Four reasons good girl Empath’s fear their own power
There is a curious thing that happens in our healing process where we can be absolutely desperate for healing to take place yet be totally terrified and resistant to change. Even if knowing what we are experiencing is dysfunctional, damaging, painful or harmful it may be all that we know, and therefore paradoxically feels safer than the unknown - even if that could be healthier for us. Additionally, these known behaviours have been kept safe for all these years and changing them could be threatening (usually this is an unconscious response).
I understand why, because I have been there, it feels scary and we might need to get to the point where the situation is so overwhelming that we are willing to do anything to make it stop as we’re not coping. I remember experiencing this fear towards my own sense of inner power. I keenly wanted to feel empowered and embodied but I was terrified of my own power because everything in me told me it wasn’t safe to have it and this is something I see in many of my highly sensitive clients so I wanted to explore why that is the case.
Conditioning from experiencing a threatening parent
Many highly sensitive clients that I work with have grown up with a threatening or unpredictable parent or a situation of a similar form, that may be living with a parent or caregiver who is: narcissistic, a volatile alcoholic, explosive due to trauma, physically abusive, or unpredictable emotionally due to severe mental health issues* etc. Now as a sensitive child to survive the situation you create adaptive behaviours which keep you safe in the moment but can negatively impact your relationship to your own power for the future - until you engage in the healing work. These are some common behaviours and beliefs I see at play for highly sensitive people. (*Severe mental health issues is a broad term here and I am not suggesting all people working with mental health problems are emotionally unpredictable).
1. Fear the power of their own voice
If you are living with an emotionally unpredictable or volatile parent, voicing how you feel can simply not seem safe or let alone welcome. I have worked with a number of clients who say ‘I can’t hear my own voice’ with a sense of panic. Even when they are trying to listen it doesn’t feel present - let alone them feeling able to articulate their own voice. This can be for different reasons: Sometimes our own opinion or desires can be drowned out by the loud voice of demanding authoritarian family members or the needs of others that are being prioritised. It can feel hard to define or hear your own voice from that of others, when you are so sensitive to the needs of others and absorbent of their emotions. It can feel hard to hear your own thoughts.
We also live in a patriarchal society that not only has shut down the voice of women but also the emotional experience of men - so our cultural inheritance can be impacting fear around articulating our voice as well. The witch hunts have left a strong wound for women. We may also fear our own complexity, and find the paradox of our emotional experience too difficult to experience, let alone voice. Through fear, we may then shut down to parts of ourselves that we deem unacceptable and they remain unintegrated within our psyche.
However, this shutting down to or numbing one aspect to ourselves, can have a parallel effect of freezing our whole ability to hear or articulate our own voice at all as we are not in a flow state, rather a self policed one. We then lose the power of our own inner voice and the power of articulating our voice in the world. So what do we do? The first step is to move towards and vocalise all those parts of ourselves, perhaps in a safe held space using EFT to create release, to start to free up your voice.
2. Fear the power of ‘imperfection’
Many highly sensitive people are perfectionists to some degree, I have noticed. They can be very hard on themselves and critical. The world can become very black and white when you're a perfectionist. You're not allowed to fail and you mustn't get it wrong - If you do, you might mentally punish yourself mercilessly. But often this inner critic is an internalised version of an external critic we once had. It’s usually not even our own words we hear but theirs. You were taught to be perfect and attempt to make no mistakes, then maybe you wouldn't be shouted at or criticized by your caregiver. So we get accustomed to suppressing ourselves and who we are - we need to be understanding, we mustn’t be too big, too loud, have too much energy, as it's not tolerated so we need to stay still, quiet or small in some way or ‘get it right’ which can create anxiety.
The world becomes very black-and-white when you're living with perfectionist tendencies. Nothing you do can ever be good enough, and maybe that's how you were made to feel when you were little.You are in constant competition with yourself for an impossible prize, to be perfect. No human has ever been perfect, nor will they be. Great power can lie within our ‘imperfections’ when we are able to embrace them with kindness and we can see a massive reduction in stress levels when we are able to be more accepting of ourselves and not expect the impossible to be achieved. Take highly sensitive nature as an example. ‘You’re too sensitive’ may be a criticism you heard frequently? When in fact you’re highly sensitive and this gives access to incredible gifts.
3. Fear the power of fully feeling
Dealing with an unpredictable or volatile parent can overwhelm our nervous system, their responses feeling ‘too much, too soon, too fast’. If we feel isolated and the situation is overwhelming, we often try to manage it by trying to control our thoughts as well as our emotional or physical responses. Our fear feels overwhelming so we dissociate, our rage feels terrifying so we disconnect from it, our body feels unsafe to be in so we numb ourselves to not feel present. This is the primal part of the brain stepping in to keep us from harm, smart move.
The problem isn't the way we survive in the moment, as we will be doing the best we possibly can to live through it - but what can happen is we get stuck in this cycle which then impacts our mental, emotional and physical health. We can also feel cut off from the power of our own true feelings and thoughts, feeling safe to call out what we don’t feel acceptable, experiencing our big expression. This is when we need support to release and process these past sometimes incredibly intense frozen responses and reactions in the mind-body (trauma responses) so we can once again access our power. The power to relax fully and rest, for our physical body to have the ability to function to full capacity, the ability to express the power of our total emotional range without freezing.
4. Fear the power of their anger
The term ‘but I need to be a good girl’ is one I hear many highly sensitive women say at some point in sessions. They have been conditioned to be ‘good’ to be loved and accepted. But ‘being good or good enough’ can actually have nothing to do with being kind or ethical - ‘being good’ can really mean be obedient, controlled, be coerced and do not express your basic needs or feelings to be acceptable. Don't be challenging, is what we're being asked - don’t express your ‘no’ or objections, ‘be good’ or feel rejected or shamed. This controlling behaviour becomes even worse if we're dealing with an abusive parent or caregiver on some level (be that emotionally, mentally or physically).
Now every parent has to manage children's behaviour and maintain some level of order, I know because I am one(!) and parenting styles change of course. For example, I would say I am much more authoritarian than my partner, who’s style is ‘gentle parenting’ (as he is a gentle soul). But I give my daughter a great deal of autonomy of choice, I give her space to get her wild or intense energy out in ‘rough’ playtime, allow her to scream at me without shouting her down - to express her anger and be heard, feel loved after and talk about the feelings underneath after (FYI I am FAR from a perfect parent, I mess up all the time but this approach is important to me).
The problem for highly sensitive people or any child for that matter is when certain emotions are demonised as ‘bad’ or you don’t feel safe to express them such as your anger or rage. Why is this a problem? Because our anger is often the voice for our boundaries when they are crossed. Our anger is an articulation of a power - fighting to keep us safe or simply meet our needs. If you're not allowed to express anger or if it even feels unsafe to experience it, we can be shutting down a bridge to our own inner power. Our anger has a message - listen to me, this isn’t fair, I don’t want to do this, this doesn’t feel good to me etc. Our anger demands to be felt, and to be heard, and if it's not, it can remain in the body and subconscious. When our anger is transformed, it can become empowering, instead of anger we might experience: clarity, assertiveness, be able to articulate what we need and be able to define our boundaries.
What next
So how do you move beyond your fears to reclaim your sense of power? Well you work with the subconscious beliefs and memories that are stoking the flames of your fear, we do the inner work. For me that came in the form of EFT and more recently intuitive healing to engage with the subconscious mind, but we each have our own path. But I will say this, ignoring it won’t make it go away, facing our fears and releasing them is how we grow and regain our self empowerment.
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