Showing Up: How To Have Your Own Back

In this heartfelt and insightful talk, Lynn Fraser explores what it means to truly show up for ourselves, especially after trauma. Through stories, somatic inquiry, and compassionate reflection, she guides us to recognize the inner critic, explore early experiences that shaped us, and gently return to self-support.

With a blend of mindfulness, body awareness, and kindness, this session offers practical tools to break free from self-abandonment and create a new habit of standing up for ourselves. Ideal for anyone on a healing path who is ready to practice being on their own side.

Transcript

Being on our own side,

Having our own back,

Supporting ourselves.

From Dr.

Gabor Maté,

One of the effects of trauma is that we disconnect from ourselves,

Our sense of value,

And from the present moment.

That's the root of a lot of the disconnection that many of us feel.

We've had experiences where we weren't safe and we often develop an inner critic or a feeling of overwhelm,

Or I'm not really too sure about my value.

So we have court efficiency beliefs,

Perhaps.

I'm not lovable,

I'm not worthy,

I'm damaged.

We have all of these things going on that have developed from experiences we had when we were younger,

And often we judge ourselves,

Maybe very harshly at times,

For what's going on.

As we really look into it,

We realize that court efficiency beliefs are not true.

They're beliefs that we formed based on some experiences,

And they're actually not true.

We have this persistent habit of giving ourselves away or of turning against ourselves that we could work with.

One of the things that I think is helpful around that is that we do have some optimism that as we work with this,

As we tune in,

We realize we could have a lot of court efficiency beliefs.

They interact,

They intersect,

And we could come into kindness,

Compassion with ourselves,

But also this kind of a robust,

I'm not going to give myself away anymore.

I'm not going to believe that,

Those false conclusions that I came to when I was a child.

We have so much conditioning.

We have so many people who have influenced us or affected us,

And not all of them were as their best selves.

Oftentimes with parents or other adults,

They're not that healed,

And they might be passing on messages.

They might be putting us in the role of a parentified child or the one who has to take care of everything.

As we're working with this,

It's a really good idea to step back enough to see what are some of the dynamics to understand our childhood in that sense from a trauma-informed lens,

And then to bring ourselves up to date.

Here we are,

Whatever age you're at now,

Wherever you are in terms of an inner critic or not quite sure about those court efficiency beliefs,

But not quite sure that they're not true.

We have a lot of history with that.

You might have an inner critic that's very nasty,

Or maybe you've kind of worked with that over the years and made a truce with it perhaps.

There's a lot of different elements of this,

Which is good in the sense that we have a lot of ways to come in,

A lot of pathways in,

And it's difficult in the sense of it's very complex.

There's a lot of interweavings,

Intersections of experiences and beliefs in our personal life now.

We live in a system that's very oppressive.

Patriarchy,

We live in a place where a lot of people aren't valued for who we are.

We have to really struggle to be authentic and to be accepted for who we are.

Some of that involves pulling back from caring so much about what the mainstream thinks of us.

Here we are,

These messy human beings with all of that.

So let's take a breath and tune into your body for a moment.

One of the things I really know about healing trauma is that we need to be here in this moment in time and to know in our nervous system and in our body that we're safe.

So we're safe enough here to do a practice of looking into some of the things that cause us trouble,

Some of the things that limit our happiness and limit our agency,

Limit our power.

Take a few breaths if that feels comfortable for you.

If it's not what your body wants to do,

Then don't do it.

Do something else instead.

There's a lot of different ways that we can break the trance of catastrophic thinking or other kinds of things that are coming up that are difficult.

What is our experience right now as we're thinking about or absorbing some of the words around showing up for ourselves,

Being on our own side?

What's going on in your body right now?

And if you were to say,

I show up for myself consistently,

How true does that feel right now?

It's interesting when we do these reverse inquiry statements where we say something that we wish was true and maybe is partially true,

But we know isn't completely true.

We're not saying it in a sense of an affirmation.

We're saying it in a sense of I want to know what the resistance is.

What's my mind going to tell me about that?

So not very true.

Does that relate to this period in your life?

Is it more when you were younger?

When I think about being on my own side and showing up for myself and being self-generating,

Self-directed,

I didn't feel that way when I was a teen,

When I was in my 20s,

30s even.

It took a long time for me to connect in enough with my body,

With who I am to really settle into a feeling of I am worth showing up for.

What's that for you?

I'm showing up for myself.

I've got my own back.

What are some examples that come to mind?

Probably your nervous system,

Your mind is bringing in lots of examples of when you didn't.

You threw yourself under the bus,

You wanted to avoid being rejected,

So you went along with something that you weren't comfortable with.

What is your energy,

Sensations,

What does that feel like in your body as you're sitting with this?

If you have a memory come up of some time and maybe persistently when you didn't show up,

You didn't have your own back,

There's probably some kind of difficult energy in your body around that.

Those are experiences that were difficult.

So when we have those difficult experiences,

The energy of that in our body might feel tight,

It might be quite intense.

So one of the ways that we can work with that is we can move our body around,

But also if we're working with the sensations and energy,

They are here when we ask a question like that,

When we make a somatic inquiry statement.

The energy that shows up has something to say about that.

It's a reflection,

A memory,

When you blah blah blah,

Then of course you weren't showing up for yourself.

So one of the things we can do with energy is to notice that it's here.

So when we're inviting this response,

We're also paying attention.

If you think back and touch in to your heart with your younger self at whatever age this evidence is coming in,

These memories are coming in.

For me,

A lot of that is in my teens and 20s,

But wherever that is for you.

Certainly I have later in life examples too.

What does that feel like in your heart when you bring forward that memory of that younger person who maybe was quite dysregulated in your nervous system?

I was often in freeze.

Who didn't quite have the confidence or the awareness to pull back from something to set your own course.

Maybe you went along with things that you wouldn't know.

And that could be quite subtle,

Like always going to the restaurant your friends wanted to go to or to the movies.

But it could also be something more serious,

Like going along with someone who was bullying or mean.

We have this very strong survival drive to fit in so that we're not isolated or excluded from our group,

Our community,

Our family.

This comes to mind in teens,

Junior high,

High school especially,

Where that becomes really predominant as we're detaching and gaining independence from our birth families or our families that we're living in into more of a peer orientation that's a step into adulthood.

But often we're very vulnerable and we're also feeling a lot of shame during those years.

We don't have a lot of power.

Some people had social power and some used that in a positive way and many didn't.

But when we think about that time,

Let's go into the feeling of that in the body with some kindness.

We're in this sticky situation.

We're going into puberty,

We've gone into puberty,

We're in our teens and 20s.

There's a lot of social pressure and we don't know who we are very well at that age.

Most of us are still exploring that.

Our brain doesn't fully develop until we're in our late 20s so we don't have a fully developed brain.

A lot of us have conditions of developmental trauma where our brains and neurobiology didn't develop in an optimal way because of trauma when we were children.

So here we are in this situation of intense pressure from the outside,

Not knowing ourselves,

Not being fully developed.

Many of us had no backing.

Nobody had our back.

How would we know that that's something that we could even do is have our own back?

It's one of the things that we learn through experience if we have parents and other adults who have our back.

We believe that we are worthy of that.

Breathe,

Relax your shoulders,

Your jaw,

Whatever parts of your body are tightening up.

Do a little bit of cyclic sighing.

We need to sometimes reset our nervous system.

So a deep double inhale through the nose,

Long exhale through the mouth like you're breathing out through a thin straw,

Reminding our body that we're here in this moment.

And then if you were to tune into the energy that's here,

Let's do the locate and describe to help us know that we're witnessing,

We're observing what's going on in our body.

If there's a tight energy in your chest,

For instance,

Is it moving or is it still?

Do you have an image of it?

Can you breathe?

How far does it go?

What are the edges?

Sometimes it'll be a tight ball of energy.

Often it's a little bit more diffused,

But it doesn't go into the whole world.

It often doesn't even go into our whole body.

It might be right in the center of the chest,

But not really coming out to the muscles.

It might be a little bit outside our body.

It might be up into the throat,

But not down into the belly.

So notice the outside edges as well.

We have very persistent habits of contraction in our body,

Clenching our jaw,

Bracing ourselves through the upper back,

Holding our breath.

What is it that these sensations are trying to tell us?

Often it's a memory that's come forward.

And sometimes the inner critic has a lot to do with this.

It's trying to warn us not to be brave,

Not to go out on our own,

Not to stand up for ourselves because we could be cut down,

We could be gossiped about,

We could be isolated or ostracized.

So notice what your mind is saying as we're just kind of sitting with this.

And if you were to bring kindness into your heart,

Does that feel possible?

In order to have our own back or to show up for ourselves,

There's several levels here.

One way that we show up for ourselves is this somatic awareness.

When I tune into my body,

This is the energy and sensation.

I'm willing to be in connection with my body.

Trauma is stored in our body as sensations and energy with associated thoughts and memories.

So this is not easy.

Takes courage,

Persistence.

But I want to show up for myself in a sense of I want to know myself.

What is it that I've got stored in my body and my psyche that keeps bringing me into this inner critic storm or into this disconnection?

I go into fight,

Flight,

Freeze,

Fawn.

And when we go into fawning,

That's one of the ways that we don't show up for ourselves.

So here we are in a situation where there's some kind of social pressure.

There's a social power imbalance.

So we don't fawn to people with less power,

We fawn to people with more.

Some connection with fawning,

With humiliating,

With shaming.

Can we stay with kindness with our younger self who sometimes went into fawning or people pleasing or ingratiating ourselves as a way to stay connected?

As we pay attention,

As we tune in,

And as we cultivate being kind with ourselves,

It makes it a lot easier to show up for ourselves.

So one of the ways that happens is we see through some of those core deficiency beliefs.

We see that we are shaming ourselves for all kinds of things,

Including not showing up for ourselves.

How could we have known?

How could we have had the strength to do that?

So some people kind of go into more of a fight response.

It's like,

I'm not letting anybody shame me.

I'm not letting anybody define my path.

And if that's the case,

Then you're showing up for yourself more strongly than people who are in a flight,

A fawning,

Or a freeze response.

But it all stems back to this knowing in our body that there's a threat here.

So the threat is social many times.

We live in a world of inequality.

We live in a world where many people will shame us for who we are.

And it takes a lot of work and courage and persistence to know who we are.

Part of it is this disconnection from our body,

Our sense of value.

This is a complex web,

And any thread that we pull here can help us to heal.

The sense of,

I can come into my body,

I can notice the energy,

I can soften my shoulders,

My jaw,

My gut,

I can breathe.

And putting aside our history with this,

Maybe we weren't able to show up for ourselves in a way that we would have wanted to when we were younger.

But now is this moment in time,

And you might be 20 years old or 72 like I am,

Or somewhere along that timeline.

What could you do now that would be helpful?

For me,

It's being aware,

The somatic awareness of being able to be in my body,

To be welcoming of these sensations,

The memories,

To stay stable knowing that I'm here in this moment as I'm doing that.

I can breathe.

Another big step is offering kindness.

If this was a friend of yours,

A dear friend or a child who is feeling the way you feel and was wanting to show up for themselves more,

What would you say to them?

How would you feel about that?

So often we are more loving and compassionate with others.

Could you offer yourself some kindness around this?

We've been in situations that are very difficult.

Some of them are global,

Some of them are personal,

But we all know about this.

And it's not our fault that we have a nervous system,

That we live in a certain type of society,

That we face certain pressures,

And that sometimes we give in.

We don't support ourselves in the way that we would want to.

Now what comes to mind?

Let's take a moment here to visualize.

What could you do differently now in your life right now as it is to show up for yourself,

To have your own back?

And some of it might be to invite in somatic awareness,

Compassion.

It might also be to work with the inner critic.

I've got several guided practices on working with the inner critic,

Working with catastrophic thinking,

Coming into regulation so that we're fully here with our humanity.

It might be interesting to monitor.

Am I showing up for myself?

Do I have my own back?

And when we notice we don't,

If we're being critical of ourselves,

If we're tuning out,

If we're just kind of,

Well,

You know,

I'm not very comfortable with this,

But I don't want to make a fuss,

Or however that might show up.

We can always show up inside,

But sometimes we can do things on the outside as well,

In our relationships and in our interactions,

But we can always work with kindness and connection and showing up for ourselves internally.

So that's a practice that we could make a commitment to,

To set our intention going forward.

I'm going to notice this more.

I'm going to work with this.

I'm going to consciously offer myself support and love and care,

Perhaps in a way that I have never had before.

I can show up for myself now as a practice.

And then the thing about practice is that as we do it,

After a while,

It just becomes the way we are.

That we practice kindness.

We practice awareness of our body.

We practice breathing.

We practice this awareness.

After a while,

That's our new normal.

We start to have more experiences of showing up for ourselves,

And we start to notice that and really appreciate,

I've got my own back.

It's still a practice,

And it's getting better.

This isn't something that we need to be perfect at.

It's just something that we need to be aware of and to practice.

I've got my own back.

Reviews

I SO appreciate your teaching and sharing, thanks Lynn

Lynn always shares positive “advice” I enjoy listening to Lynn everyday💛💛

This really resonated with me, as so much of her work has… she is so insightful yet gentle