It’s one of the most common questions I get from people I encounter in the tiny village I moved to at the edge of a lake on Vancouver Island. “It was time for a change,” I say, or “I’ve been wandering since I sold my house in Winnipeg, and this felt like the next right thing,” or “My kids all grew up and moved away so I thought it was my turn for an adventure,” or “I wanted a place with gentler winters.”
Whenever I’m asked the question, I have to pause and ask myself “Why DID I move here? What was the truest impetus for this decision and how do I explain that to other people when I don’t quite understand it myself? How do I talk about gut feelings and a life-long draw toward the ocean and a longing to be among tall trees and deep moss? And are there things I’m not fully admitting to myself or that I don’t want to say out loud – like a desire to be in a different place than where much of my trauma lives?”
It’s not that I doubt my decision – far from it – I have rarely felt more at peace about a big life choice than I have about this one. I love it here. My body feels like she has found home. I’m sitting right now looking out at the tall cedar tree in the backyard of my new home and I feel like I have found new friends among the trees. It still feels rather exceptional, after years of parenting and marriage and place-based work and looking after the needs of other people that I got to make this choice purely motivated by my own pleasure and longing. It’s a special kind of privilege that I have and I don’t take that for granted.
But what gets me into an existential place with this question is a bigger one that I often grapple with… Can I ever truly KNOW myself? Can I ever truly know, without a shadow of a doubt, that a choice I’m making is rooted in my own identity and desire and isn’t tinged with obligation, trauma, fear, or social conditioning? Can I ever really see myself clearly enough that I know which biases, beliefs, baggage, or barriers are shaping the choices I make?
I suppose it’s a rather odd question, coming from someone who’s relaunching a course called “Know Yourself, Free Yourself” in just a few weeks, but if you’ve been following me for awhile, you probably know by now that I have never been a person of absolutes – a person who doesn’t continue to question and explore an idea even after she’s put it into writing. I have often joked that I wished my books could be published with Velcro pages so that I could change the ones that no longer fully reflect the evolution of my beliefs and worldview.
Yes, I’m teaching a course with “Know Yourself” in the title, but that’s not because I believe we can ever FULLY know ourselves or that we are ever meant to be static enough in our identity that knowing ourselves is a once-and-done accomplishment. Quite the opposite – I believe that self-awareness is a life-long quest, and not something you can ever complete in an 8-week course. (Perhaps I should have called the course “Explore Yourself, Free Yourself”.)
As I said in the last post, I think identity is a rather slippery thing, and that’s okay with me. I don’t need it to be static. There are very few things that I feel like I need to know with 100% certainty anymore. Except when my nervous system is particularly activated and it feels like certainty would give me some measure of safety, I have mostly become quite accepting of ambiguity and liminality. Even when I make big decisions, like moving to an island 2400 kilometres from where I lived most of my life, I’m okay with a “good enough” understanding of why I made the choice.
There is still much to explore about who I am. I don’t fully know what I believe, for example, especially when it comes to faith and religion. I grew up with a narrow understanding of what faith was supposed to look like, and with regular reminders that if I didn’t have that particular kind of faith, I would suffer the punishment of hell. It took me a long time to work through the fear that that kind of teaching instilled in me (which I wrote more about in my book, Where Tenderness Lives), and when I finally realized it wasn’t a faith that felt alive in me anymore, I spent years trying to figure out what I actually DO believe. I haven’t let go of a belief that there is a loving divine who’s looking out for me, but now I more frequently use words like Mystery and Tenderness and that fits me better than the language of “God” (especially the male version of that terminology). But is there a tangible belief at the heart of this that I can claim and define? Not really – it feels different nearly every day. Much of it is rooted in a relationship with nature, but that doesn’t mean I’ve fully embraced language like “animism” or “wiccan”.
I also don’t fully know where I stand when it comes to my own gender and sexuality. I use she/her pronouns, and I’ve come out as queer (which I also wrote about in my newest book), but it still feels kind of fuzzy to me. Mostly I feel more attracted to women than to men, but it doesn’t feel definitive the way it seems to for some people (especially since I could also imagine myself with a non-binary or trans person anywhere on the spectrum). What’s the terminology for that, and… does it matter? I would defend the right of anyone who feels more certain than I about their sexual/gender identity (especially if it means they have to fight against transphobia to be their truest selves), but that doesn’t mean I can find that kind of certainty in my own body.
Beyond sexuality, there are many, many things I have yet to learn about my body. I get stuck in my head a lot and it’s only been in recent years that I started to pay more attention to what my body needs or what she is trying to communicate to me. Old habits die hard and so I still ignore many signals and forget to take care of myself. Sometimes I’m surprised to discover, years after something starts showing up in my body, that it’s related to a transition my body is going through (like menopause) or a past event.
In all of these cases – faith, sexuality and embodiment – I’ve experienced trauma that’s shaped the way I show up in the world, so… again, I don’t know what’s fully ME and what is a trauma imprint left in my body. Which leaves me wondering… is there any way to separate the two? Is there actually a version of identity, for any of us, that is not at least somewhat trauma-shaped. We are each an amalgamation of both our DNA and all of the experiences we’ve had in our lives, plus our DNA holds trauma from the lineage that came before us. In other words, it’s probably most true that trauma healing isn’t about reverting back to some magical pre-trauma state, but about learning the most healthy adaptation that allows the trauma-imprint to live in our bodies without causing further harm.
So maybe the best we can do is not to ever expect to KNOW ourselves, but to commit ourselves to a lifelong exploration of who we’ve become AND to allow ourselves to continue to evolve and shape-shift to meet the life ahead of us.
Which brings me back to my course, Know Yourself, Free Yourself. When I think of the impetus for creating the course, it’s less about trying to find certainty about our identity than it is about learning to be more at peace with the uncertainty, learning to see things about ourselves that might keep us bound to old narratives, and learning to find freedom so that we can continue to evolve instead of being held back by things like trauma, social conditioning, and the systems that oppress us.
It’s true that I will likely never fully know myself, but I will NEVER regret the quest to find out more about who I am, what (and who) I love, what shaped me, what limits me, what brings me delight, and what makes my body feel the most alive, safe and free. And I will never regret the depths I’ve gone to understand the shaping of a human – things like trauma, social conditioning, oppression, mental health, family systems, belief systems, and the way a human nervous system works. And, more than anything, I will never regret what it took to find the courage to step away from some of those old narratives that kept me in a box and claim my right to be someone other than the identity I once felt confined to.
Every step of this quest has been worthwhile, and it’s brought me here, to this little village at the edge of a lake on an island at the edge of a big country – a place where I feel deep joy and liberation and safety in my body, and a place where I don’t need to pretend to be someone I’m not.
Allow me to (re)introduce myself to you… My name is Heather. I live in Shawnigan Lake on Vancouver Island because I leaned into a desire that brought me toward the ocean and the tall trees. It’s also true that I wanted to see what it felt like for my body to live in a different city from where I experienced most of my trauma. I am a spiritual person, but my faith is liminal and not easy to define. I am queer, but I don’t entirely know how to define that either – just that my body lives in the liminal spaces of gender and sexuality. I keep evolving, so the things that were true of me last year might not be entirely true this year. I started liking coffee and the smell of lavender last year – both of which seem like strange things to start at the age of 56, but I’m okay with that. I have an adventurous spirit and I like to explore both my inner landscape and the landscape that lives outside of my body. I wrote two books that I’m proud of, but I’ll need to keep writing new books because the ideas I’ve put into words in the past may not be sufficient for the ways I’ll view the world (and myself) in the future.
I am pleased to meet you! What do you know about yourself?
“I don’t know who I am. I’ve shaped my life around other people for so long that I’ve lost sight of myself.” I used to hear some version of that sentiment quite regularly, ten years ago when more of my work involved coaching people. It was especially common among women in the 40-60 age range – women who’d spent years raising children, holding a marriage together, and/or building a career.
These people excelled at shape-shifting to meet the needs and expectations of everyone around them – children, partners, parents, employers, employees, community groups, etc. They’d shape-shifted so often that they’d lost track of who they were, what they needed, what gave them pleasure, and what they most wanted out of life. Most of them were at a loss when it came to making decisions that prioritized themselves rather than the people they cared about.
What many of these people were revealing (and what I, too, have struggled with) is that life had taught them to develop an external locus of identity. They’d become accustomed to defining themselves not by what they saw in themselves but by external factors such as other people’s opinions, societal norms, success measurements inherent in their careers, and their capacity to keep other people happy.
When you have an external locus of identity (or at least primarily lean in that direction on a spectrum), you tend to rely heavily on validation from others and on your ability to meet the standards set by your culture/career/family/religion/etc. Without much capacity for internal validation and self-worth, you feel insecure or inadequate when external factors don’t validate you. You crave the approval of others and the accolades that come with success, and you crumble in the face of criticism or failure.
To locate your sense of self primarily outside of yourself is to live a wobbly and destabilized life. It’s like tossing your anchor into another boat instead of sinking it into solid ground. Whenever the wind changes, or the other boat shifts its position, you’re knocked off your feet.
I struggled with this especially when I got divorced. I’d spent so much time looking after other people’s needs that I had no idea what I needed for myself. As I wrote in my book, Where Tenderness Lives: On healing, liberation, and holding space for oneself, it was only after I finally worked up the courage to choose myself and end an unhealthy marriage that I realized just how codependent I’d been in the marriage. I was so entangled in my former husband’s emotional well-being that I felt completely adrift when that was no longer at the centre of my life.
Why do some of us develop an external locus of identity? It starts in childhood, when we have little choice but to look to adults as our models for how to live. Some of us receive an excess of attention and affirmation from the adults in our lives, and we fail to develop the internal skills needed to affirm ourselves, and some of us receive too little attention and affirmation and are left always hungry for it. In school, we start picking up messages that those who get the best grades receive the most praise from adults, those who excel at sports or performance are popular with their peers, and those who behave well in class receive preferential treatment from teachers. We learn to perform for other people’s expectations so that they’ll love us and care for us.
With adulthood should come individuation and the development of our sense of self and capacity for internal validation, but many of us remain stunted in our emotional growth because of trauma, abuse, social conditioning, or other extenuating circumstances. We’re often held back because of the cultural or family systems we’re part of. If you were raised in a high control group or authoritarian household where you were rarely allowed your own choices (and punished if you made the wrong ones), it can be particularly difficult to, as an adult, learn to trust yourself and claim an identity outside of that system.
Even outside of those more extreme environments, many of us weren’t given the tools or modeling to make good choices on our own behalf, or to see ourselves through any other lens than what the system equipped us with. In a patriarchal system, for example, women are taught to sacrifice our own needs in service to others, and so we develop beliefs that we are selfish if we focus too much on ourselves. Men, on the other hand, are taught that to show emotion is to reveal weakness, and so they often fail to develop skills in self-reflection or emotional maturity. In a religious system, for another example, when a person is told to look to God for all direction in their life and they’re led to believe that they are sinful and worthless without God, it can be difficult to develop independent decision-making skills or a sense of self-worth.
At the core of what we all need in life, from our first day on earth to our last, are three things which are both separate and closely intertwined – safety, belonging, and identity. When those needs are not being met and we feel under threat, we tend to sacrifice our identity so that we can better ensure our access to safety and belonging. When a community or family we’re part of fails to validate a particular part of our identity, we learn to mask that part of ourselves so that we won’t be abandoned. People who are queer, neurodivergent, or disabled often become the most proficient at masking in order to fit in. Many of us lose sight of who we are and become like those boats anchored to other boats instead of the firm ground beneath us, largely because we don’t trust people to fully embrace us otherwise. (I teach more about these primary needs and how they shape us in Know Yourself, Free Yourself.)
Sadly, social media has been an exacerbating factor for those who already struggle with an external locus of identity. While those with the most likes, comments, and shares develop the most social capital and clout (and make the most money), the rest of us are tempted to measure our own worth by their standards. These measuring sticks and popularity contests are in front of us every single day and that can mess with even the most grounded among us. In a podcast I listened to recently, researchers talked about how, despite evidence that their platforms are designed in such a way that negatively impacts people’s self-esteem (especially youth), social media companies refuse to change anything. They have learned to monetize our low self-esteem and attachment to other people’s opinions, so why should they do it differently? Those of us already inclined toward an external locus of identity are further destabilized by the algorithms of social media.
Capitalism (often working hand-in-hand with social media) is also an exacerbating factor. Even those most grounded in a solid sense of self sometimes find themselves knocked off centre when they struggle to make a decent living and can’t pay the bills or buy the things that give their families comfort. If you’re not valued in a capitalist system – if what you produce or the ways that you serve the public are not paid well, or if you are unable to contribute to capitalism because of disability, mental health or family demands – it’s hard to keep holding your head up and finding your inherent value apart from that system.
I’ve recognized this in myself recently as I’ve been marketing my new book, Where Tenderness Lives: On healing, liberation, and holding space for oneself. The book is all about learning to love myself and my body; to ground myself in joy and surround myself with tenderness; to detach myself from external expectations, value judgements, and cultural pressures; and to move toward personal and collective liberation. AND… in order to get that book into people’s hands, I have to be out in the public (especially social media) promoting it in what feels so often like a plea of “like me, PLEASE like me… and like my book and buy it and tell people about it and rate it favourably with those five little stars and PLEASE make me worthy of measuring up according to capitalism’s measuring stick!”
It’s a slippery thing, trying to sink our anchors into solid ground – trying to root our identities in a healthy sense of self instead of other people’s opinions or pocketbooks – when so many forces seem to be working against us. And yet… I believe that that is where our liberation lies. We only become free when we unhook our anchors from other people’s boats (and the systems those boats are connected to) and start looking for the solid ground beneath us. (Note: this doesn’t mean we stop being interdependent with other people – just that we don’t attach our value and identity to their opinions, needs, or expectations.)
The unhooking can feel cataclysmic though, so I don’t offer this reflection lightly. As I found when I finally ended my marriage, after five years of considering it, it can take a lot of self-reflection followed by a life-shattering moment (or in the reverse order) for us to wake up and recognize the ways in which we’ve been shaped and lost sight of ourselves. Sometimes it can take years to fully unravel the old programming and to learn to make courageous choices that allow us to chart new paths.
Before I end this, there is one more thing that’s worth mentioning… identity itself is a slippery thing, and that makes this even more tricky. I don’t believe it’s wise to imagine that we might some day know exactly who we are and that whatever conclusion we come to will become our fixed identity for time immemorial. I think we are meant to be evolving humans who keep learning new things about ourselves and keep being open to the surprise of our own unfolding. (I may write about that more in a future post.) And I think we are meant to be shaped by our relationships, even if we shouldn’t anchor our identities in the whims of the people we’re in relationship with. That might offer further clues as to why we’re sometimes tempted to place the locus of our identity outside of ourselves, though – because we become confused by our own evolution, and we do need other people (we are social creatures, after all), and sometimes it feels safer and more comfortable to be defined by a person who sees us from the outside.
While other people’s perceptions of us can be enlightening and can offer us insights beyond what we can see in ourselves (at least when those people have our best interests at heart), ultimately, though, we are best to hold those insights and perceptions with healthy non-attachment so that we don’t slip into the trap of trying to live up to their expectations of us and therefore abandoning ourselves.
In conclusion, I would suggest that while reclaiming our right to define and shape our own identities (rather than allowing them to live outside of us), the goal is not to claim solid, immoveable identities, but to claim the right to each have an evolving identity. Perhaps the goal in life is to simply be pilgrims on life-long quests for what sets us free and brings us joy. I imagine us dancing together down the path, finding discoveries as we go and sharing them with each other in delight (without judging each other or trying to hold anyone back).
I have lots of thoughts about how to untangle oneself from an external locus of identity and how to be such a pilgrim. I have thoughts about finding practices that help keep us grounded, unraveling the messages we’ve received in the past, healing trauma, building secure attachments, and making hard choices. I teach about them in the upcoming course, Know Yourself, Free Yourself (which starts March 5th), and I’ve written about my own pilgrimage in new book, Where Tenderness Lives: On healing, liberation, and holding space for oneself..
If you are waking up to a realization that you have a primarily external locus of identity, take heart. You are not alone and you are in the right place. This realization is the start to a long pilgrimage, and if you’re willing to take it, you won’t ever regret it. I’ll meet you on the path.
There’s a pedestrian tunnel I pass through regularly, in all seasons. In summer, I often cycle through, and in winter, I pass through on foot. The tunnel provides a safe passage under a busy freeway. It’s a connecting point between my sister’s house and mine, and it’s also along the best cycling route from my house to downtown.
While it’s designed for safety (keeping pedestrians off the busy freeway), there are many times when the tunnel feels less than safe. It’s dimly lit, so when I pass through after dark, it’s hard to see what might be hiding in the shadows. Its walls are covered in graffiti and there are often signs that people have been taking advantage of the shelter and obscurity of it to do some late-night partying. In the summer on my bike, I am often fearful I might puncture a tire on broken glass.
While the tunnel offers shelter from the elements and a brief respite from rain or snow, it’s also lower than the ground around it and there isn’t proper drainage, so rainwater collects in large puddles on the concrete floor. In the Spring, when snow is melting, it’s nearly impossible to pass through without rubber boots.
A few days ago, I passed through the tunnel and found it especially treacherous (see photo). Melting snow and slush had frozen into an unpredictable landscape that made each step dangerous.
As I was reaching the far side of the tunnel, I looked up from my careful concentration on where to place my next step and saw the light streaming in. The bright sunlight made me pause for a moment to appreciate what it meant to near the end of my careful, dangerous journey. As I stood there, my body almost involuntarily took a deep, lung-filling breath. It felt like hope.
That’s very similar to how I felt last month when I landed in Costa Rica, where I’d traveled to spend a couple of weeks at my friend’s farm working on my next book and the new course that’s launching this week. After two years of no travel, two years of social distancing, two years of anxiety over COVID, two years of supporting my three daughters through big transitions (and one through complex medical challenges), I felt like I was finally arriving at the end of a long tunnel.
When my friend Mary picked me up at the airport, I burst into tears. I’d been holding so much anxiety for so long, tiptoeing through the treacherous tunnel, that I just needed to release it before my body could fully relax and enjoy the sun and warmth of Costa Rica. Once the tears settled, so did my body and breath.
Like that light shining on me at the end of the tunnel, Costa Rica offered me light and hope again (especially after what has been a long, cold, and hard winter here in Manitoba). It invited me to stop holding my breath and stop tensing my leg muscles for every step I needed to take in the unsafe territory of the pandemic.
Sometimes when we’re in the middle of the tunnel, we forget that the tunnel ends. We assume we’ll always be afraid of the next step, always be holding our bodies tense, always be breathing in that shallow anxiety-ridden way. Unfortunately, when that kind of anxiety is present for a prolonged period, our bodies assume they need to stay in high alert, and we get stuck in an activated state. I remember that feeling so clearly after my divorce, when a naturopath told me I’d developed adrenal fatigue from too many months of high stress. Our bodies can only take so much before they start to protest.
With Easter coming up this weekend, I’ve been thinking about an Easter eleven years ago when I entered one of the hardest, darkest tunnels of my life. We found out my mom had cancer, and two days later I told my husband we either needed to separate or go for counselling. (I wrote about it the following Easter, and now, when I read that post, I feel so much tenderness for past-me who was feeling hopeful that life was settling. She didn’t yet know that the tunnel was about to get darker.)
What I keep having to relearn every time I go through a tunnel like that is that the tunnels are the places that shape us most. Tunnels cause us to pause and take stock of our lives. They remind us that there’s no point in carrying extra baggage, especially when every step must be taken carefully. They help us re-evaluate what’s important and, like a kiln that turns mud into stone, they strengthen us into vessels with strength and purpose.
The tunnel I walk through regularly is dark and hidden. A lot of people in the city don’t even know it exists, because it’s not in a high traffic area. You only arrive there if you happen to live in the area or you know it exists. From the road above, it’s entirely invisible. Almost every time I pass through it, I walk through alone.
That’s how tunnels in our lives often feel. They are usually times of loneliness and isolation, when we find ourselves set apart from the people we love because nobody really understands what we’re going through and we don’t know how to talk about it. In the years between that fateful Easter, when told my husband I was ready for a separation, and the day five years later when we finally gave up on counselling and separated, very few people in my life knew what was going on. Many were surprised when I told them we’d separated. I simply didn’t know how to talk about it.
Part of the reason I do the work that I do is because I don’t want people to feel so lonely when they pass through tunnels like that. I want them to know that there are others going through similar tunnels, and others who’ve been through the tunnels before them. I want them to find encouragement and hope in community.
That’s one of the reasons I’ve created my newest course, Know Yourself, Free Yourself: Self-exploration as a Path to Liberation and Love. I know that self-exploration can be challenging and lonely sometimes, especially when we learn hard things about ourselves and we have to dismantle old belief systems or disrupt maladaptive patterns. I don’t want you to have to do it alone. I want to offer you guides, companions and insights to help you navigate the tunnel. Consider this course to be like a flashlight that helps you find safe passage through.
The route that I walk that includes the tunnel is nearly 10,000 steps long. Only about 100 of those steps are through the tunnel. That means that for 9900 steps, I don’t have to deal with the challenges of the tunnel. When I’m in the tunnel, I often overlook the fact that it is a relatively short period of time, but when I emerge, the steps that take me home feel much more carefree and easy.
The course that I’m creating isn’t just about tunnels. It’s about liberation and love. It’s about the light at the end, when your body feels relief and hopefulness and you know that you have grown and changed and will never be the same again. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all of my years of going through tunnels, it’s that when we surrender to the tunnel, we always feel more freedom on the other side. And that freedom is worth every challenging step.
If you’re in a tunnel right now, I want you to know that you’re not alone. I want you to know that there’s a light at the end. I hope that you will see it soon and that you will discover that the tunnel offered you gifts you didn’t know you were gathering along the way.
