Is your inner voice actually your own?
Belonging is the wounding of our time
I had a somatic therapy session recently, where I was working with an incredibly uncomfortable sensation of anxiety and tension I’d been feeling of late.
We started to explore the dense, swirling pit of my stomach that, like waves, would travel up into my throat, constricting it.
And then, what soon became apparent, was another part of me that did not want it there. That was in active resistance.
This part felt like a large piece of rectangular metal, pushing down the sensations at all costs, with all its might.
As I brought my focused attention and breath to this dynamic, I noticed the resistance was amplifying the anxious sensations. It would make my stomach turn even more strongly, my muscles contract through my arms and legs even more tightly, a sense of panic increasingly emerge.
With presence and caring awareness, the resistance eventually felt okay to step aside, and I had a deep, rich session exploring the anxious sensations themselves.
When we were wrapping up, my therapist asked,
“What’s one of the main things you’re taking away from today?”
I responded,
“The resistance was when it felt the absolute worst. When the tense, contracted, anxious sensations in my body were the most intense. The most fierce. The most like panic.”
This session is at the heart of something I’ve been thinking about deeply for some time now.
It’s not really a story about anxiety, but a story about belonging.
During my master’s in international development, I studied how oppression, violence and poverty are never just individual.
They’re structural, cultural and societal. You can’t understand a person’s suffering without understanding the system they’re suffering inside.
In a completely different sector - the therapy room - I’ve seen the exact same pattern emerge.
The voice and expectations of our societal and cultural context become the voice and expectations of our family, which eventually can become our inner voice and the expectations we hold ourselves to.
As one example:
The modern, western culture I’m a part of, at large, says emotions are inconvenient, possibly a bit weak, and that they get in the way of being a stoic, diligent hard worker, and an acceptable, worthwhile adult.
“Get over it”. “Toughen up”. “People have it worse”. “There’s no time to feel”. “There’s a deadline, a job to do.”
Adults, parents, professionals inherit this, and unconsciously move towards or away from others, and their own family, depending on their emotions and expression. They may even give or withdraw love.
Children learn what they can and can’t express to stay loved and in connection, and develop an inner voice and strategies to shame, shun, silence, suppress. Culture’s voice becomes their own.
There’s much wounding to our time: the meaning crisis, the culture crisis, the climate crisis. But I’ve started to think belonging is, at least, one of the greatest woundings of all.
In myself and in the clients I work with, I continue to see a very deep, learned sense of which parts of us belong, and which don’t. What qualities make us desirable, acceptable, worthy of love and care, and what qualities, emotions, needs are unwelcome or make us less than.
Everyone’s template is a little different.
Some learn anger is absolutely not tolerated. Others learn it’s the only emotion the house allows. Some learn no emotion is welcome, and you must be the perfect happy human, always.
Some learn love means being so selfless your own needs sit outside the circle of care. Others learn you need walls of armour and smallness to stay safe in connection.
Some learn that if you hate yourself hard enough, other people’s words might hurt less. Others learn you need to attack first, to stop feeling the pain.
We learn.
And we learn to silence, suppress, shun, shame, exile.
When parts of us weren’t welcomed, held, seen, supported the way we needed - especially as children - we learned this does not belong.
This part of me, this need of mine, this quality, this emotion, is not welcome.
It feels deeply personal, and it is, because it’s our experience.
But it’s also an expression of our culture. It’s how the culture touched you, specifically.
And because we learned, we go on sustaining that lack of belonging in ourselves.
There’s a real suffering, a real pain, a real primal rupturing, in being cast out into the dark, alone. In not belonging.
Whilst it often feels like the thing standing in the way of the life we want for ourselves, I have so much compassion toward the parts of us that learned that pushing away, exiling, withholding belonging from ourselves were the solutions for safety, connection and minimising suffering. Because at one point, they were.
And, it’s this same resistance that sustains inner tension, inner conflict and inner pain. The same wound, replaying.
It’s the pervasive voice that says, “this does not belong.”
The journey, as I see it then, is the journey of welcoming home.
What parts of me, what needs, what emotions, what qualities currently live outcast in the cold, shadowy corners of my being, in need of warmth and care?
My teacher once said, “How do we adopt our orphaned brothers and sisters?”
What parts of us would benefit from the tender, slow, courageous work of welcoming back?
What parts of us can belong, even simply for the fact that they are here? That they are parts of us?
If a lack of belonging creates the wound, belonging is an antidote.
If shame is the method of exiling, compassion* is the river toward belonging.
*Not compassion as fixing, or as forcing acceptance, but as a sitting beside and with. A non-judgemental presence that extends understanding, care and holding… what we needed in the first place, right?
The way you’d sit beside a frightened animal, not asking it to be different, just staying, until it feels safe enough to be as it is.
And linking back to the interconnectedness of individual, family, culture and society, this individual work becomes cultural repair.
In the way we hold ourselves and meet ourselves, we model outward what’s welcome, what’s possible.
We see the world not as it is, but as we are.
What we can welcome in ourselves, we can welcome in others. We sow a seed of belonging that has the potential to grow into its own garden.
And perhaps what we’re really doing, underneath all of it, is finding out what — and who — we belong to.
Parts of us need a home, and there is a part of us that can be the home. Our essential nature.
This isn’t a self we build or earn, but the ground we were and are always standing on. And once we’ve felt that ground beneath us, belonging stops being something we chase, and starts being something we recognise.
A resting place within us, and beyond us, that is always there waiting for us.
This is a kind of belonging noone can take away from you.
To leave you with a short poem on belonging
when I close my eyes
sometimes my stomach draws me in, as if a tumble dryer is stuck on run, spinning over, and over, and over again.
anxiety, i was told.
sometimes, my shoulders try to kiss my knees, like the little green caterpillar does when retreating from the magpie’s hungry eye.
shame, i was told.
sometimes, my eyes become the vessel for an army of teardrops, each carrying their forbidden secrets of wartime wounds and long-lost loves.
grief, i was told.
sometimes, lightning bolts through every. single. cell. charged with the ferocity of a mother tiger, defending the preciousness of her young.
anger, i was told.
and other times, when i close my eyes, i feel the centre of my chest beating, and a warm wave rippling out, soothing, smoothing the memories of these mammal muscles.
the boundary of my skin blurs, and - all of a sudden - i’m no longer a single body in time and space but a node, perfectly placed, in a vast and living web, here and now.
my voice sings the songs of birds, and resistance dissolves like morning fog off a summer field.
it’s no longer ‘my heart beating to the rhythm of its own drum’ but my whole being beating with the rhythm of life.
i searched, and i searched, and i searched for the name of this happening.
until a fellow traveller, who’d seen far and wide, who carried the sun’s radiance in her eyes, whispered,
“ahhhh, it sounds like belonging”
Take care,
Taylor
xx
So beautiful Taylor! Loved the context of systemic oppression and how they contribute on our inner voices. And the poem is stunning, I felt my body soften with its tender offering, thank you 🙏