Doing It Alone Doesn’t Work

Photograph: Tobias Tullius

Trust me. I’ve tried.

I’m one of the most fiercely independent people I know and it doesn’t work to do this life alone. 

As painful as it was at times, my most crucial transformation came from leaning into discomfort and learning how to ask for support.

I never wanted to need anything from anyone. 

I wanted to be alone and do it myself. 

I wanted to enjoy that sense of pride. 

And then one day… 

I was really struggling in my life. I was really confused and overwhelmed about my work and the direction my life was headed in. My romantic relationships were a mess and my finances were embarrassing.

AND I felt alone.

Really alone. 

But, instead of asking for support - because I didn’t even really know what I needed - I contracted even more. I pulled in, even more, to hide my shame, hide my own hurt, to hide how much it pained me to feel alone and not know what to do about it. I had no idea where to begin closing this gap.

And mind you, I was around people a lot. I was very active in my life, teaching, seeing regular private clients, facilitating trainings and women’s circles. I had friends.

The truth was that I over identified with my work. I saw my value only in relation to how I was seen and appreciated as a figure that helped others. And it was hurting me. 

Let me say this so clearly: I had no personal life. AND I had no way of really expressing who I was as a person. 

In truth, I had no idea who I was. I did not know what my personal needs and desires were. At that time I was living in reaction to my circumstance, fiercely doing what I had to do to make a living.

Because making a living doing what you love determines your freedom. Right?!

Yet, I was still not in alignment with myself.

What was really confronting was how completely out of touch I was when it came to my own very real personal needs in relationships. I was unaware of what I needed to feel safe, loved and cared for by another.

I could feel myself deeply and clearly when I was alone, but when I was around other people I lost who I was to their needs. 

I only felt valued for what I had to offer others. I loved the work I was doing, but eventually I became unhappy, exhausted and resentful. I had lost touch with my core essential self.

I developed my work, but I had failed to develop myself along the way. I had lost myself in my work and in relationships.

What I needed most was a way to get back in touch with who I was. To strengthen my core sense of self. I needed to claim myself. To fully feel and own my unique personal experience, my spiritual connection, my sexuality, my creativity, my desires, dreams, and aspirations, even my own personality - for myself first.

I had to learn who I was all over again. 

I had changed. I hadn’t actually stopped to look at who I had become and to recognize I had outgrown old ways of relating.

It was like the real me was hiding somewhere underneath this big responsibility of being of service and helping others. This can be a dangerous trap, for those of us that LOVE to give. I see this especially in altruistic entrepreneurial pursuits as well. 

Your work is nothing without the real YOU. 

This is one of the difficulties I am seeing with a lot of healing professionals. They have succeeded in building their practice, they work alone, they work so hard to keep their healing practice thriving, and they have become over-identified with their professional calling that their personal life actually dwindles out of sight. As a result, their experience of real fulfillment suffers. 

I was so over-identified with my professional calling, so over-identified with my self-less spiritual self that I was disconnected from what I needed in order to thrive in a real, relatable, physical, loving, compassionate, material and prosperous way. 

I believed that I was only valuable in my professional calling. 

My friends can tell you I had a hard time at parties. I’d rather be in the kitchen, massaging kale and blessing it with holy water, than be out in the crowd mingling with strangers. 

I had a hard time connecting with people personally, and yet when I had a defined role like teaching, or laying my hands on someone in a healing session, there was no problem. 

There was, to say the least, a gigantic split. 

When the self-isolation got so bad a friend called me out and said, “You know, when you try to do everything on your own, you take away the chance for me to help you, to love you, to express my care for you, and I want to be a part of your life, so please stop being alone all the time.”

In that moment I realized that I was not only doing harm to myself, but I was actually hurting those closest to me by not sharing who I was, by not involving them, by not leaning on them in times of difficulty. I was leaving them out of something they enjoyed doing, something that brought more meaning and love into their experience. 

One of the greatest gifts we can give each other is our presence, our openness, and our listening.When you struggle, the people closest to you want to know they can help. They want to know that they can be the ones you choose to lean on. 

Now trust me, the actual process of rebuilding trust within myself and with others took years of practice. It took developing my own healing process and allowing myself to be supported by my friends, family, healers, and therapists. My healing process was fundamental to embodying REAL change. 

Healing your life, healing your relationships and restructuring  your business/life balance will begin when you address the primary relationship you have with yourself.

In order to heal myself, heal my relationships, and step up to the next level in my work, I had to re-learn who I was BEING IN RELATIONSHIP.

I had to put myself directly in relationship with others and with the world to enable a corrective experience on a felt sense level so that my nervous system could register the change. And that came with developing a much higher tolerance for my own vulnerability and fears. I had to practice vulnerability. I had to practice asking for support. I had to practice in relationship.

We cannot have a more beautiful, connected, thriving, purposeful world if we don’t start on the ground level. We need to pay attention to and work with the parts of ourselves that remain closeted in isolation and shame, so that we ourselves can return to wholeness and transmit that through everything else we do. 

Nothing in nature works in isolation. Nature is a network. And you are a significant part of the macrocosm. 

Where there is disconnection there is a signal for healing, for returning to wholeness. Where we feel disconnection there is a desperate call to be reconnected. This is what healing is all about. 

Your deepest, most impactful, transformations will come when you step into connection in full presence.