From Overwhelm to Authentic Autonomy

Relationship Crisis Care: How Tending To Your Heart and Soul Right NOW is your LIFELINE for You, Your Business, and Your Loved Ones.

Posted by Wholehearted, LLC on Tuesday, April 21, 2020

In a crisis, what was decided, delegated, or streamlined is now jumbled. You get placed in a position where you will likely need to reassess and renegotiate everything, including: boundaries, routines, processes, and responsibilities, sometimes weekly or daily.

Everyone will experience times of overwhelm, especially in crisis. Yet, if overwhelm becomes a pattern or perpetual state, it can have a significant affect on one’s health, happiness, and relationships. Overwhelm can be very costly.

Overwhelm is where you feel engulfed by externals. You lose a sense of your own personal grounding, choice, and power. Your internal awareness feel smothered by the demands, emotions, and pressures around you.

It is difficult to experience authentic autonomy when someone else pays your bills, hijacks your emotional state, or when someone else’s opinion matters more than your does. If you find yourself in these situations, you will likely hold a significant amount of unauthentic tension (aka consistent overwhelm).

If overwhelm is a pattern for you, there is likely good reason. One reason may be that you feel safer, better, or more secure in your relationships if you are present to externals more than internals. Although you may have good reasons to be overwhelmed, there may just be even better reasons to be authentically autonomous.

Your cultivated ability to be a true or accurate expression of our genuine desires, feelings, and priorities (authenticity) as well as be free from the pressures of external controls or unwanted influences (autonomy) pave the way for clarity, peace, and fulfillment.

REASONS OVERWHELM MAY BE A PATTERN:

1. STRIVING TO PROVE OUR GOODNESS. Everyone wants to be assured he/she is good, accepted, and wanted. If you are uncertain of your goodness, then you will likely be caught in a constant attempt to secure it in the eyes of others. This can make it feel very difficult to say no, to communicate from authenticity or to have space in your life that is not filled with being a busy thinking, giving, or helping others.
2. ATTACHED TO AN IDEAL: You could be attached to an ideal self, an ideal outcome, an ideal experience, or an ideal relationship and subsidize it. You keep giving or investing in something even though it is not working for you. You may be resisting the feelings of disappointment, pain, embarrassment you fear would occur if you accept the limitations of this ideal. Therefore subsidization leads you to keep throwing good money, time, or energy at something that is not giving you true value in return.
3. TRYING TO GET IT RIGHT : If you are consistently trying to get something right, then you are likely using overwhelm to avoid showing up human. Ironically you may be making very little progress all the while feeling overwhelmed. Trying to get something right instead of getting started is a way you may be attempting to protect yourself from shame, accusation, or blame.

3 step process for emotions

1. Allow yourself to receive and respect emotional signals
2. Process through new ways of reintegration and regulation
3. Develop emotional resilience and resourcefulness

FEELING OVERWHELM gives you access to:

1. Where you are potentially over subsidizing and costing yourself significantly
2. Personal voids in regards to freedom, health, or self governance
3. Releasing ideals that were not serving you
4. Recognizing where shame is smothering your authenticity
5. Relationships that are not mutually beneficial

Questions:

1. In regards to your time, energy, or priorities, what have you had to reassess or renegotiate due to the C-19 crisis?
2. How might this reassessment or renegotiation process be overwhelming? What aspects of your current overwhelm may be circumstantial and which may be emotional or relationship patterns?
3. Where do you see people doing too much? You doing too much?
4. What/who assures you of your goodness?
5. Where do you experience stress or resistance to expressing an authentic “no” in your life? Why may that be?
6. What would not work if you stopped subsidizing it? What is it costing you versus what is it benefiting you?
7. Find an area of your life that you have been saying, ” I can’t” and change that to “I don’t want to.” How does that change your emotioanl experience of that thing? Do you have resistance to accepting choice in this?
8. Do you value a hard life over an easy one? Why?
9. Do you have judgments about people who have an “easy” life? What are they?
10. Do you need support in an area and are afraid of directly asking for it? Why may that be? What has been your experience when you have asked for support in the past?

I can help you and your relationships move from overwhelm to authentic autonomy, if interested sign up for a free introductory breakthrough session here.