The Slow Erosion of My Soul

Conditioning Happens Outside of Our Awareness

Nov 22, 2024

You’ve heard me say this before, no one has authority over you. What you do though is you give your authority away without even realizing it.

Just to clarify I am not referring to outside authorities such as the laws that govern you or the governing system of the land in which you live.

If I go to another country, I know I am expected to abide by their laws. If I don’t agree with those laws, then I shouldn’t go.

Let there be no confusion in my use of the word authority. As much as I say, no one has authority over you I am not implying that anyone is above the law.

When I use the word authority, I’m referring to your ability to make decisions over your body, your thoughts, your reactions and responses to life, and the direction you take in your life. Simply put, your authority is the expression of your Soul.

Your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, your body, these are not separate, isolated aspects of who you are. Your authority, your Soul, is the expression of your totality. But we treat ourselves as if we can isolate these aspects. Locking up the unwanted aspects somewhere deep inside, out of sight, and then wondering why we feel incomplete.

Now, with that technicality cleared up, did you read my article from last week, Frozen in a Moment of Time?

Have you taken any time to reflect on whether or not you’re living your life frozen in a moment of time from your past and may be completely ignorant that you are doing that?

When you’re standing in the middle of a forest, you cannot see all the trees and how they are casting a shadow over you. You cannot see the path that you’ve traveled to get where you are. Why you went one way and not another? How that obstacle influenced you to go around it? When the storm came and things got really scary how you made yourself small and hid away. This is why I encourage people to seek help because you aren’t going to see these things for yourself.

Most of humanity is oblivious to how they make decisions. I mean no disrespect. It’s just the plain simple truth. When we’re not using our authority, we’re living in our shadow.

Even when you think you are making decisions or choices, consciously, you aren’t.

As a late-diagnosed autistic, I too, was fooled to believe I was making my choices consciously and living authentically.

I discovered yoga and meditation a few months apart when I was nine. They became my coping strategies. Yoga allowed me to experience my body deeply and taught me the power of my breath to calm my nervous system. Meditation taught me rather quickly to be an observer of myself and others. My rigorous practice of mindfulness was more like a constant wakeful meditation to carefully imprison my sensitive nature and externally, present a version of myself that didn’t upset others.

I mindfully disassociated from myself because then I was successful at presenting as normal. It’s called “masking”, and is another survival strategy. However, masking also meant that I suffered in silence all the noise and sensory disturbances of the world around me.

By “present as normal”, I mean, I was able to disguise my emotional state. I kept my thoughts to myself. I was able to appear alert and engaged when I was bored. I mimicked the behaviors of others to avoid drawing negative attention.

Conditioning happens outside of your awareness.

I was aware of my behavior. I was aware of my survival strategies. I spent every waking moment thinking about possible scenarios, analyzing all the what-ifs, to determine how to respond and what to say. I rehearsed these scenarios in my head for hours every night to prepare myself for the next day. I was aware of how I was pretending as I put a tremendous amount of effort into it. Yet, I wasn’t aware of how I was erasing myself from my life. With each day lived like this, I was a performer in my life obeying the cues and directions society imposed on me. I knew it was all just a mask and I believed if I just waited patiently, someday, someone would see me.

When someone did take an interest in me, who was he interested in, the real me or the performer? I had been wearing that mask for so long, even I identified with it and proclaimed I was living true to myself. Sure, we got glimpses of me without the mask but only those aspects that helped to make him feel complete. For all my decades of what I believed was mindfulness practice I was as oblivious as you are now.

There are so many ways we invalidate ourselves.

Self-deprecating humor.
Dismissing our needs and wants to prioritize the needs and wants of others. (Basic training for People Pleasers AND the handbook passed down through generations to most mothers and some fathers).
Avoiding confrontation to keep the peace (which means you’re sacrificing your inner peace).
Staying silent about your feelings because you’ve been ridiculed and called too sensitive.
Comparing ourselves to others. (You cannot be compared to anyone, fairly. There’s only one you!)
Seeking validation from others. For women, this too often means using your body like a commodity.

Recently I was sharing a story with a friend about an embarrassing incident and I discovered in that retelling how I had invalidated myself. How my mind had invalidated myself.

In my early 20’s I had fibromyalgia. This particular day was a bad one and I was in a state referred to as “fibro fog”. This is when the brain is so overwhelmed with dealing with widespread pain that there’s a significant decrease in situational awareness. I was trying to distract and comfort myself from the pain by painting. I had been using a large bottle of acrylic paint and needed more. It’s natural to give your paint bottle a good shake before using it and so, I picked it up and gave it a good shake not realizing the lid wasn’t secured properly. I got paint all down one side of my face. I didn’t want to move for fear of spreading the mess I was in. I was painting in our guest bedroom which was carpeted. So, I called out for help. My husband was home and he readily came to my aid. However, before he gave me the washcloth, he took my picture. I wasn’t happy about him taking my picture. I was embarrassed about the mess I’d made. I was a grown woman. Yet, I felt like I was about two.

I didn’t have the energy to argue with him and I brushed it off, telling myself, “It’s not the worst thing to have happened to me”. I minimized my feelings. I literally had paint on my face. My self-esteem was extremely low. I didn’t want that moment immortalized in a picture. Yet, I gave him the free pass to embarrass me.

This was just another example of the slow erosion of my soul that I went along with. I don’t say that to be poetic or dramatic in any way.

There’s a story there that I told myself. “I didn’t have the energy to argue with him”. Why did I believe speaking up for myself would create an argument? How much effort was really needed? The air in my lungs to use my voice and say, “No, you don’t have my permission to take my picture”. I should have the right to decide something as simple as that in my life, right?
There’s a whole lot of self-judgment and criticism and not much self-compassion. What, because I’m an adult I can’t make mistakes?
Just because I was abused in my childhood doesn’t mean I should accept any form of disrespect later in life. What I did at that moment was to undervalue myself. *My husband may not have intended any disrespect. Maybe it was just funny to him.
I was perpetuating the pattern of non-self-acceptance. I was still hiding behind a mask of shame. How can I fault others for not accepting me the way I am when I didn’t acknowledge and accept myself?

Do you see how many layers of conditioning there are in just this one minor incident?

This is how we invalidate ourselves without realizing what we are doing and why it’s a mistake to try to go it alone when it comes to our mental health.

Do you recall times in your life when you felt a certain way but repressed your feelings and stayed silent? I want you to see how, in those moments, you gave your authority away. You sold yourself short and, in the process, you weren’t walking the path that is intended for your soul. When we do this enough times, we inevitably feel lost.

This belief that “abuse makes us stronger” is just another layer of conditioning. It’s the story we tell ourselves to dress up something ugly and reprehensible into something pretty and acceptable. What we’re actively doing by going along with this concept that “abuse makes us stronger” is conditioning ourselves to accept and tolerate abuse.

When I was 12 years old, I had to flee for my life with my sweater almost torn off my back, and in bare feet, I ran through the snow to my neighbors and called the police. After this particularly violent escape, children’s protection services were contacted and I was removed from my home.

My eldest brother somehow was given charge of my care. I have this memory of my eldest brother and I sitting on his couch side-by-side posing for a picture, a rare happy moment. His girlfriend wanted to take a picture of us. She wanted him to put his arm around me. He didn’t want to and they got into an argument in front of me over this. The picture was never taken. I was told to go to my room, my temporary accommodation. I stuffed down the emotions of helplessness, of worthlessness, of this moral suffering of feeling unlovable. Feeling like I was trash.

So, that day many years later when my husband took a picture of me with acrylic paint all over my face on a particularly bad day with fibromyalgia, I remained silent because at least he took a picture of me. He saw me even if he didn’t see my suffering.

Take some time to consider the consequences of those moments when you have invalidated yourself and dismissed bits of your soul without realizing the significance of those choices.

You become stuck in a life pattern;
Your mental health suffers;
Your physical health suffers;
You feel lost and alone;
You find yourself in the wrong places with the wrong people;
You use harmful coping mechanisms; (I misused meditation as a way to disassociate.)
If you haven’t completely numbed yourself out and are aware of this dissonance within yourself but can’t identify the why, the worst-case scenario may be suicidal ideations and you don’t seek help.
You don’t seek help.

I hope this article gave you an Ah-ha about yourself. I would love to hear from you. You never know, maybe your thoughts or questions may inspire someone else.

Mental Health Matters by Grace Dakini

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