Not all of the messages that you see are meant for you
We all see a million messages every day, through social media, TV, advertising, podcasts, our friends, our family and more, but here’s the thing:
Not all of those messages are meant for you.
Sure, some of the messages we see may hit a nerve and some of them may even land with an oompft in your heart but I’m talking here about a different kind of message. I’m talking about the messages that you see and take on board because they match the stories you tell yourself about yourself, or the world, or maybe even because they support an existing behaviour that you have.
Let me give you an example: Hi, I’m Liz and I’m really good at making myself do stuff even when my body tells me that it’s had enough. A particularly great example of this is when I continued to run, for a good few months, on a broken foot. Sure it hurt when I walked around and it hurt when I started running and it hurt as soon as I stopped running but, importantly, when I was in flow and running like the wind it was fine fine fine. And *Drum roll please* the reason it was “fine fine fine” is because I blocked out the pain. I shut it down.
I see all sorts of messages about “Pushing through the pain”, “Never stopping”, “Just fkn doing it” and, because these messages match my internal stories about me needing to push myself to the edge to prove my worthiness, I notice them. My brain sees those messages and adds them to the collection of “Evidence” that supports the idea that This Is The Way.
Those messages of pushing through, never stopping and just fkn doing it, those messages are not for me.
Whist I need to pay attention to the fact that I am noticing them as this helps me to start to untangle that whole knot of needing to push past breaking to be “worthy”, I also need to pay more attention to the counter messages. I need to actively seek out and pay attention to the messages that balance out that tendency to run on broken bones and push myself to the brink. I need to look for those messages that say that it’s ok to rest and that a person’s worth & lovableness is not directly correlated with their ability to Just Push Through.
I need these other messages, the messages about being kind to yourself, about resting, about listening to my body. Those messages are the ones I need BUT because they go against such deeply ingrained behaviour, such deep rooted beliefs about pushing myself to be brink to be “good enough” to be loveable, those messages about compassion are hard to see. They are even harder to take on board and they are REALLY hard to accept as truth.
To accept those other messages, these messages of kindness, to accept them as truth I have to acknowledge that those old behaviours come from a core wound of never feeling that I was good enough. I have to recognise and acknowledge that deep down I used to believe that I literally break myself in order to feel valued and to get love… and that’s scary. Sometimes it can be easier to just ignore the messages of compassion, the messages that really are for me, and just continue to collect those other “pushing” messages that support those beliefs.
Not all the messages you see are meant for you. Some of them will resonate and some will simply reinforce old patterns, behaviours and beliefs.
Pay attention to what’s around you, to what you see and how you see it – how is a message presented to you, what’s underneath it, what is it really saying? Pause and reflect, am I taking this on because it feeds into a core wound that I have OR does it challenge a deeply held belief?
Sometimes it’s the messages that you don’t see that are the ones that are meant for you.
