The last few weeks, we’ve been working on reprogramming core wounds.
Today, we’re gonna take a break from that to focus on something else – empowerment.
If I asked 100 people what it means to feel empowered, I may very well get 100 different answers.
Simply put, empowerment is the ability to do something for yourself.
Why is empowerment important?
Because the opposite of trauma is power.
And while you may or may not resonate with the idea of having experienced trauma in your life, that’s likely due to how we conceptualize it as a society.
We think of trauma as something that has to meet specific requirements and thus, we expect it to look a certain way.
But the truth is, trauma occurs any time an experience is bigger than our ability to cope.
And what that looks like for each unique person has a wider range than one can even imagine.
Trauma doesn’t have to look a certain way to “count.”
Loosening the threads of what “counts” means we can take a different route than qualifying (or disqualifying) ourselves by comparing what we’ve experienced to what others have experienced.
We can simply ask questions like,
– Do I feel disempowered in this area?
– Do I feel helpless?
– Do I feel like I don’t have enough resources to handle this?
And if the answer to any or all of those questions is “yes,” then restoring power is the answer.
The First Step Toward Empowerment
To begin, I want you to start noticing every time you feel like you have no choice, no options, and/or no freedom.
Those situations put you into a traumatized state because as we know now, trauma occurs in moments of real or perceived powerlessness.
So, to counteract its effects, we must first throw out the playbook on all the things we “should” do so that we can decide what we WANT to do.
Our goal here is to give you authority over your own life.
This isn’t about anyone else in the world. It’s about you.
You get to decide what feels good to your nervous system and what doesn’t.
At first, this can be scary because as disempowered people, we often feel if we truly followed our joy and what felt good to us, we’d wind up in never-ending cycles of instant gratification.
But instant gratification doesn’t sustainably provide us with joy; it only provides temporary relief from the pain of our triggers or unmet needs.
Fleeting pleasures act as emotional morphine which is what gets us hooked.
Following What Feels Good
To find what is genuinely empowering for you, begin to observe how you feel before, during, and after an activity. Any activity.
Whether it’s something generally seen as positive like working out, eating a healthy meal, spending time with a friend or family member, cleaning up your space, going to work on time, etc.,
or potentially negative like watching many hours of TV, binge eating, compulsive shopping, gambling, losing your temper with your dog, etc.,
Pay attention to all of it. How you feel before, during, and afterwards.
If you’re being truly honest with yourself during these observations, you will easily and effectively reveal what in your life is empowering and what is disempowering.
With continued practice over time, you will develop a powerful intuition within yourself that will effortlessly pull you into alignment with your most authentic, most empowered self and cultivate true, lasting joy.
To our collective empowerment!
