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One of the things I invite participants to do during the training is to put on the transcript, so that they can access the exact wording when it was just right for their incredible neurodivergent brains.

One of the benefits of this, is that when I say something that felt “just right” for my brain, I can also capture it.

We were talking about the complexity of unmasking – that as we find out who we are underneath of all the expectations there can be a tension between needing to pay our bills and wanting to be our authentic self. Here’s what I said. (Note: all names have been changed to protect participants).

The question we are trying to answer is, “how does a Craig operate well iIn the world, operate authentically as themselves in the world?” (“How does a Bill? How does a Joe? How does a Sarah? How does a Jill operate as themselves in the world?”)

We live in a complex world: We need to be able to eat. We need to be able to have a roof over our head. There are things we have to do to survive. Some of those things are malleable in terms of how we achieve them in the face of better understanding of our authentic selves. Some of them may not be.

I know most of your clients can’t all just leave their jobs and go become yoga instructors, even if they want to. That tension may continue to exist. We may not be able to remove that tension. That’s not what we’re trying to do.

We’re not trying to think our way into a better way of living. That is definitely not what we’re trying to do. We are trying to find our way back to our authentic self. And we are trying to give our authentic self space to speak into how we show up in this complex, turbulent, morally challenging world that we live in.

It’s not going to be perfect at the end of the day. That’s not one of my promises. I make no promises that we’re going to get to perfection. My hope is that working with this material will get us closer back to our authentic selves. And doing that will allow us to show up more authentically in this morally complex world that we live in.

That we will spend less of our time in fight and flight, and freeze and fawn and force.

That we will have more time that we are able to engage in our passions and live from a sense of groundedness. These are the goals.

We may still have to go into the world. And show up in a way that isn’t perfectly comfortable. I don’t know that perfect comfort is possible. I don’t think it’s possible, even if we were to isolate ourselves from everyone in the world. It’s not just about pulling ourselves back from that space. But it is about knowing who we are, knowing how we would like to solve for this problem, and exploring ways that that can become more of our reality.

Your comment, “Maybe it’s about learning to be fully be ourselves without needing to always express that, being discerning about when that is safe to fully show who we are. We can also do the fully being who we are on the inside.” I think that’s true, but I also think that the reason that we find ourselves masking so much in our environments is because of that fight and flight, and freeze and fawn and force.

I think that is mostly what we are trying to mask. We are trying to mask the behaviors that we are told over and over and over again, are problematic. And so, if we can listen to those behaviors, investigate what they are telling us, honour the misalignment that they are pointing to, and rediscover how we are authentically meant to live in those environments, then what we will find is that we have less and less masking that we need to do.

And that’s a game changer!