a note on… saying no

notes on freedom

A weekly email series containing easily digestible morsels of info on relational trauma and how to find freedom from it.

THIS WEEK IT’S A NOTE ON…saying no

Before we can say ‘no’ we need to be able to hear and feel our ‘no’. We need to be able to interpret our body’s ‘no’ signals.

But trauma prevents us from doing this. Over time we’ve disconnected from our body, so we struggle to understand or ‘be with’ our physical sensations and emotions. We also have a fear-response to strong sensations and emotion which gets in the way of us interpreting or understanding our ‘no’. Because of this self-disconnection we rarely trust our own experience or instincts. Without self-trust saying ‘no’ is very hard.

Many of life’s problems require us to ‘figure things out’ with our mind. But even when the problem at hand is one that requires reasoning, being able to feel and hear our instinctive, authentic ‘no’ is important.

An instinctive, authentic ‘no’ moves us away from things that are not good for us and towards things that help us grow, prosper and expand. For this reason, in many ways, a ‘no’ is really a ‘yes.’

As we learn to feel, hear and act on our instinctive, authentic ‘no’ our self-trust grows. We learn to trust our body and our instinct because life is better when we do. There’s less anxiety, fear and resentment. There’s more confidence, trust, flow and acceptance.

Before we can do this we need experience what our instinctive, authentic ‘no’ actually feels like. And this requires practice.  

So, what does a ‘no’ actually feel like? We tend to feel (and our yes) in our chest, our tummy and/or throat. Often people describe their ‘no’ as:

A feeling of tightening

A feeling of contraction

A feeling of closing-up and becoming smaller

A ‘sinking’ feeling (in tummy)

A blocked feeling (in throat)

If we can’t feel and understand our ‘no’ we push on. We plough forward despite the fact we have a sinking feeling in our tummy and we just know something’s not right. We push on rather than connecting to our body and our truth.

We push on instead of pausing. We push on because of what we want to be true, rather than noticing what actually IS true for us. So we end up somewhere we don’t want to be.

Freedom is found as we pause and listen to our body instead of pushing on. First we get curious about what our ‘no’ feels like in our body. Then, slowly (painfully and imperfectly to start with) we act on our ‘no’. As we do our nervous system and the wounded younger parts of ourselves begin to relax because they learn that we’ll consistently listen. They learn that they can trust us.