobility and worthiness of every sentient being. We can learn to wish all beings well, including ourselves, no matter what our personal opinions may be about the other people, or ourselves at the moment.
The acceptance and honoring at the base of loving-kindness practice interrupts whatever automatic thoughts and opinions you may be having and refocuses your attention on keeping the mind and heart open to what is happening right now.
1. Find a few quiet moments in your day to pause and say these traditional phrases to yourself:
May I be safe from inner and outer harm.
May I be happy and deeply content.
May I be healthy and strong in body and mind.
May I live with the ease of well-being.
2. Repeat the phrases five to ten times; repeat the practice five times during the day for a full week or longer.
3. Notice any shifts in your energy, your mood, as you deepen the practice. You may not notice any immediate shifts from practicing the phrases per se; instead, you may notice that an incident that might previously have caused you to tip into shame or collapse now causes barely a blip on your radar. Notice whether this trend continues as you deepen the practice.
4. You can adapt this practice and phrases to offer loving-kindness to parts of yourself as well. All are worthy and deserving of love and attention.
May my whiner find soothing and ease.
May my stubborn part feel acknowledged and relax.
May my inner critic feel appreciated for the job it’s trying to do.
May my smallifyer trust the growth of my capacities and strengths.
May my withdrawer feel safe and able to stay engaged.
May my procrastinator trust that the capacities are there to begin this project right now.
May my fantasizer rest in and enjoy this moment.
5. Modify the phrases over time as necessary to keep your mind and heart focused and open. Besides learning how to do this new conditioning, you are learning that you can.
I suggested this practice, with these updated phrases, to a client. Not only did she notice a change in her response when her computer crashed over the weekend, but she reported to me that after she had coped with that disaster pretty resiliently, she had bounded down the stairs saying excitedly, “I’m growing new neurons! I’m growing new neurons!” Indeed, she was.
Level 3. Too Much
At this level of new conditioning, you’re learning to shift your entire philosophical stance toward the inner critic (see the aside on shame and the inner critic, p. 99). That shift is the most effective way to cope with your inner critic in the long run.
The most potent way to change your relationship with your inner critic is to understand that it believes it has a very important job to do — to protect you from making mistakes and failing in front of other people (and thereby provoking who knows what unbearable humiliation or rejection). And so it hammers at you — admittedly at some of us more than others — about doing better and not messing up. In its overzealousness, it endlessly reminds you of every fault and screwup, just in case you hadn’t noticed. The biggest difficulty with the inner critic is that it blames you for every mistake, labeling you as bad, irresponsible, and worthless. And when you listen to and believe the inner critic, when you hear its messages as true, you stop being able to see your inner critic as an overworked, underpaid part of your whole self.
Arguing with your inner critic, trying to persuade it of your worth, doesn’t work well. There will always be some imperfection it can pounce on to prove you wrong. (And your goal, in any event, is to accept your imperfections as part of your particular flavor of being human.) And you can’t ignore the inner critic. It will never go away on its own, because it thinks its self-imposed job is essential to your survival. Trying to ignore it takes an enormous and exhausting amount of psychological energy.
What works is to retire it, to rewire your view of it, to shift your perspective — the gold standard of response flexibility — and to relate to it as one part of your larger self. You can work with any grain of truth in the inner critic’s message as you would work with negative emotions, saying, “Thank you for the signal to pay attention to something important. I trust that I will. Now please go back to your room.”
When you choose to relate to the inner critic as just another part of yourself, it will settle down to being listened to, and you can settle down to listening without being derailed.
EXERCISE 4-9: Meeting with the Inner Critic
1. Settle in a comfortable place where you won’t be interrupted. Allow thirty minutes for the exercise.
2. Imagine your inner critic as a character in your multiplicity of selves, as you imagined different parts of yourself in exercise 4-6. Imagine having a meeting with your inner critic, just as you imagined a meeting with your compassionate friend in exercise 3-11. In fact, you may invite your compassionate friend to this meeting for support.
3. Imagine your inner critic as a person, a figure, a presence. Visualize who or what they look like. Imagine meeting and greeting them and the place where you will sit or walk and talk. Remember, you’re the one running this meeting.
4. Begin the dialogue by acknowledging that you know the inner critic has been trying really hard to protect you from actions and traits it believes are harmful. You can set some guidelines for this dialogue: it is not an invitation to the inner critic to deliver its own message. Convey your understanding and appreciation and even compassion for how hard the inner critic has been working.
5. As you convey your appreciation to the inner critic for the job it is still trying to do, let yourself feel your own wholeness, your ability to do this important job of protecting yourself from harm. Anchor in your own inner secure base of resilience. Trust that your own capacities for resilience are quite solid now. Let your inner critic know that you expect it to trust you too. The inner critic can retire now, with thanks for its service.
6. Imagine your inner critic taking in your empathy for it and your trust in your own competence. Try! This imagining is real to your brain. Imagine your inner critic acquiescing in your new relationship to it and to its new role as inner adviser.
7. Imagine saying goodbye to your inner critic for now. Savor your own skill in shifting your view, rewiring your relationship with your inner critic, and retiring it to a new, more workable role.
8. Repeat, repeat, repeat, little and often, for as long as you need to. It’s your choice to retire the inner critic.
Realistically, the inner critic will probably never fully disappear. It’s part of our deeply ingrained arsenal of survival strategies. But you can shift your relationship to your inner critic, not take its message so personally, not believe it so readily. Over time, the voice of the inner critic can be muted. It may still be annoying at times, but it will no longer derail your resilience.
Reconditioning
Whenever a whiff — or even a whack — of shame wobbles your inner secure base, you want to stabilize that base as quickly as possible. A critical comment from another person, or even from yourself, may contain a grain of truth. But you want to explore that opportunity for learning (AFGO — another frickin’ growth opportunity) from a place of strength and confidence, not from a smallified place of shame and self-doubt.
Level 1. Barely a Wobble
Developing an inner secure base is the best protection we have against later stress, trauma, and psychopathology. You want to recover and maintain that base.
EXERCISE 4-10: Carrying Love and Appreciation in Your Wallet
1. Begin to gather appreciative comments about yourself from birthday cards, holiday cards, random emails from friends and colleagues, comments you notice in conversations with friends. Write them down on a “Genuine Appreciations” list.
2. You can even ask two or three or five or seven friends, people you trust to express their appreciation of you, to send you an email, card, or text listing two or three things they appreciate about you. Add these comments to the list.
3. Type up the comments on a single sheet of paper. Tape the list to your computer monitor or on the bathroom mirror, carry it in your wallet or purse, or enter it on your phone: put it somewhere you can read it every day.
4. Read these comments three times a day, every day, for thirty days. Each time you read them, take another thirty seconds to take in the good of receiving this support and appreciation from people who know you and care about you. Repeatedly taking in the appreciation of others does create a new appreciation of yourself in your brain.
5. Any time a sense of shame, failure, inadequacy, unworthiness, self-doubt, or unlovability threatens your inner self-acceptance, pull out the list and read it, or recite it from memory. Use it to counter the negative self-talk that might be arising.
This exercise trains your brain to counter any possible derailing of your resilience caused by shame, by immediately shifting to and remembering positive perceptions of you. That response flexibility becomes the new, more resilient pathway in your brain.
Level 2. Glitches and Heartaches, Sorrows and Struggles
Review the previous discussion of shame and the inner critic (p. 99) if you wish. When you experience any collapse into shame, any hounding from the inner critic, it’s important to right yourself as quickly as possible, and reinforce your sense of yourself as fully lovable and acceptable, to prevent any further derailing of your resilience.
EXERCISE 4-11: Loving and Accepting Yourself, Even Though. . .
1. Practice saying this phrase: “Even though . . . [you’ll fill in the blank in a moment], I deeply and completely love and accept myself,” over and over again until it feels natural and believable to you. You’re creating the positive message you will use to rewire a negative one. This phrase may feel unnatural to say at first, but it can become more familiar and comfortable with practice. If “I deeply and completely love and accept myself” is too much of a stretch, start with “I’m willing to consider thinking about trying to love and accept myself.”
2. When the positive phrase begins to feel realistic, you can begin to juxtapose it with a current or previous example of a negative one. Start small! “Even though I forgot to email Janet and Don about changing dinner plans for Saturday, I deeply and completely love and accept myself.” “Even though my feelings were hurt when both Janet and Don forgot to email me about changing dinner plans for Saturday, I deeply and completely love and accept myself.” “Even though my boss wasn’t too crazy about my idea of putting up a stop sign in the parking lot, I deeply and completely love and accept myself.” “Even though Bill was a bit harsh in his criticism of how I disciplined George today, I deeply and completely love and accept myself.”
You get the gist. Repeat over and over and over.
This exercise trains your brain to create the responses that will rewire old negative messages about yourself and prevent any new ones from arising.
EXERCISE 4-12: Turning Enemies into Allies
You may have noticed that a food you couldn’t stand when you were younger (pickled herring for me) has become a favorite now. Or a type of music that used to drive you bonkers (rhythm and blues for my neighbor Bob) has grown on you; you find it quite respectable and engaging now. Similarly, parts of ourselves that we used to disdain, ignore, or be ashamed of can begin to occupy their rightful place as part of ourselves as we mature and gain resilience. We don’t let them take over, but we can be present for any gifts they have to offer.
1. Identify one particular part of yourself to work with in this exercise. It may be a part you explored in exercise 4-6, it may be another part on the list, or it may be a different part altogether.
2. Begin to explore the gift that this particular part of yourself might bring. Your lazy part may be protecting you from getting involved with projects or people you really don’t want to engage with but don’t know how to say no to. Your stubborn part may insist that you be seen and understood for who you are and what you believe before you go along with someone else’s plan. Your inner critic may be trying to shape up your behavior before other people criticize you for it. Your smallifying part may be trying to maintain a healthy humility about your place on the planet. Your fantasizer part may simply want to be fully alive and engaged. Let your imagination help you find the gift that this part brings you.
3. If you find this process hard, recruit a friend to brainstorm with you.
• Share with your friend the concerns you have about the part you’ve chosen to work with.
• With your friend, brainstorm ten possible ways this part might be useful or have something to contribute — to anyone, not necessarily to you personally.
• From these ten possibilities, identify one that might be relevant to you. See if you can identify a moment when this part might have benefited you in this way.
• Thank your friend for helping you see new possibilities.
4. Now remember a specific time when the gift of this part really was a gift, when some aspect of this part actively supported your resilience. For example, your stubborn part may have helped you when your insurance company denied your disability benefits after a car accident. You persisted and argued and talked to supervisors and managers and C-level staff until you were blue in the face — and until you got your benefits approved. Notice this reframing of stubbornness to persistence. If you wish to, write this memory down and save it among your “Reminders of My Resilience.”
Recognizing the gift offered by a challenging part of yourself can radically shift your overall view of, understanding of, and relationship to the part. It is now available to support your resilience.
EXERCISE 4-13: Sifting and Shifting Parts
1. Spend one entire day (or longer) noticing various traits and parts of yourself as they come into your awareness, perhaps through noticing an inner message or a habitual behavior.
2. Pay attention to all of these traits — such as upbeat, discouraged, open-minded, playful, irritable — whether you deem them positive or negative and whether you relate to them positively or negatively.
3. Notice how long each one lingers, whether it’s moments or hours.
4. Notice how these traits and parts shift on their own, coming and going. Notice whether any one part seems to dominate for very long.
5. Practice deliberately choosing to shift from one trait or part to another. The purpose is not to deny or repress, or to dislike or disdain, but to learn to discern the different aspects of yourself and do the shifting.
6. Repeat this exercise many times, noticing what aspect has shown up, and shifting it if you choose to.
Parts of the self do come and go and do shift on their own. You’re strengthening the flexibility of your prefrontal cortex so that you never have to be stuck with any one part taking over for too long, and you’re learning that you are in charge. You can choose to return to the sense of your larger, whole self.
Tools of reconditioning can rewire our relationships to any stubborn, recalcitrant, acting-out part of us that seems to insist on derailing our inner secure base. We enable this rewiring through strengthening the response flexibility and functioning of the prefrontal cortex. We have to be mindful, compassionate, patient, and persevering in the process.
How long should you try? Until.
— JIM ROHN
EXERCISE 4-14: Writing a Compassionate Letter to Retire the Inner Critic
The rubber meets the road here. In this exercise, you use the focused attention of your prefrontal cortex to shift your relationship with the most powerful derailer of your inner secure base: your inner critic.
1. Identify just one negative message you typically hear from your inner critic, such as “You’re so lazy!” or “You sure are out of shape these days!” Write the comment down. Write down also the tone of voice your inner critic uses, such as harsh, angry, or nagging. And write down the reaction in your own nervous system when you hear that message and that tone of voice, like tensing up or cringing.
2. Write a letter to a trusted friend — perhaps a true other, perhaps an imaginary friend. (You won’t mail this letter.) Explain to your friend the circumstances in your life that usually trigger this negative comment from your inner critic. Share with your friend how you react when you hear this message: include the body sensations you notice, your feelings, and your thoughts when you hear this message delivered in this tone of voice.
3. Share with your friend any fears about any grain of truth in the critic’s message.
4. Ask your friend to convey understanding and support for you as you struggle with this message from your inner critic.
5. Set this letter aside. Begin to write a second letter, this time from your friend to you, conveying understanding and support.
6. Have your friend convey their empathy for the misery of this pummeling by your inner critic and their empathy for your experience of it. Have the friend reaffirm your many strengths and capacities to deal with your inner critic and to deal with the situation or behavior your inner critic is complaining about.
7. Have your friend convey love and acceptance of you, exactly as you are, regardless of what the inner critic says, regardless of your vulnerability to hearing that same message from your inner critic for the umpteen-thousandth time.
8. End the letter with your friend’s sincere wishes for your anchoring in your own wholeness, your own inner secure base of resilience, your own strengths and gifts. Include, too, their sincere wishes for the lessening of your vulnerability to believing or being bothered by the messages of your inner critic.
9. Set this second letter aside for a while. After a few hours or days, reread your friend’s letter to you. Take in the understanding and compassion you have given to yourself through your friend. Let this understanding and empathy shift your view of yourself and your relationship with your inner critic.
Repeat this exercise as often as you need to, addressing as many different messages from your inner critic as you hear, to prevent the negative messages from derailing your resilience or even taking up much of your attention any more. As these messages become less frequent and less bothersome, you’ll have more mental bandwidth to cultivate the positive messages of acceptance and appreciation that strengthen your inner secure base.
Deconditioning
You may not have expected to use your imagination so much for coping with real-life disappointments, difficulties, and even disasters, so I’ll reiterate here that whatever you can imagine is real to your brain. (This is precisely why your fears and worries can be so troublesome.)
Here you practice using your imagination to install reliable inner resources in your neural circuitry that you can call to mind and draw support from again and again and again.
Throughout this book I have emphasized response flexibility, being able to shift gears and perspectives to respond to challenging circumstances or internal messages differently than you have before. The inner resources created in your imagination by the two exercises below still foster flexibility but attempt to balance that response flexibility with response stability. You remain anchored in your inner secure base, with these resources to support you.
EXERCISE 4-15: Cultivating the Wiser Self
Cultivating the sense of a wiser self is somewhat de rigueur these days in many therapeutic and coaching modalities that help people strengthen their resilience. The wiser self is an imaginary figure who embodies the positive qualities that lead to more resilience and well-being: wisdom, courage, patience, perseverance. This wiser self is someone who truly cares for you and offers you understanding, support, and guidance to help you change and grow. Your wiser self could be drawn from a composite of many people who have been helpful to you already — role models, mentors, and benefactors. It could be a visualization of yourself five or ten years from now, when you have fulfilled your aspirations for developing strength, competence, and empowerment. However you imagine this figure, you can pose a particular problem or question to your wiser self and then listen for the answer, which comes from your own intuitive wisdom.
The beginning steps of this exercise resemble the compassionate friend exercise in chapter 3. It’s a similar process that creates different resources.
1. Find a comfortable position for sitting quietly. Allow your eyes to gently close. Breathe deeply a few times into your belly, and allow your awareness to come more deeply into your body. Allow yourself to breathe comfortably. Become aware of relaxing into a gentle state of well-being.
2. When you are ready, imagine you are in your safe place, somewhere you feel comfortable, safe, relaxed, and at ease. This could be a room in your home, a cabin in the woods, a place by a pond or lake, or a café with a friend.
3. Let yourself know you are going to receive a visit from your wiser self, perhaps an older, wiser, stronger version of yourself — someone who embodies the qualities you aspire to and is mature and settled in them.
4. As your wiser self arrives at your safe place, imagine the figure in quite some detail. Notice how old your wiser self is, how they are dressed, how they move. Notice how you greet your wiser self. Do you go out to meet them? Do you invite them in? Do you shake hands, bow, or hug?
5. Imagine yourself sitting and talking with your wiser self, or going for a walk together. Notice the way their presence and energy affect you.
6. Then, begin a conversation in your imagination with your wiser self. You can ask your wiser self how they came to be who they are. Ask what helped them most along the way. What did they have to let go of to become who they are? Can they share examples of when and how they triumphed over adversity?
7. You may choose to ask about a particular problem or challenge you are facing. Listen carefully to their response. Notice what advice your wiser self offers that you can take with you. Listen carefully to all they have to tell you.
8. Imagine what it would be like to embody your wiser self. Invite them to become part of you. Notice how it feels to experience your wiser self within you, how it feels to be your wiser self. When you are ready, imagine your wiser self becoming separate from you again.
9. Imagine that your wiser self offers you a gift — an object, a symbol, a word or phrase — to remind you of this meeting. Take this object in your hand and place it somewhere in your clothing for safekeeping. Your wiser self will let you know their name; remember it well.
10. As your wiser self prepares to leave, take a few gentle breaths to anchor your connection with them. Know that you can evoke this experience of encountering your wiser self anytime you choose. Thank your wiser self for the time you have spent together, and say goodbye.
11. Take a moment to reflect on this entire meeting and conversation. Notice any insights or shifts from the experience.
12. You may choose to write down your experience with your wiser self to help integrate it into your conscious memory and to have it ready to use any time you need guidance from within about how to be more resilient.
As with any use of imagination to access our deep intuitive knowing, the more you practice encountering your wiser self, the more reliably you will be able to embody this wisdom as you respond to the challenges and difficulties of your life.
EXERCISE 4-16: Befriending the Many Parts of Yourself
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
Some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you
out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
— Jalaluddin Rumi, “The Guest House”
Now you’re ready to draw on the intuitive wisdom of your own wiser self to integrate the gifts offered by many parts of yourself, positive and negative, into an acceptance of all of who you are. This process helps your inner secure base become more stable and reliable.
1. Sit comfortably. Allow your eyes to gently close. Relax into the awareness of being at home in yourself.
2. When you’re ready, imagine you are standing on a sidewalk outside a theater. Imagine the building, the marquee, the people walking by. Walk up to one of the main doors, open it, and walk into the lobby. Walk through the lobby — it’s empty — to the door into the theater. Open it and walk into the theater — it’s also empty. Walk all the way down to the third or fourth row and take a seat in the center of the row. An empty stage lies in front of you. All is quiet.
3. In this visualization, a series of characters will come out on to the stage representing your wiser self and various inner parts. You will be able to have a dialogue with each of these parts.
4. The first character to come out onto the stage is your wiser self from exercise 4-15. This character embodies all the qualities of resilience you identified in exercise 4-1. This wiser self creates the safety for all of the other characters in this exercise to come on stage. Temporarily, your prefrontal cortex doesn’t have to be in charge; it can relax and enjoy the play.
5. Now imagine other characters coming onto the stage one by one. Each of these imaginary characters embodies a particular part of you. Each part might be represented by someone you know; yourself at a different age; someone you know from the movies, history, or literature; an animal; or a cartoon character.
6. The first character embodies a part of yourself that you really, really like. It’s truly a part of you, and you are proud that it is. Let that character take the stage and remember it (perhaps make a note).
7. A second character joins the first on the stage, embodying another positive part of yourself. Again let that character materialize on the stage and remember it.
8. Now bring a third character onto the stage that embodies a part of yourself that you really don’t like all that much. In fact, you wish it weren’t part of you, but you know that it is. Let this character materialize and take a moment to remember it.
9. Bring a fourth character onto the stage that embodies another negative part of you. Observe and remember it.
10. Now you have on stage your wiser self, two parts of yourself that you really like, and two parts that you don’t like so much, that you maybe even dislike or disdain. You may even wish these last two weren’t part of you at all, but they are.
11. One by one, ask each character what particular gift they bring to you by being part of you. Ask the parts you like first, and then the parts you don’t like as much. Listen receptively, open-mindedly, to the answers from each part. Thank each part in turn for their answers, and sit with the answers you’ve heard for a moment, noticing any grain of truth or wisdom in them.
12. Ask your wiser self what gifts each of these parts may bring to you. Listen receptively to these answers, which may be different from the answers from the characters or your own perception of these characters.
13. Briefly thank each character for participating in this exercise with you. Watch as they leave the stage one by one, the wiser self last.
14. Imagine yourself getting up out of your seat and walking back up the aisle, through the lobby, and back outside. Turn around to look at the theater where all this happened. Then slowly come back to the awareness of sitting quietly. When you’re ready, open your eyes.
15. Notice and reflect on your experience of this exercise. Notice any insights or shifts. Remember and embrace the lessons of each of these five characters, especially the ones you originally didn’t like so much. Each one is an integral part of you, essential to your wholeness. This time of reflection helps your brain integrate the learning into long-term memory.
In this exercise, you release the energy it takes to repress or split off negative parts of yourself because you aren’t repressing them anymore. They are recognized and accepted as part of the family system.
That energy is now available to you to grow, thrive, and flourish.
Level 2. Glitches and Heartaches, Sorrows and Struggles
When things get a little rougher and you need more inner resources to draw on, you can recruit someone who can be a true other to your true self, or you can use the power of your imagination to create those resources.
EXERCISE 4-17: Singing Your Song Back to You
A friend is someone who knows your song and sings it back to you when you have forgotten the words.
— passed on to me by Shoshana Alexander
Friends — anyone who knows something of your history — can act as true others to your true self when you feel overwhelmed by stress and can’t find your way back home.
1. Ask a trustworthy friend who has been around the block with you a few times, or at least knows your stories of how you’ve found your way around the block before, to help you with this exercise.
2. Come into a sense of presence and acceptance together; let the social engagement evoke a neuroception of safety and trust.
3. Ask your friend to remember, or help you remember, moments of previous competency at coping, of response flexibility, and of resilience, even if you can’t remember them right now. (These could be the “Sure I can!” moments you identified in exercise 3-14. Small is fine.)
4. Let one memory lead to another. In the safety of the social engagement, your brain can shift into the default network mode to start exploring, and it will.
5. Integrate several of these memories to recover the “song” of yourself as a competent, resilient person. Let yourself take in this sense of competence as a core part of who you are.
With the recovery of one memory, the default network of the brain can begin to meander and uncover other memories. Even if these memories are not particularly relevant to the stressor you are coping with now, your sense of being competent and resilient is relevant. That can be reintegrated into a sense of yourself as a competent, resilient person.
EXERCISE 4-18: Imagining a Good Inner Parent
This exercise is a highly modified variation of a form of group therapy now known as psychodrama, in which members of a group assist someone in reexperiencing and rewriting old, implicitly encoded internal models or old mental scripts of a past relationship with a neglectful, dismissive, or critical parent. One group member acts the role of that parent; another acts the role of a new, empathic, responsive “good inner parent.” Other members play other roles as needed. In this version of the exercise, you create the characters you choose to work with entirely in your imagination. You can ask friends to assist you if you wish, or you can use furniture, pillows, or other objects to stand in for the characters you want to evoke.
1. Sit quietly and comfortably in a place where you won’t be interrupted for ten to twenty minutes. Come into a sense of presence, breathing gently and deeply to reduce any body tension. You may place your hand on your heart at any time to remind yourself to bring a kind, loving awareness to your experience.
2. Evoke the presence of your wiser self to act as a witness in this exercise, who can mirror and reflect your experience back to you. You may also imagine your compassionate friend (or a representational object like a pillow or stuffed animal) sitting near you to help with this exercise, not saying anything but offering presence, connection, and comfort.
3. In your imagination (or using another representational object in the space around you, such as a chair or a lamp), evoke the parental figure you wish to work with — mother, father, stepparent or grandparent, aunt, or uncle if they were significant in shaping your sense of yourself as unworthy and unimportant. Share with your wiser self your visceral, felt sense of being in the presence of this remembered person (or the object representing them). Notice feeling heard and accurately understood by your wiser self. Notice any safety or ease that comes from hearing your wiser self empathically and accurately reflect your experience back to you.
4. Bring in any other characters who are relevant in re-creating this earlier experience — siblings, neighbors, friends, or teachers. Trust your imagination to evoke the characters most needed in this scenario, even if your conscious brain is not entirely sure why they are there.
5. Now imagine the character of a good parent — the ideal or better parent you can feel safe with, who understands, accepts, and appreciates you. Take your time to evoke the character of this good parent until it feels real to you. This figure may be an imagined version of someone you know who does act like a good parental figure. Notice your experience of being in the presence of this good parent, and share it with your wiser self. Take the time you need for this experience of sharing to emerge. Notice your own felt response to having your experience understood and mirrored by your wiser self.
6. You can imagine interactions with this new parent, witnessed by your wiser self. Notice whether you feel any increased sense of worthiness or acceptance. Notice and share with your wiser self your experience of these interactions.
7. Spend as much time as you wish with your good parent. Let yourself take in the good of the encounter.
8. You can explore a juxtaposition of the “old” parent with this new, good parent if you wish, always sharing your experience with your wiser self and having it witnessed and reflected back to you.
9. When you feel complete, let all of the characters dissolve, your wiser self last. Reflect on the entire experience, noticing any shifts in your sense of yourself.
The creative imagination called for in this exercise is quite a stretch for your default network. The new scenarios you imagine (which most likely will evolve if you choose to do this exercise again) can become powerful inner supports of your resilience.
Level 3. Too Much
Sometimes too many experiences of being thrown off center leave you abiding long-term in a sense of shame, rather than spending most of your time centered and only occasionally being thrown off into shame. If this is the case, it may seem extremely difficult, or impossible, to find your way back to your secure stable base.
Other exercises (6-15 and 7-6) offer additional tools to deal with the feelings of being lost, confused, and overwhelmed that come up when you are derailed. Here, for practice, we explore the use of tools for recovering from the shame engendered by feeling like a failure too often, over too long a time, or starting when you were very young.
We personify your experiences as the archetypal wounded inner child who has too often felt neglected, criticized, rejected, abused, humiliated, abandoned, and shamed. These are painful experiences that occurred at times or in circumstances when you did not have enough inner resilience or support from others to avoid the feeling of shame. This wounded inner child is found in the mythology of every culture and many modern therapeutic modalities, and most people recognize and resonate with the experience of it instantly.
Recovering resilience involves using tools to help that inner child at last feel seen, heard, understood, accepted, and loved when that didn’t happen the first time around, or not often enough or deeply enough, with parents, peers, colleagues, friends, and romantic partners. This inner child is not who you are, but it is very often part of who you have been. Recalling moments of social rejection and embarrassment or the failure of relationship can activate the pain as though it were happening right here, right now.
It doesn’t always require therapy to recover the resilience of the inner child, though a skillful relational therapy certainly can help. Any attuned, understanding, accepting, loving relationship can do this rewiring and recovering. It’s the seeing, understanding, and accepting of the inner child by any older, wiser, and stronger (more resilient) parental figure that does the healing.
In practicing this skill of relational intelligence, you’re evoking your own wiser adult self to provide the seeing, understanding, acceptance, and even embracing and love that will help your inner child heal from shame and recover its inner secure base of resilience — its birthright.
EXERCISE 4-19: Dialogue between Your Wiser Self and Your Inner Child
Conducting an imagined dialogue between your wiser self (or good inner parent) and your emerging, wounded inner child draws on your powers of imagination and your capacities of awareness and acceptance to create a new experience of an inner relationship between your wiser self (or good inner parent) and another part of yourself. This relationship allows you to create new patterns of responding to your inner self.
1. Evoke a sense of your wiser self (or good inner parent). Imagine that wiser self sitting somewhere that feels safe for your inner child too: on the floor at home, on a bench in a park, on a blanket on the beach.
2. Evoke a sense of your inner child at a time when that child felt a little lost, confused, and unsure of belonging. I’ve noticed that for many folks, thinking about being back in the third grade or in middle school or junior high reliably evokes this state of being.
3. Imagine your wiser self and inner child sitting together, perhaps saying hello, perhaps saying nothing and simply coming into an awareness of the presence of the other. Let your wiser self be open and receptive, trusting and relaxed. Let your inner child be exactly however they are, with whatever comforts they need (teddy bear, stuffie, toy car, beloved poodle) to feel safe enough to sit with the wiser self.
4. Imagine a sense of connection developing between your wiser self and your inner child, however shy or wary the inner child might be about the contact. Imagine a conversation developing between the two, however hesitant or superficially courteous that might be at first. Imagine the inner child feeling safe, comfortable, and familiar enough with the wiser self to settle into a genuine conversation about whatever needs to be seen, heard, and known.
5. Imagine your wiser self and your inner child settling into getting acquainted: “So this is who you are. Glad to finally meet you. This is okay.” This encounter is neither idealized nor idealizing, not fantasy perfect. Whatever arises, love that.
6. Let your wiser self and your inner child reflect separately on their experiences of this conversation. (Toggling back and forth between the two is fine.)
7. Imagine your wiser self and your inner child saying goodbye and parting company for now, knowing they can come together again whenever the inner child wishes.
8. Reflect on your experience of this entire exercise, noticing any shift in your sense of self and accepting this part of yourself.
Acknowledging and relating to the inner child with kindness, interest, curiosity, and care rewires some of our earliest internal working models of self and creates the neural platform for earned secure attachment, which you experience as your inner secure base. This is the strongest inner foundation you can have for your resilience.
EXERCISE 4-20: Empowering Your Inner Child to Evoke Your Wiser Self
Building on the previous exercise, here you use your imagination to rewire a moment when your inner child felt dropped or forgotten by others, with no inner resources available at the time to remedy the situation or prevent a collapse into shame. But now your inner child can become empowered to evoke the wiser self to step in, evoking self-acceptance and a sense of inner goodness, to prevent that shame response.
1. Imagine your wiser self and your inner child getting together for another conversation. This time, your inner child feels and expresses appropriate anger from a time when an adult in charge didn’t connect with or protect the child. Maybe it was a time when a parent forgot to pick the child up after school, a teacher failed to stop bullying on the playground, or a best friend turned mean and snotty. At the time, the child didn’t have the inner resources to respond resiliently to the situation, and your wiser self, not yet a part of your psyche, wasn’t present to intervene.
2. As your inner child relates the story to your wiser self, the child may express some anger. “Where were you when I needed you? How can I trust you to show up now?” And your wiser self (or good inner parent) listens empathically and understandingly. “Of course you would be upset; that’s perfectly understandable.” The wiser self reassures your inner child that they are here now and will be here whenever needed from now on.
3. Your inner child receives and trusts this reassurance from your wiser self as best they can. This building of trust is the repair and the rewiring your inner child needs: the realization that they have the power to evoke the wiser self anytime they need to, and the wiser self will show up and help.
4. Notice any shifts in your inner child’s experience: is there a sense of becoming more empowered, more resilient?
This exercise doesn’t change what happened, but it does change the inner child’s relationship to what happened. It doesn’t rewrite history, but it does rewire the brain. Repeat this exercise as many times as is necessary to firmly establish the sense of the inner child’s empowerment to evoke the help of the wiser self.
This chapter has introduced many tools of self-awareness, self-acceptance, and inner integration to recover and strengthen your own, powerful inner secure base of resilience. These practices allow you to meet the challenges and stressors of your life with your own core strengths of resilience, guided by the intuitive wisdom of your wiser self.
Feeling more trusting and secure within yourself creates more flexibility and resilience in your brain to meet the challenges of relating to others. We’ll address those in the next chapter.
This deeper resilience in relating to people allows you to receive more support from them. You can come to see other people as useful refuges, resources, and role models who can foster your own growing capacities, competence, and courage.