The Perils of Being Homogenized

Losing Your Authenticity

I am on the autism spectrum, previously known as Asperger’s. I was not diagnosed until I was in my forties and suffering from PTSD. Getting that diagnosis was a huge step forward for me. This was the beginning of my journey to accept myself as different. And it's okay to be different. I'm not weird. Just different. What a relief that was. The challenges in my life started to make sense.

In the years that followed, which included my separation and eventual divorce, I noticed when I shared my stories of being different, that the strongest response came from so-called “neurotypicals” who came up to me after my talk to thank me for what I shared. This was very comforting for me because it made me feel a little more normal. I truly feel everyone is suffering on some level due to the perils of being normal. This is what conditioning does to us and you don’t have to be on the spectrum to feel this way!

Conditioning comes in through the neutrino field. Conditioning is also experienced through our contact with others, through our energies, and how our energy field, our aura, interact with each other. It is purely mechanical. Most people are not intentionally or deliberately trying to influence us negatively.

In our early childhood years, literally from the moment of our birth, we are conditioned by the energy fields of our parents and caregivers. As parents, it is their job to keep their children safe. As parents, they make all the decisions for their children. Without recognizing what your child’s inner authority is, you cannot teach them how to use it correctly. We become conditioned to always look outside of ourselves for guidance, and authority – even when we’re opposed to authority – we’ll doubt ourselves. The consequence of not being taught our inner authority from childhood means we're being taught that we do not have any inner authority. And when we're taught that we do not have an inner authority, we are being taught not to love ourselves. Only when you know how to use your inner authority correctly do you know how to respect yourself and show up for yourself as yourself in the world.

My home environment of my earliest years there was alcoholism. This means there were sudden outbursts of verbal and physical violence. My older siblings by 6, 7, and 9 years would take me and barricade us into a room for our safety. Children under the age of 7 take in everything without the capacity to filter what they are taking in. If you can imagine the different strong emotions flying around, from the rage between the adults and the fears of my siblings, that’s what I was taking in. That was my conditioning environment. After the rage had subsided and the smashing had stopped, the door would be cracked open to send me out to sit on the lion’s lap. It became my role to be the pacifier to keep everybody calm.

The worst-case scenario of not being taught your inner authority, when you can’t say yes or no and set your comfort boundaries, is that you are being taught to hate yourself. That is absolutely how I felt. I had no love for myself. I only had hatred for myself. I couldn’t stand to look at myself in the mirror. When everything that made me, me, was being criticized as being wrong and I was “told” (usually by being yelled at or by being hit) to stop doing what gave me comfort or joy, I learned that hitting myself was correct behavior instead of rocking, or jumping, or racing around on my tippy toes. I would isolate myself and hurt myself. I would bite the inside of my palms as hard as I could, tear off my toenails, or I would put needles into my skin. Yes, my examples are extreme because I was undiagnosed as being on the spectrum and therefore my “odd” behavior was not understood. I was trying to cope with sensory overwhelm.

The ONE thing in this world that should truly be the simplest thing for us is to be ourselves and yet that seems to be one of the most difficult things for us to do. In my case, it wasn’t just the challenge of being myself in a world that didn’t understand me. It was and still is hugely challenging to be in my body. From the moment I wake, I feel like the world is attacking me through my senses. I have to start my day off with meditation. It is meditation that has taught me to observe my senses, what is there without judging it as my nervous system is highly aroused, it is highly alert.

Temple Grandin gave a talk at Google, about 10 years ago, where she visually showed what her brain pattern looks like compared with a person with PTSD. She concluded that people on the autism spectrum share a similar brain pattern to people with PTSD because our nervous systems are highly aroused. This is why I believe I was “resistant” to treatment for my PTSD. I say “resistant” because that is how the medical field described my lack of improvement through therapy not because I was intentionally being uncooperative.

Even today, I find it very difficult to wear clothing. It's a constant distraction that my mind is trying to suppress the discomfort I'm experiencing simply by wearing clothing. When I look at my Human Design it reveals that my body is the hermit which means I like to be natural – to be in the world naturally. As a child, that means running around naked. And as an adult, the moment I’m in my front door the clothes come off.

There’s more going on in my Human Design than just the fact that I am a natural hermit. On a deeper level, my super sense is feeling. My whole body, through my skin, is receptive and taking in my environment and the people in my environment. Add to this, the quality of my aura which is open and enveloping, I am a walking, talking receiver.

Can you imagine being imprinted as a role model? I remember feeling the pressure of being a role model when I was just a toddler. The first book I read after being diagnosed as autistic was “Pretending To Be Normal” by Liane Holliday Willey. Her story resonated with me but the word that really grabbed me, was the word “pretending”. As a role model, what I value most is being honest, being authentic. But I had felt like I had been pretending my whole life trying to “fit in”, to belong, to be seen as “normal”.

I got so good at it that I became a chameleon. Depending on the situation, depending on who I was with, teachers, schoolmates, at home, it didn't matter who I interacted with, I was very, very good at adapting. If you do this long enough, wearing different masks to suit the situation, you’ll 1- forget who you really are and 2- believe this persona IS who you are. I felt it made me a better life coach because I could play the role my clients needed me to be.

But I do recognize that my chameleon nature came to be out of the desire to avoid conflict and the logical explanation for this could be said it was because I had an abusive home life and I was punished physically for being me. Naturally, I would want to avoid conflict. I became very good at people pleasing, anticipating what they wanted. When we look at my Human Design below, you’ll see that I have an undefined (white) emotional center.

You can see in my body graph that I have 5 centers that are white (undefined). It is through these centers that I became conditioned to be “normal” – or homogenized, to hide the parts of myself that made me different and unique.

The emotional center is the triangle to the right and is also called the solar plexus. It is the emotional awareness center as well as a type of fuel. This means that I am highly empathic. I feel what others feel and it’s amplified in my being. And remember that my super sense is feeling. Of course, there are pros and cons to this. As a life coach, I could tune in to how my clients felt. But without the knowledge of my Human Design and my inner authority, it was very easy to become overwhelmed by others’ emotions because others’ emotions made me uncomfortable and I didn’t recognize for a long time that those emotions weren’t my own; I became very skilled at “reading” people and anticipating their needs. You know that person, “Mr. Nice Guy”, the person who never quarrels, who never rocks the boat, who is always smiling and laughing, and is the ultimate people pleaser. That was me – making me a very good chameleon. Remember those strong emotions flying around in my childhood environment, that is how I was conditioned to avoid conflict.

If you have an open crown and Ajna like I do, the top 2 centers, form your mind. They represent both your mind, as in your conscious thoughts, and your brain.

If I go even deeper into my chart with what’s called my variables (not represented here), my mind is logical yet, my brain is abstract. I can remember being asked questions and having 2 completely different answers because I could give a logical answer and I could give an abstract answer. I had to learn my teacher's preference, if they were more logical or abstract to succeed in school. I could, with time, zero in on which answer they wanted but that internal struggle, of having that doubt and confusion as to what was the RIGHT answer was always dependent on the other person and their perception of what the right answer was. Not exactly favorable conditions to build self-esteem or self-confidence when you’re dependent on the other person’s perception of right and wrong.

In my Human Design, my life force energy is largely unconscious – it’s what you see in my body graph above as the connecting RED lines between my sacral (red square), spleen (brown triangle), and G (yellow diamond) center.

All life force energy is created when you are defined (colored) between two centers. In my example, this is the only place in the Human Design body graph that has the potential to connect to four centers – the throat, G, sacral, and spleen. As you can see above, I have 3 channels that become one life force energy. These channels are referred to as Integration channels. I don’t have the connecting energy to the throat. With this life force energy, it means that with each new life experience, I need some alone time to process it given my hermit nature, to integrate it and without consciously knowing it, it mutates my beliefs and therefore my behavior.

You can see in my body graph that my throat is undefined. It is the third square from the top. I was “non-verbal” for the first 5 years of my life. I mostly used sounds, grunts, and groans as a negative response or “hhmmmmm” when I liked something. I now understand that this odd behavior was correct for my Human Design as I was speaking from my Sacral authority. It speaks the truth for me. I could use language in my mind because I had long conversations in my head but I couldn't get the words out quick enough to speak. It made me a very frustrated child. It didn't become any easier when I got to school because the teachers didn’t have the patience to wait for me to speak and often avoided calling on me altogether. I spent hours every night reviewing the conversations that had gone on around me that day and what I would have liked to have said but didn’t. I spent hours rehearsing possible conversations in my head in preparation for the next day but no matter how much I practiced in my head, I couldn’t speak when the moment came or it never came out the way I had rehearsed. By the time I reached high school, I had developed a speech impediment. I stuttered because I always felt this pressure to answer questions quickly, and the more pressure I felt the more difficult it was for me to speak.

I had one figure in my life who had been a teacher. This person wanted to help me learn things by heart, by memory, and with great speed. He would quiz me, and if I did not speak quickly enough, in the time it took him to snap his fingers, he would strike me across my face. My Integration channels are very individualistic energy and as such I don’t respond well to “authority figures”. As is the case for generators in general, I don’t respond well to people telling me what to do, so I made matters worse by clenching my jaw in complete defiance and refusing to respond to his testing me.

That red line between the 3 centers, is my unconscious nature, meaning I cannot witness this about myself. This energy is designed for survival by following my convictions in how I behave or what I feel is correct human behavior. When somebody criticized me for my behavior that was so devastating to me. It felt soul-crushing to me if I felt I had done something wrong, especially if I offended or hurt somebody because I have an open solar plexus. When a center is undefined or white in the body graph, how it functions is that it acts like an amplifier of whatever its nature is.

It took me a very long time to learn that a large part of the emotions I felt were not mine. This lesson happened very suddenly. It was during my marriage. I was interacting with my husband and another friend of ours. This was a new person in our lives and the joy that was being experienced between my husband and this other person, I realized later in the evening for the first time in my life, how I was experiencing joy, wasn't my joy! I was experiencing the joy coming from them. I cried that evening. For the very first time, I realized I didn’t know what gave me joy. I could not identify what made me happy. By this time, I was in my thirties and the shock of this realization created a rift within myself that only I could fix. I thought I was happily married. I thought I had success in my life. I had checked all the right boxes. I had a good education. My husband and I had built our dream home. In my mind, we were the ideal couple that others wanted to be like. The conditioning I am describing here is partly my undefined emotional center but it is also my undefined heart/ego center. That’s the smallest of the triangles just above the solar plexus. I had no self-worth. My sense of worth was derived from being in service to others, like being the “ideal wife”, even though I would have stubbornly disagreed with you at that time. In my mind, I was a leader and a teacher. I did not feel like I was a follower. I desired to empower others so I never saw how I was giving my power away for free, without expecting anything in return.

You see, I was still ignorant of my conditioning. For starters, I didn’t recognize that I hated myself. Instead, I just felt unloved. I admit that I have attempted suicide and what stopped me in my youth was not out of self-love but my love for others. No matter how beaten down I was by others, I was determined to love others. And that expression, “You can’t love others unless you love yourself”, I felt was total bullshit and I was going to prove it. I even felt someday I’d write a book about it! When someone is thinking about suicide, it’s because they want to escape the pain and powerlessness, they’re in. It feels like an act of salvation, an act of self-love but that’s what we tell ourselves. It is a problem of the mind and it is a solution of the mind. It isn’t an act of self-love. The truth is, it is the greatest act of self-hatred there is. Once a truth is revealed there is no going back. I no longer struggle with suicidal ideations.

The opposite of a role model is a hypocrite or I could say, “pretender”. I had all this pressure, which comes in through that top white center. It’s the pressure to know, to have all the answers, to explain myself. Because it’s undefined, it acts like an amplifier. So, yes, it’s amplified pressure to be a role model, from the black side of my chart, which means I am conscious of my role, and is where my mind’s attention is.

How could I love myself when at my core, I felt fake? And then there’s that popular colloquial, “fake it till you make it” implying that “faking it” is a good thing. Today, my Asperger mind just cannot accept when words and actions don’t align. For too long, I had to fake it to survive.

Without knowing my inner authority, my life force energy, what makes me unique gets hijacked by all the undefined (white) centers. I was living my life from my shadow, from how I was conditioned. I share my story because I want people to understand the perils of being normal or how becoming so strongly identified with your “not-self” conditioning and the need to fit in and belong, this is how it shows up in your life;

• When you’re too afraid to speak your truth

• When you’re avoiding conflict at the expense of your beliefs and values

• When you’re holding onto relationships that are not supportive or harm you

• When you have to prove your worth and can’t say no

• When you have to be the center of attention and be the funny guy all the time

• When you have to be recognized for your ideas and you have to share your opinions even when they aren’t being sought out

These are all indications that you’re not following your inner authority and you’re not honoring your true self. Remember, there's no blame here. This happens on an unconscious level. But if I can wake you up, then this pain and suffering becomes a choice.

My life has been transformed. I am happy. I still face challenges and obstacles. Life isn’t all rainbows and unicorns. For instance, while I write this, my mother has been hospitalized. She has been there for the past week and her condition remains uncertain. The challenges I've been putting my body through, my mind through, to be by her side, I know I am using my energy correctly. Yes, I am tired but I go to sleep feeling satisfied with how I have used my time and energy. I can accept whatever will be. My happiness remains. My peace of mind remains for the most part 😉 after all, I am still learning to use my mind correctly.

I sincerely apologize for not getting this posted on Friday, I wasn’t satisfied with my first 2 drafts.

What was your biggest takeaway from this article?

If what you just read piques your interest and you want to hear more, I invite you to subscribe to my newsletter. I will also explore other Mental Health Matters through the lens of Human Design.

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Friendly Reminder…

It is my mission to expand your self-awareness and empower you to make decisions correctly, using my outer authority but never attempting to be YOUR authority. I ask you to keep in mind, that I am only touching on a very small aspect of Human Design with each article. Whenever I share my example of my Human Design, it is only natural that you will compare it to your Human Design. For you to fully understand that aspect within your body graph it has to be seen within your whole structure, which I cannot do in an article. What we’re doing is looking at a single piece of a bigger puzzle. You don’t know what the big picture is from a single piece unless it’s seen in the whole picture.

Using my Human Design as an example, I want to stimulate your curiosity to explore your Human Design. If we have an aspect in common, it will only be at the surface level and not in terms of your whole picture. Be aware that the aspect may resonate with you but at the same time not quite, and that’s perfectly okay because we are each uniquely different.

I trust that my readers are intelligent and are capable of experimenting with your Human Design to come to your own conclusions. Please don’t take me at my word! I want you to own your power and it starts with knowing your true self.

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Coming Soon…

Every Friday (to the best of my ability), I will go more in-depth as succinctly as possible on a topic I only hinted at previously. Remember, we’re assembling a puzzle and I’m only delivering one piece at a time. But each piece will require time to process on your own. This is what you can expect in your inbox over the weeks to come:

• I will discuss each type of Authority (your decision-making process);

  • Emotional Authority

  • Sacral Authority

  • Splenic Authority

  • Heart Center Authority (2 versions according to your energy type)

  • Self-Projected Authority

  • Environment Authority

  • Lunar Authority

• How is the mind used correctly as an Outer Authority

• Human Design and your Variable of Motivation, such as “hope” (There are 6 different types of motivation)

• Understanding the patterns of over-thinking, worry, confusion, and self-doubt. The basic Human Design structure of the mind for every single human being

• How do you correctly connect with others through the lens of Human Design

• Why is Human Design not a quick fix and why it’s not easy. How you can work on yourself without the constant effort of working on yourself

If you know someone who would like to receive my newsletter please share and let’s get the conversation started about Mental Health Matters so that no one ever feels alone.