Advocate for Yourself. Or Else...
Choose self-advocacy over self-abandonment
Every action you take or don’t take conveys critical information to yourself.
Let me explain what I mean by this.
On any given day, we are faced with many opportunities to essentially either advocate for ourselves or abandon ourselves. Choose self-advocacy more often than self-abandonment and you’ll be rewarded with a strong sense of self and internal equanimity. Self-advocacy is self-reinforcing. The more we advocate for ourselves, the more we believe we are worthy of being advocated for, worthy of having our voices heard, our needs expressed.
The self-advocacy route looks like taking these opportunities to honor ourselves, to build trust in ourselves, to prove to ourselves that our desires and needs are valid and worthy of expression. The opposite is to reject ourselves. How many times a day do you talk yourself out of a desire or feeling? Do you ever tell yourself things like “Oh, you’re being sensitive. So and so didn’t mean it like that. There’s no need to tell them how their words/actions hurt your feelings.” This has the effect of creating a disjunction within. Each time you choose not to stand up for yourself this chasm widens and your connection to yourself weakens. Repeatedly invalidating yourself or ignoring the states that arise within is a surefire way to erode your self-esteem over time, making it harder and harder to believe you are worthy of being advocated for.
Let me be clear, there is a difference between acting on every desire/feeling/need and bearing witness to them. What I am exploring here is the latter. It’s about cultivating the ability to see yourself fully, to remove the blinders, to tell that part of you that wants to protect you from pain through evasion or repression that it’s okay to give your desires and feelings the acknowledgment they are craving. And, that you can do so without falling victim to them, losing all sense of control.
The paradox is that in our attempt to repress and deny our feelings and desires, we actually fuel them and give them more power. And, because we have exiled them to a locked room and thrown away the key, we lose access to clearly seeing how they are guiding our behavior. But, make no mistake, they are.
Let’s use loneliness to illustrate the deleterious effects of not facing yourself head-on. I recently moved to a new state all by myself. One fear of mine is that I will feel isolated and lonely. Loneliness, when unchecked, takes on the form of a boogie man in my mind. It’s this terrifying, overpowering entity, and my instinct is to run away from it as fast as I can. But, I have a choice here. I could:
Continue to give this feeling an undue amount of power over me. If I do this, I am in essence saying to myself “You are not strong enough to handle feeling lonely.” Or,
Acknowledge the discomfort and fear associated with loneliness and use this as an opportunity to reassure myself that I am strong and capable of handling it.
In the first path, you will live your life in such a way that you try to avoid the big bad loneliness monster at all costs. This often results in clinging behavior, or seeking external validation and comfort. In the second path, you convey to yourself that you are the one in charge. You can handle feeling lonely and offer yourself the support that you are craving. In this path, you aren’t revolving your life around the avoidance of an uncomfortable feeling because you know you can handle it.
It’s in the nonjudgmental witnessing that diffuses the emotionality of the desire or feeling and then allows us to move forward with aware, aligned action.
Self-abandonment is especially insidious in the context of our relationships. If your friend expresses to you that she wishes her partner would communicate with her more consistently would you tell her she’s being needy and to suck it up, or would you tell her that her desires are completely valid and warranted and worthy of expressing to her partner? Assuming you’re a good friend, you would probably encourage her to express her feelings because from your perspective it is so clear that she’s not asking for too much. Can you extend the same advocacy to yourself?
If we were in our friend’s shoes we might find ourselves questioning the validity of our feelings/desires. If you can’t conjure compassion for yourself in that moment, ask yourself, “What would my best friend want me to do?”. If you decide not to bring it up with your partner you are in effect telling yourself that your need for consistent communication is invalid. It is an act of self-rejection/abandonment.
Imagine the little kid inside of you who just wants to be seen, being left alone in the dust by you, the one person whose job it is to take care of them. You’ve just told them they don’t matter. Their feelings don’t matter. And, your partner’s comfort is more important.
Likely, part of the reason you don’t want to bring it up is you don’t want to upset your partner, or you are afraid that they won’t like what you have to say and will get upset with you or leave you. But, guess what, if they can’t handle you having and expressing your needs, then you might want to examine whether this person is capable of loving you well. And, look, I am not sitting here saying this is easy, or simple. Nothing could be further from the truth. But it is necessary if you want to cultivate peace, coherence, safety, and trust within.
The prospect of abandoning yourself must become scarier than the prospect of facing an uncomfortable feeling or having an uncomfortable conversation with someone.
Are you willing to abandon yourself for someone else’s affection, or acceptance? How could you ever feel truly secure in a relationship in which you haven’t let yourself show up fully? Knowing that they haven’t seen the depth that is you and your internal world? The right person will love you more for your depth and complexity. Imagine being in a relationship (platonic or romantic) where you are free to express yourself and all of your neuroses and they still love you. Sign me up for that.
So, ask yourself: Am I advocating for myself in more moments than not? If the scale is currently biased toward self-abandonment, fear not! Just around the corner is another opportunity for you to tip the scales back toward self-advocacy. And, I can assure you, you will get addicted to the feeling of honoring yourself. It will still be scary, but now you will have tangible evidence of all the times you did scary things and survived. You will have proven to yourself that you can handle whatever feelings/desires arise within. You no longer need to run from them or talk yourself out of them to not be governed by them.
Next time you are given an opportunity to face an uncomfortable feeling, or express yourself, ask yourself what message you will be sending yourself should you choose not to. I encourage you to choose bravery, choose self-trust.
