I Know I'm in There Somewhere: A Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner Voice and Living a Life of Authenticity

by Helene Brenner

Overview

Based on her work with over a thousand women across the country, psychologist Helene G. Brenner has learned that women feel the impulse to accommodate, adapt and mold themselves to serve others at their own expense. Her solution is an invigorating new approach to women's psychology. The key to transformation, she explains, is not self-improvement, but self-acceptance—affirming and validating what we truly feel and experience and who we already are. Dr. Brenner shows women how to discover and express what they truly want and value, guiding you toward your own Inner Voice. I Know I’m In There Somewhere will show you:
- How to embrace, rather than fix, the Inner Voice that has been there all along
- How to distinguish the Outer Voices (the expectations of the people around you) from Your Inner Voice (the voice of your true self that goes beyond intuition and guides you wisely towards what is right for you)
- What to do when you feel that the essence of who you are is being stifled by external demands and expectations

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781592400607
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/03/2004
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	224,417
Product dimensions:	5.33(w) x 7.98(h) x 0.81(d)
Age Range:	18 - 14 Years

About the Author

Helene G. Brenner, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist and the director of Women's Counseling and Psychological Services in Frederick and Bethesda, Maryland. She is a master therapist and seminar leader who has used the ideas and methods described in this book to help hundreds of women experience the fulfillment of living from their true selves and Inner Voices.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

I laugh to myself when my clients tell me how calm I am, because, like many women, I am an emotional person. I easily get my feelings hurt. I have deep needs for connection and intimacy. I have always been this way and I still am.

We women constantly get the message that our feelings are something we need to rise above or get over or think differently about or somehow fix. They're fine if we keep them in check and don't let them "affect our thinking." But we have to be on guard to moderate our feelings, and deny our anger or sadness, lest we be called too emotional, or hysterical, or "hormonal." We have to be careful about showing our desire for connection and intimacy, or we could be labeled "needy."

Yet our awareness of our inner selves and our desire for connection are great gifts. I would never for a moment want to give up the incredible richness of my inner life, or the blessings in my outer life, that my emotions and desire for intimacy have brought me. As one of my clients said to her husband after seeing the movie Pleasantville, "I live in Technicolor-you live in black and white."

I love helping women find and live from their true selves, which is what I get to do every day in my psychology practice at Women's Counseling and Psychological Services. As a psychologist, I've worked with over a thousand women in one-on-one therapy as well as in workshops on the east and west coasts. Early on in my career, I decided to devote myself to finding the best ways to help women be both as feelingful and as effective in the world as they wish to be, and to claim their own selves yet develop and maintain the intimate connections with others they so deeply desire.

Women have such amazing stores of passion and compassion. Almost all of them, deep down, are motivated not only by what is best for themselves but by what is best for other people, indeed, for all of life. Yet they're twice as likely to be referred for treatment for depression and anxiety disorders, because they've been deprived of the tools they need to make their natural gifts work for them rather than against them.

Almost all women live their lives standing outside themselves, always ready to judge their bodies, their feelings and their thoughts from an external standard, and find themselves wanting. Why do women do this? After all, supposedly we have all won equality with men, and are free to follow our dreams and do anything men do. But, though women's lives have changed dramatically from what they were only a few decades ago-in countless ways, big and small-women do not operate on an equal footing with men. What's more, women's ways of feeling, knowing and being continue to be relegated to second-class status, treated as inappropriate for the "serious" business of the world. Women still are given the message that to succeed in life, they must be more like men, be attractive to men, or be both.

Practically every woman, at some point in her life, has felt that she has lost track of herself and is living according to what other people wanted and expected from her. Part of the reason, of course, is the many real-world pressures affecting women. But women also carry within them an inner legacy, shaped by thousands of years of women's experiences, that tells them to accommodate, adapt and mold themselves to serve others at their own expense.

What causes lasting change? Pursuing the answer to this question has been a passion of mine for nearly thirty years. One thing I've learned is that women don't usually change their lives, or begin to feel permanently better about themselves, by adopting self-improvement regimens or telling themselves to change their thoughts and beliefs. Real change occurs when a woman has a different experience of herself.

I call this a "self-acceptance" book, rather than a "self-improvement" book, because I truly believe that you don't have to change or fix or improve yourself in order to be happy. I believe that living a fulfilled life comes from learning how to listen to your inner voice, to the truth of your inner being in all of the ways that it speaks to you, and to live from it.

Of course, everyone knows that they should love and accept themselves. It may be the most common piece of psychological advice in the world. It sounds good, but if you don't know how to accept yourself, it becomes just another item in that long list of things you "should" do to be a better person.

Self-acceptance is not something you tell yourself to have. It's something you experience when you discover that you can pay attention to your innermost feelings and desires with care and compassion. You can also pay attention in the same way to the feelings you block because they cause you pain, and to the parts of you that you think are unacceptable. Then these aspects of yourself can be welcomed back into your conscious self with the life-giving message they are holding for you. When you do this, you become more spontaneous and alive, quite literally more full of yourself, as you once were as a girl, before you learned that girls and women can't live from their inner selves and follow their own inner lights.

Working with my clients, I found that at some point in therapy, they would have moments when a switch would occur in their consciousness. Sometimes these moments were dramatic, sometimes they were subtle, but always they were meaningful. Women would go from seeing themselves and their lives from the outside to feeling them from the inside. They'd feel a surge of good feeling about who they were, and whatever they thought they had to change about themselves they'd see in an entirely new light.

Until that moment, important aspects of these women's true inner selves were inaccessible to them. Without that access, they had nothing to counter the influence of what I call "outside voices"-the opinions, desires and expectations of other people, or the critical, judgmental voices in their own mind that told them what was wrong with them and what they needed to improve. Once they reconnected to their inner selves, however, they had a new reference point for how they could feel. It became easier for them to understand the signals that came from their inner selves, and so they trusted them more. The outside voices had less of an effect.

I saw these experiences as central to the therapy I was doing. I saw women come more alive as they trusted more and more what their own hearts, minds and souls were telling them. And I looked for ways to help women come to their inner voices more quickly and predictably.

Reconnecting to your inner voice is one thing; staying connected is another. Living from your inner voice is in a great sense a matter of learning what, and what not, to pay attention to within yourself. In the process of doing therapy, I identified five distinct passageways to lead you back to your inner self again and again. I call these the Five Pathways to the Inner Voice. The first four are Knowing, Sensing, Feeling and Wanting. The fifth is the Voice of the Larger Self, the "spiritual guide" within. What comes from the Voice of the Larger Self is something quite remarkable: a quiet, clear message that seems to emanate from deep within your body, accompanied by an extraordinary sense of inner rightness and peace.

The techniques I describe to access these inner pathways are effective because they work with the grain of most women's natures. All the messengers of your inner self-your knowing, your sensing, your feelings, your wanting, and your larger self-are there to help you become more whole and live a life that's most rewarding to you. Once you begin to trust them again and continue to do so, it becomes easier and easier to use them in your life. In every chapter except the first I've provided "innercizes" to access your inner voice based on the work that I do with my women clients. I think you'll find them useful and enjoyable.

I've divided this book into three sections. The first, The Inner Voice Experience, shows how women come to lose themselves and then shows how they reconnect with themselves again, re-experiencing the feeling that they lost of living from their inner voices. After learning what the inner voice is and some of the fundamentals about how to regain it, we then go back to explore in more detail what the outside voices are, how they function to block your inner voice, and what you can do to begin separating yourself from them so as to hear your inner being.

The second section of the book, Aligning with the Inside, teaches you, chapter by chapter, how to use each of the Five Pathways-Knowing, Sensing, Feeling, Wanting and the Voice of the Larger Self-to connect with your inner voice again and again. The third section, Living from Your Inner Voice, goes into more specific detail about how to use these principles to build a life of authenticity from your inner voice, first by being your true self in your intimate relationships, and then by bringing your inner visions into your life. Finally, I'll take a few pages to look at how to relate our inner voices to the larger world around us and the times that we live in.

I've aspired to write this book in a way that will evoke for you this very different way of feeling and being. To do this, I've included many stories from my therapy practice to help make these ideas come alive. Though the particulars of these women's lives have been changed to protect their privacy, and some stories are composites of several women's experiences, the feelings and words are true. These women have generously allowed me to share their stories and feelings with you so that you can be there with them during the moments when they turned toward their inner voices, in the hope that their stories might awaken the inner voice within you. I invite you to notice as you read their experiences whether they affect the way you see your own.

You might wonder whether, in talking about living from your inner self, I'm suggesting you only listen to your inner self. Nothing could be further from the truth. Growing and developing as an adult means increasingly opening to the world around you and letting other people affect and change you. I would be just as concerned about a woman who never let other people affect her or change her mind as I would be about one who always let other people affect her. The more you feel anchored in your inner being and can validate your own opinions, feelings and desires, the more you can give to others and truly listen to others without fear of losing yourself.

This book can help you if you feel that you're doing more and more with less and less and feeling worse and worse about yourself; if you spend most of your day responding to what your boss, kids and husband want and wonder why you don't seem to know what you want; if you have had fleeting feelings of wanting to bring some inner vision or dream to life but immediately tell yourself to be "practical"; or if you yearn to close the gap between who you feel yourself to be on the inside and who you are on the outside. It also can help you if you are already following your own path in life and would like a guide and affirming companion to accompany you on your journey. Though this book deals a great deal with women's issues, much of this book can also help men of heart who'd like guidance on how to live from their authentic selves.

The message of this book is as simple as it is radical for women in any era: You can trust yourself, your feelings, your thoughts and desires, your own goodness and authority. Let the power of your own spirit guide you. The world literally needs you to find and live from your inner voice. Indeed, never has your inner voice been needed more.

Chapter One

The Forgotten Self

I believed, at twelve, that I could be a scientist. I read a book a day. I believed I could be a writer, an actress, a professor of English in Rome, an acrobat in a purple spangled outfit. Days opened for me like the pulling apart of curtains at a play you've been dying to see.

My life was like a wild, beating thing, exotic, capable of unfolding and enlarging itself, pulling itself higher and higher up like a kite loved by the wind . . . There in front of me, my own for the taking. And then, suddenly, lost.
-Elizabeth Berg, The Pull of the Moon

Several years ago, I was on a plane to California to attend a family celebration when I happened to sit next to a very engaging woman in her thirties. We struck up a conversation, and as women sometimes do, we told each other about our lives. "Val," as I'll call her, was thirty-four, had two young children, and was flying to a business convention. She had also recently separated from her husband. As she told me her story, I couldn't help but think how much she spoke for so many women I'd met and worked with over the years. Though her story is her own, so universal were many of her feelings and conflicts that she seemed almost to speak for the dilemma of women in our time.

"Until six months ago, I ran everything I thought and felt through the filter of 'What would Richard think?' " She paused and looked at me, looking to see if I understood.

"Don't get me wrong. I had my opinions. I didn't submerge them for his. But whatever I thought, whatever I felt, always, it went through my mind: 'What would Richard think about this? What would Richard want?'

"I had another filter, too," she continued. "It was 'not good enough.' I'd worry, 'Is the house clean enough? Is my cooking good enough? Did I help the kids enough with their homework?' Even though I worked full-time at my job just like him, I'd think, 'Am I doing a good enough job being a wife and mother?' "

"When I discovered that he was having an affair, after he insisted over and over again that he wasn't, I was permanently freed from ever having to make him happy."

But she wasn't free-not really. "I'm never content or satisfied with myself," she told me. "I reevaluate everything at the end of the day. I'd get together with a friend, for example, and then afterward I'd think, 'Should I have asked her more about her kids, more about her?' I'm always second-guessing myself. And I always think I'm short-changing something or somebody. If it's not my family, it's my job.

"And I keep trying on other people's feelings and opinions for size. I'm glad that I do, in one way," she reflected. "I want to be open, I wouldn't want to be rigid and hardened so that other people don't affect me. But it gets exhausting, to have that much static and so many voices in my head. What a relief it would be if I could listen to others but stand by my own feelings with more conviction!"

We spoke about other things for a while. Then she went back to telling me the rest of her story. "Richard's been seeing a therapist," she said, "and he wants to get back together with me. And if I just follow my heart, I will let him. There is a part of me that still loves him. Also, he is the father of my children. But there is the part of me that says, 'Here is your chance to have something better.' I can feel how exciting that might be, but of course there are no guarantees. So I can feel both of these parts of me, but what I can't get my hands around is the gray in between.

"How does anyone really know what to do? It's so easy for me to lose track of myself," she said in frustration. "Much of the time, I feel like I'm in neutral, ready at a moment's notice to go with the flow of someone with a stronger opinion."

As women we are destined to confront a fundamental challenge that colors practically every day of our lives. On the one hand, we must respond to, notice and be true to who we genuinely are, what we genuinely think and feel in our own unique and inimitable way. For many of us, the pulse of our internal lives beats strongly. We are aware of how we feel-sometimes, perhaps, more than we want to be. Yet this is our gift, one that we must find a way to honor.

At the same time, we are drawn to connect. We are drawn to follow that urge inside us, that pull of the tide to respond to others, to take their feelings and needs into account, to reach for that moment of intimacy and communion, to tend the web of relationships that sustains (and sometimes smothers) us, and, if we are responsible for dependent children, to fulfill our responsibility to take care of them to the best of our ability, even when it extracts a great cost from ourselves.

Somehow we must balance these two forces. We must bring them together so that neither one cancels the other out. We must find a way to make them work in tandem so that who we truly are enriches all the people we touch, and so that the connections we have with the important people in our lives mirrors, validates and makes stronger the woman we are inside.

Unfortunately, very few women have been taught how to balance these two forces. Very few have been encouraged as young girls to hold on tightly to who they really are; very few have been told that they have an inner voice that is theirs and theirs alone. Instead, they often learn the intricate arts of developing and maintaining connection at a high cost-at the expense of their true selves.

Tend and Befriend

A few years ago, a group of six psychologists from UCLA announced the results of a study showing that, while each person is an individual, in general men and women react in very different ways to stress. Specifically, the psychologists said that under stress, men's bodies automatically turn to the strategy known as "fight or flight" (gearing up either to fight or to make a hasty retreat), whereas women's bodies automatically prepare them to do what the researchers called "tend and befriend."

That is, when stress mounts, a woman's own hormonal system naturally inclines her first to protect and nurture her children (tend) and then to turn to a social network of supportive females (befriend). This, the researchers said, was the biggest difference between men and women in their responses to stress.

This finding didn't surprise me. What did surprise me, though perhaps it shouldn't have, was that the research team, headed by a woman, was nervous about publishing the study because they worried that it might be used to stereotype women negatively.

"I hope women don't find it offensive," Shelley Taylor, the lead researcher, told a Washington Post reporter. "We're trying very hard not to have people say, 'Aha! We always thought that women should be at home taking care of their children.' "

How sad! Here was a study showing that under stress, women are more likely than men to try to make friends instead of enemies, and the researchers still felt the need to worry that it could be used to support keeping women in a circumscribed, traditional role. If only this tendency could be bottled and given to men!

"No man is an island, entire unto himself," wrote the poet John Donne. Rare is the woman who needs to be told this. Most women, in fact, would probably find it laughably self-evident. The human species has survived because of communities of women tending and befriending, protecting and sharing food, resources and information with each other.

Your connections-your relationships-are not separate from your sense of self, as they usually are with men; they are a part of you, included as much in your experience of yourself as your talents and abilities, or even your arms and legs. Chances are, you can feel a tear in the fabric of one of your relationships right in your body. Why can a man go for months without calling his family, or forget to send birthday presents, and not have it bother him? Of course, part of the reason is that less is expected of him because "he's a man." But it's also true that he literally doesn't feel the break in the relationship the same way you do.

This desire for connection and relationship is something our society often puts women down for. Women are labeled "needy" and "dependent," and women who show they care more about connecting than competing frequently get passed over for promotions. It's crazy-in our interconnected world, it's becoming clearer and clearer that even in the business world, success depends more on sustaining good relationships than on ruthlessness and cunning. But old attitudes die hard.

When women don't feel their needs for connection met, they often feel it's their fault, or that something's wrong with them. I can't count the number of women who have told me that maybe they're "too needy" and they want "too much." This is unjust and unfair. It's like a man slowly starving to death thinking he should adjust his caloric needs, that maybe he's being "too hungry."

But the pull toward connection leaves women vulnerable. So vital was connection to sheer survival for our foremothers that most women have trouble disconnecting, even when they want to. If you can feel a tear in the fabric of one of your relationships right in your body, then losing an important relationship, even a bad one, can feel like losing a limb. Doing or saying something that could conceivably cause a break in a relationship can bring up a strong, visceral feeling of fear, as if you were indeed risking injury or death. It doesn't matter if your rational mind tells you you "shouldn't" feel this way. Something within us sets off this powerful reaction. At those times, the need to connect and be connected can become so strong that it overrides all other impulses that arise from the inner self. Because of this, many women-including smart, intelligent, competent women-will let go of their own voices rather than risk losing connection.

We'll talk a lot throughout this book about the "inner voice" and "the inner self." What do I mean by those terms exactly? Your inner voice is the wisdom of your entire self as it makes itself known to you. It expresses itself in many ways; as impulses, as urges, as body feelings, as a sense of knowing what you need and what to do, as a deep desire, and sometimes as a wisdom that can seem to come from beyond your physical body. Your inner voice directs you toward greater fulfillment in your life the way a flower turns toward the sun. But even when you don't listen to your inner voice for years or even decades, it doesn't reject you or disappear completely. It simply goes in the background, becoming softer, ready at any moment to show you a way to take the smallest half-step, if need be, back toward living in a manner truer to yourself. Though you may be afraid of your inner voice, in fact it is always loving and supportive of you. If you are filled with strongly critical, attacking thoughts in your mind, then by definition, no matter how accurate those attacks may seem, what you're "hearing" is not your inner voice.

Your inner self is something a little different. By inner self I'm referring to your true inner experience. To begin with, it is the person that you experience yourself to be in your private moments, when no one else is around. It is made up of the things you think and feel and remember, whether or not you express them to anyone else. But your inner self is not limited to what you are consciously aware of. Rather, it includes everything that you know, feel, sense and want, whether you are conscious of these things yet or not. Beyond even that, the inner self includes your connection to what I call the Larger Self, which we'll get to later on.

When we are born, and when we're very young, the inner self is the only self we have. But over time, of course, we naturally develop a public or "outer" self. The outer self is the face you show to the world. It is what you actually say and do, and it includes the various roles you play. When you are in harmony with yourself, your outer self serves your inner self. It translates what your inner self wants into a form the outside world will most likely respond to. It helps you find the best way to get what your inner self wants. It does this because your inner self holds the blueprint for how to live the happiest, most fulfilling and most generative life you can have.

What's more, since maintaining the outer self is a tiring job, it's necessary to have places and people in your life where you can relax and pretty much drop the outer, public self and show what's really going on-what you are really thinking and feeling.

When a woman loses touch with her inner self, when she believes her inner self is destructive or untrustworthy or when she feels that it would be "impossible" for her to live according to it, she suffers. Some women feel like they can't remember a time when they were in touch with their inner selves, others feel like they lost it in adolescence, and still others feel like they lost it slowly, gradually, in a relationship with the wrong person or in a lifetime of compromises. No matter when in life it happened, in every case, the easy, natural connection to the self was lost because, time after time, the woman reached out for connection from her inner self and, instead of being mirrored, was deflected.

What is meant by being mirrored? It is to look in another's eyes and know that you've been seen, to listen to another's words and know that you've been heard, to feel another's touch and know that you've been felt. It's in the pleasure of a shared sense of humor or a shared passion for the environment, in the joy of being encouraged by someone who believes in you, in the comfort of arms wrapped around you when you cry. It is a primal need, an essential nutrient, like food, water and oxygen. Like these other needs, it never truly fades away, though there may be times in your life when you feel you don't need it as much from others, but revel in your own company.

Being deflected is the exact opposite. It is offering the gift of a part of yourself to someone and having that person unwilling or unable to take it. While deflection can sometimes be angry or hostile, more often than not it is done without any conscious intent to harm at all. Mostly, it is expressed in a simple lack of listening or accepting. It can be felt when someone changes the subject when you share your hopes and dreams, or in a silence that says, "You're making me uncomfortable. Don't tell me you're still feeling upset. You should be over it by now."

What's clear is how being deflected makes you feel. It feels like someone is shutting the door on you. Or hanging up the phone. It is a "disconnect," and it doesn't feel good. Depending on the nature of the relationship and the deflection, it can feel like a vague, inexplicable feeling of distance that leaves you thinking, "What happened?" Or it can feel like a real blow, or sting. Yet sometimes it's hard to know what stings, or why. All you may know is that something feels bad, and you may blame yourself for feeling that way. "I'm too sensitive," you may say to yourself, or "I want more than he is willing to give me yet. I should back off."

Since the sting of a deflection is something everyone wants to avoid, you soon learn what will be mirrored and received, and what will be deflected. In many relationships, the inner self is not mirrored. Instead, what gets mirrored are the actions you take to satisfy others' needs and expectations. If those who share your life don't see you, you're in danger of becoming invisible to yourself. If they don't hear you, your desire to connect with others starts to battle with your desire to be true to yourself. If connection wins, you take from yourself the right to know what you know, feel what you feel, sense what you sense and want what you want.

How does this happen? When does it start? Clearly for most of us the foundations start in early childhood.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction	xiii
Part 1	The Inner Voice Experience
Chapter 1	The Forgotten Self	3
Chapter 2	Waking Up to Your Inner Voice	31
Chapter 3	Outside Voices	57
Part 2	Aligning with the Inside: The Five Pathways to the Inner Voice
Chapter 4	Just Say Know	87
Chapter 5	Developing Your Sense-Ability: The Wisdom of the Body	101
Chapter 6	Having Your Feelings without Them Having You	119
Chapter 7	The Lost Art of Wanting	151
Chapter 8	The Voice of the Larger Self: Accessing the Spiritual Guide Within	173
Part 3	Living from Your Inner Voice
Chapter 9	Holding On to Your Inner Voice: The Foundation of Relationship	195
Chapter 10	Deepening the Connection: Living from Your Inner Voice in Relationships	219
Chapter 11	Manifesting an Authentic Life	245
	Epilogue: The Larger Picture	277
	Recommended Reading	281

Editorial Reviews

Brenner, a psychologist who runs workshops for women, focuses on the significant problem: women often are taught to behave as "people pleasers" and keep their emotions hidden rather than express their true feelings. Instead of advocating that women change themselves, Brenner wants women to be aware of their concerns. "I call this a `self-acceptance' book, rather than a `self-improvement' book, because I truly believe that you don't have to change or fix or improve yourself in order to be happy," she writes in her introduction, continuing, "I believe that living a fulfilled life comes from learning how to listen to your inner voice, to the truth of your inner being in all of the ways that it speaks to you, and to live from it." The book offers practical strategies focused on finding the "Inner Voice" in five stages: Knowing, Sensing, Feeling, Wanting and Voice of the Larger Self. Using many real-life examples, Brenner offers advice on such common issues as loneliness within marriages, unresolved issues with aged parents, job difficulties, etc. Included are sidebar exercises such as spending 15 minutes writing down wants, reading these wishes aloud and talking to a friend without censoring any feelings. Women who are comfortable expressing their feelings will find this book reassuring, but some of Brenner's suggestions are simplistic and not particularly original. (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Like so many books written by therapists, this one abounds with anecdotes from the author's patients. In a manner that will appeal to the public and other therapists, Brenner (director, Women's Counseling & Psychological Svsc., Bethesda, MD) shares the experiences of women torn among too many "voices" telling them what they should do. Her thesis is not that too many people try telling women what to do but that women suppress their own internal voices to listen to those of others, often even filtering decisions based on what they assume someone else would want them to do. Although there are several helpful exercises (Brenner calls them "innercizes"), this book is more valuable as an inspiration and comfort than a how-to guide. While it doesn't contain any groundbreaking information, it is well written and effective in conveying its message. Recommended for general and psychology collections.-David Leonhardt, Chesterville, Ont. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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