Essentials: Are You Blended Or Solid In Your Sense of Self?
The fawn response focuses our mind and awareness outside ourselves. In my work, I call this the External Orientation. This means we’re interpreting our reality through the lens of other people, places, or things. We are not associated with ourselves and not processing reality through our own perception and lived experience.
This orientation can lead us to feel diffuse, fluid, or blended with others – especially their feelings, their opinions, and their priorities.
We end up taking on things that we don’t actually agree with, like, or are compatible with our personal, unique well-being design. This is how we either lose ourselves or never come to really know who we are.
Somatically, or in our felt-sense, this shows up as feeling undefined, partially real, incomplete, “missing something”, or feeling lost and confused.
Mentally, we’re hyper-focused on what the “right thing is to say or do”, highly concerned about the other person’s perceptions (especially about ourselves, as that tends to define our worth), and we believe that we have to figure out how to make things work.
No wonder we don’t know who we are!
The solution to this habit is simple, yet not easy to implement. I call it, “Internal Orientation”.
Learn what this is and how to start implementing it in your daily life in today’s episode!
Internal Orientation is the habit of being focused within yourself, inquiring about and being aware of your own thoughts, feelings, intuitions, perceptions, and values about what is going on within and outside of you.
Put another way, you’re asking yourself what you think and feel about what you’re encountering.
Sounds simple enough, yet when we don’t have this practiced, we often face the challenge of sensing into, hearing, or identifying our own sense of things.
In the Codependency Healing System, we start with a practice of building Inward Awareness to nurture this innate, natural awareness.
This involves deliberately taking time to connect with and notice what comes up in your awareness. Students are listening for sensations, thoughts, perspectives, nudges, intuitions – whatever shows up.
From here, we begin to discern what they are by growing our sense of connection to them and then we can inquire within about what those signals are telling us (Ready to make this real in your world? Take the “3 Secrets That Heal Codependency Permanently Workshop” and get your exclusive, limited-time offer to join this work. Start here: https://workshop.freetheself.com).
This is the work of coming to know ourselves, trust ourselves, and follow our own path forward.
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