The recent death of my mother has stirred up all sorts of reflections, as these things tend to. Jointly organising her funeral with my brother has been a frustrating and wearisome process.
I realised that the part of it I found most difficult to tolerate was the way we seek to dilute the human experience in order to make it more palatable. The result was a depressingly anodyne account of a complex human life.
My mother was ‘a difficult woman’. Growing up in the wake of the Spanish Civil War, she carried the collective trauma of her country. Flouting the conventions of her day, she showed considerable courage and spirit in leaving her home and coming to the UK to begin a new life for herself, imagining the ‘freedom’ that would come with such a bold move. Perhaps inevitably she found other ways of trapping herself and life became terribly disappointing, continuing to find herself operating in a mode of surviving rather than thriving. All of this made her a mother who was unable to attend to the needs of her children.
Despite my experience of her as a parent, I would have wanted her captured in all her glorious complexity. I’ve always found the edges of human experience to be the most compelling. It felt such a shame that she became reduced to ‘the funny little Spanish woman’ who became a cleaner to the wealthier women in the English village which eventually became her home in her middle and later life.
Authenticity to me is embracing all that is. We are multifaced beings who are capable of being both terrible and brilliant, sometimes in the course of just a day. When we come from unhealthy backgrounds, we become accustomed to occupying that liminal space between what is said and what is experienced. We learn quickly that we can’t rely on the ‘normal’ conventions of human interaction and instead we begin to navigate the gap between the way things are supposed to be and how they’re actually experienced by our central nervous systems. We spend our lives doubting ourselves as what we cognitively consume in our everyday lives doesn’t match with our internal and unconscious experience.
It is only when we really do the work of exploration, understanding, healing and integration that we start to become who we are supposed to be in a way which feels authentic. By this I mean that we can start to learn the art of healthy emotional regulation and to communicate at a conscious level in a way which matches our somatic projection; our ‘vibe’ to put it another way.
I have discovered how crucial this is, not only for my personal life and relationships but also in my business. Certainly in some of my roles, such as psychotherapist, it is of course fundamental to be congruent. Interestingly I’ve also discovered that it’s equally important in the more ‘corporate’ aspects of my business, I’ve discovered that if I put out an offer which comes from a purely cognitive part of me rather than something which comes from somewhere deeper then there is a mismatch which is felt not only by me but by potential clients resulting in disappointing sales.
In the end, authenticity isn’t just a personal practice, it’s the foundation for meaningful engagement with the world. And when we embrace it fully, both in life and in work, we create something richer, more connected, and beautifully real.
If you’d like my help in becoming more integrated and authentic, please contact me for a call.