You are Here.

Your life is a path that reveals and teaches you about your Self.

No matter how your life unfolds day by day, week by week, and year by year your understanding of who you are—”your Self”—will change. This is a good thing. However, it is helpful to understand why sometimes your path may seem like it never changes for the better. Most importantly, it is helpful to understand how to make the most powerful changes to your journey. It’s about understanding your Self. The Self with a capital*.

If life is going fairly well for us, we don’t think much about it. Self with a capital, self without a capital—who cares. Life feels good.

More please. We feel like we are on the right path, going the best direction for us.

If we are not feeling good about life or just a part of our life and are in fact miserable, we feel like something has gone wrong. We don’t like the path we are on. We look around and see others who have the partner, kids, the career, the money, the marriage, the sex life, and we ask “why can’t I have a life like those people?”

It’s common to feel confused and lost, feeling like our lives are messed up, and we don’t know where we are headed.

Whether you feel pretty good about your path or don’t know where the heck you are, let’s look at the map and find your “*You are Here”.

Here’s a sketch of the map:

Above: Map of Journey to your Self with a capital (Lisa Terrell)

Let’s discuss this map.There are 8 major points of interest:

· Baby self

· Latent self

· Performance self

· Validation self

· Mirror Loop

· Crossover Pass

· Responsive Self

· Integrated Self

Baby self (Body focused and directed)
Baby self is our “essential self.” We would not survive if we weren’t born with our body monitoring systems intact and responding to get us what we need.

Our body’s automatically return to this “essential self” when in need of physical, emotional, or spiritual support and healing. You are here if you feel burned out, ill, have a health or life crisis, are stressed, or are in grief or despair.

Latent self (Outward focus|external inputs)
This is the strong imprint (internalized information, rules, and understanding of self) you get from your childhood circumstances, family, community, and culture. It is your default understanding and the foundation for the path your life takes you. Even if your path is completely opposite of and a rejection of your imprints.

You are here if:

1) Your understanding of self is mostly based on external factors of fulfilling a role in a good or certain way. (E.g. “good spouse”, “good person”, “good Christian”, “good career”.)

2) You have a strong desire to forget, ignore, or move on from parts of your life and do not assess, understand or heal from the impact of the imprint or events.

Performance self (Outward and comparison focus)
Your understanding of your “self” is based on how well you are doing compared to others lives, your dreams and desires, or your imprinted external sense of self.

The Performance self is vulnerable to have a better than others attitude like the Yogi the Bear cartoon character who frequently talked about “I’m smarter than the average bear.”

On the other hand, if you don’t think you are measuring up to the externally focused benchmarks and vision for yourself, you are at risk for depression and anxiety. You may also seek validation from others to relieve the distress of not “measuring up”.

Validation self (Outward and Mirrored understanding of self)
though you likely don’t realize it when it happens, this is a habit and response of always checking others responses to you in order to feel good about yourself. This means that if you get a less than positive response from someone, you will take it in as a part of yourself. It’s as if you treat each person in your life as a mirror to check how you look. The problem with this is that other people aren’t accurate mirrors—at least about your self. They can’t know what you can know about your Self.

The Mirror Loop
Most of us spend a lot of time going around the Mirror Loop.

We traverse the circuit, stopping to gaze at the Latent, Performance, and Validation points of interest over and over again.

It’s how we get started in life. For example, it’s how most of us find and commit to a life partner. We find this wonderful validating mirror that is smiling and excited about us and we smile and give wonderful vibes back. It’s a great and bonding experience.

What inevitably will happen is that that mirror of our partner will not be able to reflect back to us positive vibes all the time. Then as some do, you will take it that the relationship is bad because of what it is doing to how you feel about yourself. When in reality it isn’t the right place or the last word on how to understand yourself anyway.

The reason we keep going around the loop is to get relief when we are hurt, not positively validated or feel lousy about our “performance”. We will likely return to Latent self or Validated self and complete another loop of checking the mirrors of Latent, Performance, and Validation.

You likely will walk along this Mirror Loop many times before you realize you are going in a circle and want to find another path. The Mirror Loop can hold up and feel fine for many years, but it is not your best life. It can’t be because your best life is not what others or external events say they are. Your best life will always come from within when you are using your Mind-Body guidance and understand and respond to life with your Self.

Life will always invite us to grow and develop ourselves. Because the one constant in life, is that people, places, and situations—the external mirrors always change.

To get off the Mirror Loop you must find and get on the Crossover Pass.

Crossover Pass
The Crossover Pass leads you to your Inner Self. You are the only one that can connect with and glean an understanding of your Internal Self.

You will be on the Crossover Pass as you practice being fully present in the moment. This is “mindfulness” and finding the “What is” of the moment, and paying attention to the Mind-Body connection.

The Crossover Pass leads you to your Responsive Self.

The Responsive Self (Directed by Mind-Body wisdom |Explore Inner Self)
This is the understanding of your Self from the inside out. You are able to examine your true Self. You begin to understand how work in your own mind to observe your thoughts. You are able to think about your thinking rather than just letting your thoughts run your life.

By understanding how to observe your thoughts, you access your inner wisdom and use this inner wisdom to act in your everyday life. Gradually you detach from looking to outside sources to define who you are and you begin to attend to and practice your Mind-Body connection.

The Integrated Self (The practice of including Inner Self in all aspects of life, relationships, and sex.)
The more Responsive you become to your Inner Self, the more you grow in the ability to take that true Inner Self with you day to day, in your relationships, your goals in life, and wherever you go.

Why this matters to Relationships and Sex
The take away that I hope you see is that a lot of my work in Relationship and Sex Therapy is helping people to find the Crossover Pass. The crisis of not feeling good about your committed relationship (or lack of a relationship) and or feeling like your sex life sucks is caused by endlessly going in circles through Latent, Performance, and Validation ideas of who you are.

The Crossover Pass takes you on a path that will help you understand and meet life from your true Inner Self. We no longer need to seek meaning, love, and peace from external sources that are unreliable in giving us what we desire and need. We begin to take hold of our own meaning, our own assurance that we are lovable and desirable, and we begin to know how to create peace inside of us.

That peace is life changing. We will know we are on the right path for our life when we begin to feel it bit by bit.

The Crossover Pass is often strenuous and exhausting. It’s easy to feel discouraged when you realize you have gone back to seeking validation or working to perform in the “correct” manner, and you realize you are going around the Mirror Loop again.

I will continue to write about this process and use this newsletter to encourage and support your journey to practicing your Mind-Body connection, and your best life (including sex!).

*Self with a capital is when you begin to understand the importance of the Mind-Body connection and tune into your inner thoughts. It’s a practice attending to your life from your own internal and body wisdom.