UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello friends. My name is Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
I also want to take a moment and introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation, our nonprofit that creates equitable access to transformational tools and teachings. You can learn more at soundstruefoundation.org. And in advance, thank you for your support.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Megan Sherer. Megan is a special and talented young person. She’s just 34 years old. She’s so accomplished, a holistic therapist and a somatic healer who specializes in love, self-worth, and relationships. She’s also a writer, a speaker, and a host of the Well, Then podcast. With Sounds True, Megan Sherer has written a new book, and she’s created an audio book. It’s called Choose Yourself: How to Embrace Being Single, Heal Core Wounds, and Build a Life You Love. Megan, welcome.
Megan Sherer: Thank you so much for having me, Tami. So happy to be here.
TS: Here, Megan, right at the start, can you tell us a little bit about how this intentional experiment of being single, which is really what forms the core of the writing underneath your new book, Choose Yourself, how this experiment came into being and it went on for four years, focusing as you describe it, on choosing yourself, how did you start this experiment and why it started?
MS: I think as most big decisions or healing journeys do, it started with a lot of pain in my life, if I’m being honest. I experienced a pretty rude awakening in my twenties that came in the form of a string of back-to-back bad relationships where honestly, I kept looking for love to save me. I romanticized the idea of love being the thing that would take all of my pain away and make all my problems go away if I could just get that one person to choose me. And instead, I kept finding myself in relationships where the pain was being caused by my pursuit of this person or my pursuit of trying to make the relationship work and I felt like a failure. It felt like a personal failure that I kept experiencing all this pain and all this heartbreak. And that’s what really led me on the journey of exploring somatic work and attachment healing and looking at my own core wounds around relationships in kind of my mid to late twenties.
And I thought that once I did that, then okay, then my person would come, prince Charming would come and sweep me off my feet and all would be well. And I found myself around 29 having done a lot this inner work, but still feeling like I didn’t know where I was in the realm of relationships. It was this sense of self-abandonment. I would always be who I thought somebody else wanted me to be in order to be chosen to be loved, to be liked by them. And it just didn’t feel good Finding myself on dates where I was more concerned with getting them to choose me than with wondering, is this somebody I would actually want to choose? Is this somebody who aligns with the kind of life I want to have for myself? And I was living in New York at the time. I’d just moved there from la.
And as much as I was having fun dating, I also saw it as an opportunity to start this new chapter for a fresh slate and really get to know myself in any way. So it started as a one year commitment. I’ll take one year of no dating, we’ll see where that gets me. And again, I think I hoped that on the other side of that I would meet somebody and fall in love and that would again be the happy ending. But that one year turned into about four years because about six months to a year in, I realized, whoa, I actually really like this. I’ve never in my life spent so much time getting to do what I want to do, decorate my apartment the way that I want, go the places I want, and really lead from this sense of what lights me up, where’s my creativity and passion and desire and all this. And I discovered that it felt really good. And yeah, I found that I was helping a lot of my clients in my therapy practice with the same. So it was definitely that journey happening in tandem.
TS: You write and you speak on your podcast about this notion of becoming one’s own closest friend. What did you have to go through to become your own close friend in that way? What had to change in you?
MS: I had to become willing to no longer be sort of the judge, jury, and executioner to all the parts of myself that I felt a lot of shame about in the past. I think we all have parts of ourself that maybe aren’t our favorite that we don’t lead with, that we are scared for other people to see. And I had a lot of perfectionistic tendencies growing up. I was very controlling with the way that I approached myself and my achievements and goals in life. And I realized that that wasn’t going to get me anywhere other than burnout and stress and chronic illness and not feeling very good about myself. So I had to be willing to learn what it looked like to be kinder to myself and to be curious about those parts rather than judging them.
TS: So I think a lot of people hear that. Be curious about your parts when the part of you that had shame would come up in your experience, how were you able to create a loving space and shift that?
MS: I’ll say that this is something I still practice. It’s a daily practice. I don’t think we ever get to the place where we eradicate those feelings of shame or fear sometimes self-judgment. I think the curiosity helped for me initially because I realized I needed to create a little space between that feeling or that part and my core self. I needed to have some sense that this wasn’t the whole of me, it was just one part. Often like a younger part, we can talk about kind of inner child work, but I started to get to know these parts as really just younger, wounded parts of me. And when I thought of it like that, of course I’m going to have compassion for a little girl, a child who felt shame about themselves. I would want to approach that child with a sense of compassion and curiosity and help them feel seen and less alone. And I think that kind of distinction that I’m not bad. This is not the whole of who I am, it’s just a part of my psyche of my experience that helped create enough space for me to get in there with the shame without feeling consumed by it.
TS: You have a chapter and Choose Yourself about what you call the L word loneliness. And I think that’s probably one of the biggest fears that people have about not being in a relationship I think is okay, so I’m going to be really lonely. How did you sort through that?
MS: I think first it’s important to acknowledge that loneliness is, it’s understandable that it’s a massive fear for most people because if we think about loneliness from a primal, ancestral or evolutionary perspective, loneliness would equate to death if you were ostracized or separated from the tribe, you weren’t going to make it. And so the oldest part of our brain that is sort of our fear center, our amygdala is responsible for keeping us alive. And if it perceives you’re alone, you’re going to die. Of course, it’s going to prioritize connection over authenticity or being with other people over being alone. So I think that starting there and just acknowledging that our fear of loneliness makes sense and can validate that emotion helps again take some of the gas off some of the pressure off and feel like it’s okay to feel lonely. And I’m not the only one who feels that way.
That was number one. And then I think number two, it came from this sort of or desire in me when I thought about dating of how curious I was about other people and how much I wanted to get to know them and would ask dates all these questions and get into their inner world. I realized I hadn’t done much of that with myself. I wasn’t asking myself those curious questions, whether it was about preferences or desires or insecurities. And I started to see my solitude as the opportunity to do that, kind of like I was dating myself, whether I was out in public at a cafe or at home on a Saturday night when I felt like, oh, I should have plans, I should have a date or be with friends. I would say, okay, well let me make this a date for myself. Let me throw on some music I like cook and just get curious about what I’m feeling.
And that really helped me learn that loneliness is just an emotion. It’s okay to feel it. It usually communicates to us where there’s a disconnect, we feel disconnected from others or we feel disconnected from ourselves. And I just decided to kind of dig into that curiosity, and I think we all can feel lonely, but the realization that you can feel lonely in the wrong relationship, I’m sure people listening have had that experience of being with somebody, having that relationship and still feeling alone or not seen, not understood, not loved. And for me, I think that’s worse than the loneliness of just being by yourself, but everybody might perceive that differently.
TS: I mentioned in the introduction that you’re a somatic therapist and even in our conversation so far, we’ve been talking about some difficult experiences, difficult feeling based experiences, whether it’s that inner feeling of shame or child inside that needs our loving attention. And I’m curious how you have learned both to work with really difficult feelings yourself in your own body, and then how you help other people do that.
MS: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it’s sort of a multifaceted approach. I was definitely one of those people who was very good at intellectualizing my emotions. For a long time. I was in talk therapy before I experienced any other kind of therapeutic modalities, and I got really good at identifying patterns, identifying emotions, being able to talk about trauma from my past and logically understand it, but then not understand why is nothing changing? I’m doing this work and nothing’s really getting better. I’m still stuck in the same patterns. And when I learned about somatic therapy and realized, oh, I’m talking about my emotions, but I’m not actually letting myself feel them, I started to see that disconnect and my sort of entryway was actually bridging the gap between my yoga practice and therapy. I started to notice sometimes on my yoga mat, I will just cry for no reason, and I would think it was just like the song that the teacher played or we were doing hip openers and something felt painful.
When I started to understand how our bodies actually store emotional memory and trauma, I realized, oh, there’s something more happening there than just a random wave of emotion that’s my body processing something that’s happened to me in ways that words alone can’t really touch. And that was for me, the first exploration of how can movement and breath combined with our emotional experience help us to actually be with a feeling, not be afraid of the feeling. I think that’s for most people, the first barrier is like I’m afraid that if I let myself feel I won’t stop, I won’t stop crying, or if I let myself feel angry, then I’ll be out of control and feel all this rage. Or if I let myself grieve, then I’ll never be able to get out of that pit or emotions. The big ones can feel very scary, but when you have more of a frame of reference for what it feels like to kind of dip in and out of them physically in your body, you realize that they often pass much more quickly than we think they will than we tell ourselves they will.
And that’s what I really like to help people do is get to a place where they have tools to feel more regulated in understanding what’s going on in their nervous system when an emotion comes up, then to be able to get curious about some of the narrative and story behind that emotion so we can connect what’s going on in the mind with what’s going on in the body to then hopefully understand maybe this is connected to a core wound of mine and sort of validates our experience as a whole. We get to this place where we can go, oh, of course I feel sad about that thing. Or of course I feel angry about that a boundary was violated. And when our emotions start to make sense to us, feel more validated, then I think we feel safer to be with them.
TS: Part of the reason that I went to this question in this point of our conversation is I’m imagining someone who’s listening who says, I’ve been in a pattern of relationships that aren’t satisfying. I don’t want to do that. But doing what Megan did saying, I’m going to be alone and I’m going to be in my loneliness. I know I’m going to feel lonely and I’m going to be faking dancing it in the kitchen, having a date with myself and cooking a great meal and lighting the romantic candles, that’s going to be bullshit. Really, what I’m really going to feel like is some terrible set of feelings about what a loser I am and I’m supposed to get about it. But the truth is I feel somewhat tanked by it. And I guess if you could just talk directly to that person and link with what you just said about how they’re going to get through it so they can go on a journey of learning in some way, hopefully like you went on.
MS: Yeah, thank you for asking that, Tami. And to that person who I think is probably all of us, that was me too. That is me too. Sometimes I think we like to paint the picture of healing and personal growth and empowerment as this very light filled journey. The truth is it’s often very murky and muddy and heavy and dense, and there have been countless nights where I’ve just been sobbing on my couch or wailing on the ground and feeling confused about the uncertainty and randomness and unpredictability of life. And when I talk about getting curious about myself and my experience, that was the harder part to get curious about. The fun stuff is easy. Like, oh, I like this kind of music and it feels good when I dance around my kitchen. Of course that feels great, but what about the days where it’s harder to be with myself? Self-love is easy. On those light days. Self-love is very hard. On the days where we feel like a total loser, we feel like a failure. We feel like we’re never going to get out of this pit that we’re in.
So I’d say the first thing is, again, acknowledging that that’s not a unique experience. We all go through it as much as none of us really want to. And when we have the, I don’t want to say have the opportunity, when we make the decision to say, I am going to arm myself with the tools, whether that’s learning about my nervous system, learning about somatic work or parts work, learning about how different feelings show up in my body to give me a frame of reference for navigating all that discomfort, I think that is one of the best commitments we can make to ourselves so that it doesn’t feel like we’re just sort of going at it without any sort of life vest or life preserver, and we’re going to drown in the depths of those emotions. It helps to know that I have tools to pull me through this. It helps to know that sometimes it’s going to be just a deeply painful experience or a deeply painful season that I’m in, and that’s not the totality of my experience.
And I don’t also want to deter people from making that choice, like you said, why would I sign up to do that? I think the reason is because on the other side of it, there’s so much lightness and liberation in the authenticity in getting to that place where you feel like, oh, here I am. I see how I was giving myself away, losing myself, forgetting myself in the pursuit of connection before, and I can see that that didn’t feel very good. Now that I have this reference point of here I am and it’s hard work, but I think it changes the way you relate to relationships forever because you get to bring yourself into it rather than just your desire to not be alone.
TS: Now, you mentioned that before you did this experiment, you had had relationships that weren’t really that satisfying. It was like, God, I’d rather be with myself than I would be with someone in a relationship that’s not particularly fulfilling. Did you think, okay, now I’m done with my experiment, it’s time for the person to come. Oh, this person hasn’t come yet. Did my experiment really work? Or are you like, oh no, it worked? Is there a sense of I’m still single and that means somehow I’m less than? Or would you say you’ve moved through that and that thought doesn’t come up for you anymore?
MS: I think it’s less about feeling less than I’ve gotten to the place where I’ve been able to separate my self-worth from my relationship status. That was the party line for my twenties of if I’m single, there’s something wrong with me because someone hasn’t chosen me and I need to fix that by getting someone to choose me. And through that time spent on my own, I realized like, okay, my self-worth doesn’t come from anyone else besides me. I’m the only one who can dictate how I feel about myself that doesn’t eradicate my desire for partnership. And I’m clear about that in the book too. I still love love and I love the idea of partnership when it’s the right person. But to be honest, yeah, I think when I got to the point where I started dating again and opened myself up to the idea of relationship again after that period of being intentionally single, I think there was this desire, especially with this book coming out for me to be able to find the person so that I could say to those women who really want partnership like, look, it works.
If you just do this, then immediately on the other side of it you’ll find someone and it’ll be okay. All will be well to soothe that anxiety in them and in me. And it again hasn’t panned out that way, but for me it says less about my self-worth and more about my ability to double down on trusting the timing of my life. So it’s been kind of more of a spiritual practice and more of a can I trust that the life that’s meant for me is the one I’m living and the one that’s unfolding, even if it’s not happening how I think it should.
TS: I’m very interested always when people trust life, I think it’s such a big idea and the timing of things and when things work and don’t work and that this is some unfolding process. What is underneath your trust? What informs that and makes it real for you?
MS: For me, it’s a connection to sort of two higher powers, one being sort of universal power, call it source God love universe. For me, a lot of those words are interchangeable. And then also connection to what I feel is my higher self, my core self, my soul, what I feel like my soul came here in this body to do. And those are two things that I did not have a relationship with for the first 24 ish years of my life. I didn’t really begin a spiritual path, spiritual seeking, until a pretty heavy dark night of the soul in my early twenties. But that is really what forced me to look at the possibility that I don’t have to do it all alone. I don’t have to be the one to control and micromanage every little choice and detail of my life, which helped me to begin to loosen the reins on that pattern of perfectionism that I mentioned earlier.
And then it’s been about collecting evidence along the way. Over the last 10 years or so, I’ve had a lot of big sort of trust falls, big jumping off a cliff, free fall moments where I had to trust the timing of my life and trust in the uncertainty of a decision. And then seeing that on the other side of it, it worked out oftentimes differently than I had anticipated, but usually for the better. So I was able to collect those little bits of data of like, okay, when you trust in whatever it is you believe in, usually you’re supported and provided for and protected in the end. So I’m just going to keep betting on that.
TS: Now. You said what I think was a very big idea a few minutes ago, which is separating your self worth from your relationship status. And I think for other people, maybe for somebody like me, it would be separating my sense of, I’ll use a word like intrinsic worth from my accomplishments or from sounds trues notoriety and success and kind of outer world achievement things like no saying no, my intrinsic worth is not tied one-to-one to that. It’s a different thing. So I think for a lot of us, this notion of coming into a deep sense of value that we feel the value of our being. Tell me for you how you’ve been able to land in that. And that’s why when I say that I think you’re a tremendously accomplished person at a young age. I think that if you’re able to really come in, even if it’s not all the time, but a lot of the time into a sense of that value of being, that’s tremendous. Megan, I just want to hug you and celebrate you. It’s a tremendous accomplishment in my view.
MS: Thank you for that, Tami. And yeah, I also completely feel you on the point of how much we tether our worth to our accomplishments, the things we create and achieve and produce, and whether it’s a relationship or a business or anything else. I think it’s so easy to say that until I’ve checked these boxes or hit these milestones, it’s not enough yet. But I also had a point where I realized if we’re talking about in the realm of relationships, there are people who don’t meet their person, their life partner until much later in life than some other people. There are people who get married young and then get divorced or are widowed and lose their partner, and do they all of a sudden not have that intrinsic worth or value because they don’t have a partner anymore or they haven’t met one yet? That didn’t seem fair to me.
So that’s what had me begin to get curious about if relationship status isn’t where it comes from, career success isn’t where it comes from, where does it come from? And you mentioned a word earlier that for me has been one of the guiding principles, and that’s value. We’re talking about where our values come from. I personally look to, well, what are my core values? What is it that I value as a person? And if I can get clear on those, on the things that matter most to me, the qualities, the principles that I want to live my life by the experience that I want to have in this body, and if I can make choices that are in alignment with those values, that’s it. That’s where it comes from. And if I’m self abandoning, of course I’m not going to feel good enough. If I’m living my life by somebody else’s values, of course I’m not going to feel like I measure up because I’m trying to measure up to their yardstick, not mine. So I think that’s again, where it comes back to that self discovery and curiosity of what do I value if I forget about what everyone else wants for my life? What is it that I really care about? And starting there,
TS: I’d like to know what you discovered about your values and also what you discovered about your purpose. You said that that was an important part of your journey of knowing yourself was what’s my purpose here?
MS: I’m so glad you asked that. That’s actually something that’s been very fresh on my mind lately, thanks to a conversation that I listened to a podcast episode where Liz Gilbert was being interviewed, and she gave an incredible answer about purpose that kind of will tie into my answer. But as far as what I discovered in terms of my own values, I discovered that love was at the top of the list, and I knew that, but I was misunderstanding what I thought love was. I was pedestal, this idea of romantic relationship as the equivalent of love. And so I began to discover, okay, if love is what I value, how can I find ways to play with that, to infuse that into everything I do, all of my relationships, but also just how I show up for my own body, for the communities I live in, for the cities that I live in and the earth, the ground that I walk on.
How can I infuse love into everything I do? So from there, I started to realize presence is a big value of mine being present in my body, feeling what I feel, being present with a person in front of me rather than future tripping and worrying about what might happen next in my life and getting caught up in anxiety. It felt better to be present. I mean, I’ve got a whole list of values. I have a process that I invite people to go through, and I think it’s easy to say like, whoa, I mean, there’s a hundred different things I could value, but in any given season of our life, I think there’s usually five things that are really making the cut. We’re devoting most of our energy and attention to five or so values. So finding what those have been in each season of my life has been really beautiful and purpose is a part of that.
But what I realized along the way that I used to confuse purpose with was a career calling. And again, in this episode where Liz Gilbert is talking about the distinction between purpose and hobbies or a job or a calling or a career, she’s talking about the pressure that we put on ourselves to discover this one thing that we’re here and that we’re meant to do, and then to get paid for it and to be the best at it and to leave a legacy. And I remember there was a time in my life where I was feeling all of that pressure to create something so meaningful that it was going to change all these lives. And if I didn’t do that, then again I wasn’t good enough. I didn’t have that value. And it really hit me through a lot of the somatic work that I do through my yoga practice that I believe our purpose, the reason our souls came into bodies is just to feel things.
The difference between a body and a soul is our senses, like the things that we can touch and taste and hear and smell and play with and experience. That’s what makes us human. And I think the whole purpose is just to experience as much of that as possible, whether that’s hugging your best friend or smelling the roses, whatever it is, the lovely sensations, the difficult, unfriendly, uncomfortable sensations. For me, I think that’s the purpose, is just finding as much presence in that as possible. And then I find sort of a sense of calling and getting to teach other people about that and helping them feel more present in their bodies, more able to access sensation because I think a lot of us are disconnected from it. A lot of us are pretty numb.
TS: Alright, let me go a little bit more into this, Megan. This is curious to me. So I totally get, we have bodies and after we die, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but if there is continuity, at least for a period of time, it won’t be in a body. So there’s something very special about being here in our body and it allows us to experience all of these things. But is there any directionality in your view? Meaning I feel all these things the beautiful and the hard smell of the roses and the pain of heartbreak, that’s it. Just feel it and then we get to contribute to the love in the world or then we, is there some directional unfolding from that place?
MS: Yeah, I think that that is where it becomes a little bit more individualized and unique. I think when we are present to what it is we’re feeling, that’s when we are able to tap into our creative potential and our creative power. And for some people that means creating art, writing, singing, whatever it may be. For some people that means creating a baby, creating a loving relationship, creating a community. But I think those creations are felt as a natural impulse when you’re more present in your body. I know at least for me personally, the more disconnected I was, the more numb I was, the more I was just trying to check off boxes. The more anxious I felt about my purpose, the more I felt like I was doing things wrong. And the more I’m able to slow down and drop into what it is I’m feeling, it doesn’t happen all the time, but the more I feel like I get those sort of natural downloads or hits of like, oh, that’s what I should do, whether it’s like that’s a social media post I want to create today and write, and maybe it’ll impact somebody or that’s a conversation I’d like to have with a friend.
Those impulses usually come from that presence from feeling what it is we’re feeling. So yeah, I think what we create and what we contribute will differ from person to person. And I think it’s important that it does, because again, if we’re talking about societal conditioning for women and relationships, there’s this sense of like, well, if you’re not married and you’re not a mom, then you’re not doing womanhood, and that’s just not going to be the natural creative impulse for every woman out there. So yes, I think yes, and
TS: That makes good sense to me. So deep feeling and then what it gives birth to in terms of the genuine creative urges, you talk about something that you call love alignment and this notion of aligning, and I wonder how that might fit in here, deep feeling and alignment together and what that means for you and how you talk about aligning with love.
MS: Yeah. For me, love alignment was really born out of that idea of when I discovered love is this really predominant guiding force, leading core value of mine in my life and where I was looking at how am I out of alignment with love, I started to realize, well, a lot of us are out of alignment with love. We’re kind of chasing relationship for the wrong reasons. And I began to see this theme recurring in a lot of the clients that I was working with that a lot of the areas of unhappiness or disconnect in their lives often came from that lack of integrity or lack of alignment with the choices they were making, whether those were choices in relationships or in career or in their health and in their bodies. And so I started to get curious about what are the things that can bring us back to center?
And oftentimes it was that sort of overlap of the way that we use and interact with our bodies, the way we feel, our feelings, the way we connect to whatever faith or spirituality or higher power we believe in, which I know doesn’t apply to everybody, but has made a really big difference for me, and then the way we relate with other people. All of those things kind of converged to bringing us back to this core central sense of self that I think can really help us navigate the challenges of life with a little bit more ease and grace when we have a sense that we’ve got this. When I think of alignment, I think of my spine again. I’ve practiced yoga for a long time.
TS: Me too. It’s immediately what I think of. Yeah, please.
MS: Exactly. And I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of your spine being out of alignment. I’ve been in a couple of car accidents and gotten whiplash from those, and you can just feel it when your neck is not properly stacked on the rest of your spine or people who throw their low back out a lot. It feels incredibly destabilizing to have your spine be out of alignment in any way. So I think of all of these principles as kind of those vertebrae of the spine, when they’re stacked properly, there’s that sense of lightness in the body and ease and there’s more flow. So that’s how I visualize it. But yeah, it’s sort of that holistic merging of modalities
TS: And how you notice when you’re out of alignment. And then how do you come back into that, I’ll just say, integrated flow of integrity?
MS: Yeah. I think for me, the doorway was understanding sort of the subtle changes in my nervous system. I think learning about our nervous systems is something we should all just be taught in school because that’s, I think, our first line of defense, but also first indicator when something is off, oftentimes your nervous system knows before you do. And if we’re able to be more familiar with some of those subtle sensations of like, oh, my heart rate has sped up, or I’ve felt like I’ve been holding in certain parts of my body, or my gaze has been really fixed, I’ve been having really repetitive fear-based thoughts. There’s those little tells that show us that something might be a little bit out of alignment. I think most of us are pretty disconnected from those sensations I was for a long time. And so we don’t realize something’s off until the big stuff really hits the fan, like the relationship implodes or we hit that breaking point where we just can’t do it anymore.
We’ve burned out, we’re facing chronic illness or a chronic pain, our body’s yelling at us. My goal is to as much as possible, not let it get to that point anymore because I’ve hit those points and it’s so hard and frustrating to come back from them. So if over time we can get curious about those little tells in our body and how our body responds to stress and to misalignment, then we use that as the opportunity to go back to curiosity, go back to asking the questions of like, okay, where have I not been making choices aligned with my values? Where have I been overgiving? Where have I been not nourishing myself, showing up for my physical body? There’s all these kind of pillars we can look at to begin to course correct
TS: In both the book and also in your podcast. Well then there are certain themes that you circle around to, and I want to bring a couple of them forward because you’ve obviously thought deeply about them and taught deeply about them. And one of them is for women who find themselves dating people who are unavailable emotionally. And this is a pattern, and it sounds like this is a pattern that you experienced before. Your experiment with choosing yourself. What do you know about this pattern and how to break it?
MS: I am so intimately familiar with this pattern. Unfortunately, it was definitely the predominant pattern for me in my relationships prior to kind of doing this work for myself. It can show up in a few different ways. I talk in the book about the different flavors of emotional unavailability. Sometimes it shows up as the very blatant obvious, like somebody who says they’re not ready for a relationship, doesn’t want a relationship, doesn’t want anything serious, doesn’t want to commit. Sometimes it shows up in the form of a partner who just isn’t willing to have emotionally intimate or vulnerable conversations like they’re acting like they’re in a relationship with you, but the depth is something that they avoid. There’s emotional avoidance there.
For me, it was honestly every flavor. I have dated a lot of different emotionally unavailable partners. And for a while it was really easy to live in the story of it’s a men problem, I date men. So it was like, all right, well, men are just emotionally unavailable. I’ve experienced that and I see that narrative out there. So that just must be it. It’s them, and that is disempowering because if it’s them, then there’s nothing I can do to change my experience. So I hit a point when I was doing this work where I realized I have to take a little bit more accountability and ask, how could this be me if every single person I’ve been interested in is emotionally unavailable, well, I’m the common denominator there, so I keep choosing them for some reason. Why is that? And for me, and a lot of the people that I work with, it’s kind of a hard pill to swallow to realize that if you’re dating emotionally unavailable people, there’s some degree of emotional unavailability in you too. Our relationships are our best mirrors.
TS: But let’s just pause right on that. How do we know that that’s a fact?
MS: Because if we were fully emotionally available to ourselves, we would see somebody who is not able, willing, or interested to pursue the same kind of relationship goals that we have as a red flag, as a closed door, as like a, oh, that’s a bummer because I liked you, but I’m not going to pursue this any further.
TS: I got you. So there would be an immediate, you might go on a first coffee date or something and be like, nah, five minutes we’re done. So that could happen a lot. But the point you’re saying is if there was a part of you that’s emotionally unavailable, you would be willing go on a second date or a third date. But if that wasn’t the case, you’d be like, no, that’s not what I’m looking for. Forget it.
MS: Exactly. And it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t still hurt. You might have gone on a few dates with somebody and then you see like, Ooh, this person’s not really emotionally available or wants what I want. And there could still be grief in that I started to develop feelings for them. It’s a bummer to have to say no, but the answer is still no, because I am available to my own emotional experience. Why would I put myself through that? The reason that we often do put ourselves through that is because there’s either some part of us that also doesn’t want that depth of emotional vulnerability because it can be scary for so many reasons. Either we’ve been burned in the past, maybe betrayed in a past relationship, and we’ve been hurt when we are emotionally vulnerable and we don’t want to do it again. Or what’s often the case is that we’re repeating a pattern from our childhood. There was an emotionally unavailable parent, and that’s familiar to us. And so there can be a part inside that says, but if I get this person to choose me, who reminds me of that emotionally unavailable parent, it’ll finally close that wound. If I can get them to show up for me in the way that I didn’t have back then, it will heal that wound. That’s what most of us seek in partners, is somebody who can heal that core wound.
TS: And what did you discover was going on in your experience and how did you shift that?
MS: For me, it was a combination of those things. I realized that I had a disconnect in my relationship with my own emotions at that point in time. Vulnerability was incredibly hard for me. I mentioned earlier on all those parts that I had a lot of shame and judgment about. Those were parts that I did not want someone to see at all because I thought they would judge them too. I was worried they’d leave me or would see the worst in me and not love me anymore. And so if you’ve been in a long-term relationship, that person is going to see those parts of you. It’s pretty inevitable. And the person who has that degree of emotional unavailability, because we haven’t yet been with our own uncomfortable emotions and shameful parts, it feels safer to choose someone who will never force us to go to that depth of connection because we’ll never have to reveal those parts of ourself to this person.
They’re never going to ask. So it was partly that, and it was partly because I also grew up in a household where there was a lot of emotional unavailability. There was a lot of this sense of kind of seeking for a sort of love and connection and validation that I really wanted that just wasn’t available to me in my household, partially because of the circumstances there was divorce and alcoholism and addiction. I also had two really wonderful parents who just didn’t know how to be with their own emotions. So it was that sense of, I know they love me, they’re not really showing it in a way that I’m able to feel it. So I kept trying to seek that in partners too. I kept reaching for the person who felt distant because that was familiar, and I wanted the distant person to finally show up for me.
TS: Now, if somebody who’s listening wants to do some inner work related to connecting their own early patterning with the relationship patterning they’re seeing play out in their life, what might be some good writing prompts or inquiry prompts that you could point them towards to help them make those connections?
MS: I give so many of them in the book, so that’s definitely a great place to dive deep. But I think that first, just beginning to write out an inventory, write about how you felt in each of the significant romantic relationships that you’ve had in your adult life, and then write about how you felt in your childhood, in your relationship with each one of your parents or caregivers in the dynamic of your household as a whole. Write about the role that you learned to play what you had to do in order to get love, to get praise, to get approval and acceptance. Who did you have to be in order to meet those conditions to make love accessible for you? And then you’ll probably immediately start to see some overlap, but you can sort of look at it as a Venn diagram of, okay, this person that I dated was reminiscent of the same way that I had to show up to get my mom to love me.
And then this person that I dated, they were more reminiscent of who I had to be to get my dad to love me. And this person that I dated, they were a reflection of the way my parents treated each other. We’ll usually see some combination of those kinds of patterns in most of our relationships. And that I should also note that also goes for if you feel like you’re somebody who has never had a long-term relationship, maybe you’ve just had unrequited loves or situation ships or crushes that didn’t go anywhere, that counts too. There was probably a predominant feeling in those that you can map somewhere to your childhood.
TS: Now, you haven’t said this word situation ships. What are situationships?
MS: Yeah, situationships are those sort of very vague, nebulous, undefined relationships where you often act like you’re a couple, but there’s a lack of commitment. And a situationship is only true in the conditions where one person wants more than the other person’s willing to give. So sometimes people are casually dating and not in an official relationship, and that works for them. They both agree to that and they’re fine with that and that’s great. The situation chip is where you’re withholding the fact that I want more because you’re afraid if you ask for more, they’ll leave and you just are sort of holding onto whatever crumbs they’re giving you, even though they’re not showing any signs of committing.
TS: Now, Megan, and learning a little bit about how you work with clients, what I discovered was that you report that the two main approaches you use are the somatic approach, which we’ve talked some about, but you also help people at the subconscious level identify what could be happening and driving their behavior. And this is very interesting to me because I think a lot of us discover that we can talk about our issues, but changing them, there’s something driving us subconsciously, meaning it’s not even at the verbal level. It hasn’t even come into our verbal awareness. And I wonder if you can share about how you help people change subconscious patterns that are really potentially wreaking havoc in their relationships.
MS: Yeah, I mean, I think that drives most of our behavior. Our subconscious thoughts and beliefs drive the good majority. Some people would estimate 90% of our behavior. And that’s why I can have almost every client who comes to me tell me, I want love. I want a relationship. I want to feel good about myself too. And yet I am repeating this pattern over and over again, and yet I haven’t left this guy who isn’t treating me well or doesn’t give me what I want from a relationship. Why can that be true? Most of us have the conscious desire for good things to happen in our lives, including a good relationship. And when that’s not happening, it usually shows us, okay, there’s something going on on the subconscious level. And I work with somatic parts work. I also work with clinical hypnotherapy to help us understand what are those subconscious beliefs, how can we get past that conscious level of desire and underneath to the pattern that’s often connected to a core attachment wound if we’re talking about relationships so that I can facilitate change, that I don’t have to be stuck in that pattern anymore.
And what that looks like is oftentimes getting down to a very young part of ourself who experienced that original wound or trauma or separation, lack of love, and is still living in that moment in time emotionally in our psyche. So we treat our partner as if they’re going to leave us just like a parent did or judge us and have really high critical standards us just like a parent did. And when we can go back and understand the beliefs of that younger part and sort of catch them up to speed with present day that we’re not that five-year-old or 10-year-old anymore, that’s where I really see a lot of the change happen. Because I was one of those people who was in talk therapy for years and found value in creating that level of awareness, but then still felt stuck, still felt like, why can’t I change the experience? Why can’t I change the way I feel even though I’ve identified it? And that’s where that combination of somatic and subconscious work really started to bridge the gap for me.
TS: When I introduced you, Megan, I said, such an accomplished young person, 34 years old. And I noticed as I said it, I was like, wow, Tami. You sound like a grandma right now, grandma. And it’s okay. I’m 62 at this point, and so makes sense. And I realized I met my wife when I was 39 and for whatever reason, I didn’t feel particularly like, I can’t believe you’re this age. And I had had a series of relationships, but none of them were really enduring until I met Julie when I was 39. And yet I get the sense that often people nowadays says Grandma in their thirties already feel like they’re old in some way already. You’re not married yet. What’s going on? And I wonder what you see in terms of that judgment in the zeitgeist, and is that true and how to break through that for yourself and for the women that you work with?
MS: I try to, a lot of it, I’d say data that I collect about this kind of stuff comes from content that I see on social media. I get really curious about hearing other people talk about their lived experience and then reading the comments of what other people have to say about it. And I feel like there is a really big split happening now between those women that you mentioned who are like, oh my God, I’m so behind. I’m 30, haven’t met somebody. It’s never going to happen. I think that can be also incredibly fueled by if there’s a desire to have children, especially to carry your own children for women, of course that pressure is unique and certainly can add fuel to the fire in your thirties. But then I also see a lot of women these days, people in general online feeling like thirties, really young in a way that it wasn’t in the past.
We look to maybe the generations of our mothers and grandmothers and the women who got married in their twenties and had babies in their twenties, and we feel like, oh my gosh, I was a baby in my twenties. Why would I have kids then? So I noticed definitely a split there, but I’d say the majority of the women who come to work with me are the ones who are feeling behind and feeling a sense of urgency. And that’s one that I certainly can relate to from my past experience. And I think a lot of it honestly just comes from patriarchal conditioning. I mentioned reading the comments. Most of the negative comments about being behind in life typically come from really misinformed, ignorant men like trolls online who are saying things like, you’re expired after this age, you don’t have any value. And I have gotten to the point where it says so much more about their consciousness level and where they’re at than it does about how I feel.
And I hope that other women can get to that point too, where they’re able to not internalize those narratives anymore because you just never know what the timing of your life is going to look like. You meet a partner at 39 or any age that is 89. What is right for you? 89, my mom has been married five times. She was widowed and finally found herself in a place at 70 where she was just embracing this single hood and loving her relationship with herself for several years and really enjoying that and reconnected with a first love from when she was 20, and now she’s 72 and they’re in love again. And it’s great. People can find love at any age, doesn’t matter. So focusing less on the noise and more on just your life I think can help a lot.
TS: Okay. One final topic I want to talk to you about, Megan has to do with moving through transitions with a sense of grace, because it sounds like you already at your, I’ll say again, grandma young age have moved through a lot of big transitional phases in your life, and I’m wondering what wisdom you have to share about that.
MS: It’s not something that feels very graceful from the inside when I’m doing it. Navigating transitions and periods of uncertainty for me is one of the harder lessons that I’ve had to learn and explore. It’s so destabilizing as I think it is for most people. We are creatures of comfort and habit, and again, uncertainty feels like death to that fear center in our brain. And I love when I can predict everything and know what’s going to happen. I’ve also have had to go through a lot of chapters with a lot of loss and a lot of uncertainty and a lot of transitions. Some that I chose and plenty that I didn’t. And I think coming back to that sense of it’s not all on me. I can do everything in my power to live a life that feels good and aligned with my values and true to me.
And then there’s a certain point where I’ve just got to put my hands up and surrender the rest of it. I don’t get to control the outcome. And in that, can I also develop some sense of belief that when the future is uncertain, that means that anything is possible. And it’s not always the worst case. Scenarios that happen, it’s usually the better or best case scenarios that end up happening in the long run. So when I’m in a moment of absolutely freaking out because I’m scared about a transition that I’m going through, I usually just come back to that. I’ll even journal about what are 10, 20, 50 good outcomes that could happen that I’m not focusing on right now because I’m worrying about all the bad things that might happen here. And that helps ease some of it a little bit. And then I just come back to my practices. Yoga, meditation, being in my body like nature, getting out and playing for me is huge. Whether it’s jumping in the lake in the summer or I live in the northwest. So going on hikes and just being with the trees, very grounding for me.
TS: You’ve been listening to Megan Sherer, author of the new book Choose Yourself: How to Embrace Being Single, Heal Core Wounds, and Build a Life You Love. What a wise and bright light you are. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you and talking with you. You’re so easy to talk with. Thank you so much.
MS: Thank you so much, Tami. This has been so much fun. You ask such incredible questions and I’ve really, really enjoyed this.
TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundtrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
