Check Your Privacy Settings …

Privacy is desired, protected, and promised … but do you know what it is for you, and what it means in your life? In my search to ease the flow of words in my life –  those I speak, those I write and ultimately those I share – I have come to learn a few things about how I hold privacy and how it holds me hostage in my own life.

Really? Can a construct like privacy influence my life when, as the awesome Louise LeBrun often says, you can’t put a pound of privacy (or relationship or money or whatever else image we hold as real ) in the trunk of your car? Indeed it can. Just like the privacy settings on your social media or web browser controls access and use of your data, privacy settings are wired into your body from before you were conceived and are absorbed like a sponge by your nervous system, especially in your first few years of life. Those settings are from your parents’ past, and their parents’ past, and so on, and become yours as you grow and move through the world. These settings are so deeply wired and rarely if ever discussed, they run on default underneath all we say and do, or don’t say and do,  while we forge on, completely unaware. The fascinating thing about working in words, especially writing, is that it reveals a deep double bind: a calling to write that at once lights up the system and brings up a deep resistance, you know the jokes, writers drinking, writers living on coffee, writers with the cleanest houses as deadlines loom. Folks unaware of this constant start-stop sensation don’t get it: how hard can it be to just sit down and type, especially when you say you want to do it? Note I say ‘unaware’ rather than ‘without’ … any human I’ve met has at least one kind of double bind running, often more. To the unaware, I ask this: how easy is it to drive a car pressing the gas and the brake at the same time? That’s a body locked in a double bind. The irony is that the very thing that can release the double bind – touching the story, writing it down, and choosing from mindful awareness – is the very thing that triggers the lockdown.

Is there a way out of this vicious loop? The answer is always yes.
What I discovered: I was confusing privacy with secrecy.

In that confusion, my ‘privacy settings’ were set so stringently that there was barely room for anything to get in or out, including myself. Words were compressed and stuffed into crevices and corners until pressure built to where they would erupt in a jumbled, erratic stream, spewing bits and pieces here and there. In the rare moment I allowed myself to sit down and write, out came chunks of three different books, a few short story sentences and some days, a grocery list, all words so tightly held their flow was squeezed into a concentrated ache of frustration. So, who chooses that? I did, day after day, year after year, for as long as I can remember. Now, after years of literally relearning everything, from how to breathe to how to work with my body rather than against it, I’m integrating things I’ve known all along but ‘wouldn’t go there’ or couldn’t bear to admit because … yep … my ‘privacy settings’ steered me off with the story of keeping me safe. The thing is, the only safety to be had in this world is internal alignment, knowing clearly who you are and choosing from that inner knowledge you often hear but too often dismiss in favour of thing ‘out there’ we have been taught to trust as smarter than us.  For the past decade, I’ve been relearning, releasing, reconnecting, and creating new at the same time within myself. To share what I’ve come to know, to share my journey in the moment, to share my words … well, that remains a journey in itself. Akin to a computer running slow or crashing during searches and projects, my body continued to resist sharing. A key to my evolution here has been to revisit how I hold ‘privacy’ … and that’s when the revelation came that I was holding privacy as secrecy, when they now appear to me as two very different things.

Here is my experience now:

Privacy is a boundary, clear and mindfully chosen. Just like clicking the boxes in my online privacy settings, I choose: what is meaningful for me to share, what is meaningful for me to keep to myself, or to share specifically with a person or people? I then engage with respect to those boundaries and in my engagement, my boundaries are clear with others who can then engage according to their boundaries. Information shared confidentially is kept confidential through mutual respect. Information shared to the wider world is done with an aligned desire to offer my view in the moment and the knowledge that the power is in the sharing. Reactions of others cannot be controlled. I, however, can choose my reaction to those reactions, and as easily as settings are changed, so are tools engaged to act on my choice.

Secrecy, however, is a whole other construct, a strategy for avoidance that encapsulates within shame and fear an action or memory held as too disruptive, unacceptable, or terrifying to face. Under the guise of safety a secret is swallowed like a bitter pill in an attempt to protect, control, or otherwise make the information within disappear.  In its protective coating of habit and shame, however, it persists in the memory of the body, generation after generation, accumulating and running patterns even though I may have no recollection of the secret … in fact, I may not even have been born when the original whatever-it-was took place. Nor does my body care what or when. It could have been me stealing a quarter from my brother’s piggy bank when I was six. It could be a great-great-grandfather having stolen money from his employer and his wife and children coerced into covering up the crime. All the body knows is the pattern of avoidance and it keeps running unless the body is rewired to stop.  In my body, secrecy weighs heavily in the lower back and abdomen, between where my safety sits and my power centre to engage on my own behalf. The mantra ‘what happens in this house stays in this house …’ was the overriding call to action in childhood.  I was raised on the cusp of the ‘children should be seen and not heard’ era … to share ‘secrets’, to repeat things overheard, to offer opinions, resulted in joking dismissal, a ‘go to your room’, or out-and-out punishment. Nothing was more important than keeping secrets. ‘It’s none of their business’ was the explanation. Being ‘private’ and being ‘secretive’ in my child brain became the same thing, and violating that ‘privacy’ became wired with danger and shame. The thing is, as a child, I had little experience to sort out what needed to be ‘private’ and what could be safely shared.  ‘Oh, what a pretty sweater,’ offered as a compliment set off a fireworks of patterns in my body.  Impulse would be to share I liked it, too, but was that a secret because it’s what I felt inside? Or who gave it to me, that might be okay but wait, would it be okay to name them, or say where they bought it? Wait, I might slip and say how much it cost and that’s not appropriate … in the end, managing a ‘thank you’, if the conversation hadn’t moved on by then. It was a polite response, externally acceptable, but not my entirety of expression and the shame of self-betrayal added to the fireworks of stress my nervous system was now absorbing and rewiring to match. It felt safer over time to simply not share anything.

Jump ahead several decades, and deep within, those patterns still fire off except this time, it’s in conversation with a blank screen, words pressing and churning inside, emerging as a sodden shell of what unfolds behind my eyes. And it is just recently, in sitting with that sensation, icky as it was, that I could feel congruently the presence of ‘secrecy’ in my body. It was not just the sensations of shame and danger deep in my lower body, ‘keeper of secrets’ was also high in my third eye, the region around the middle of my forehead where identity lives, the deeply-embedded belief of who I am that influences all that I do. Secrecy had become part of my identity, the good girl who never told, the one who protected everything she knew from anyone who might see it. And protection of identity sets off a fierce battle in the body between the divine energy that is me and the intellect that has been trained to match the needs and wants of the external world. I came into the world with words as my superpower – the fuel of my existence – and over the years, outside of my conscious awareness, had crafted not only strategies to contain and control that superpower, but instituted that control as part of who I am. To violate that ‘secrecy’ was to violate my very being … or so the pattern went.  To hold everything I am, all I create as a secret, well, THAT was the violation. And I get to choose: keep running the default or step into the now that I know. That is the power of awareness and mindful choice. Becoming aware is like a mountaintop view of my life, able to rise up and look down on everything running, see the patterns, see the outcomes, and choose: let them keep running, or make some changes?

I choose change, and in that choice is the awareness that everything from beliefs to my nervous system are energy in flow, can be adapted, altered, rewired to align with my divine energy within rather than someone else’s landscape.

Easy? Absolutely not. It takes mindful action to back up that mindful choice, moment by moment, day by day, filling my days with words of others that encourage and enlighten my journey through books and blogs, audio files and conversations, then allowing space for my own words to flow, unjudged and welcomed as they are. I have chosen to relearn how to write, to engage from and for myself rather than engage solely for others. I have chosen to allow that after decades earning a living as a professional writer  I HAD to relearn how to write to be fully myself. Dropping the ‘stupid’ label and embracing the ‘infinite journey’ invitation has gotten me here, to where I can choose to see ‘secrecy’ in my identity and choose that it no longer belongs there. I am safe without it now, and I am constrained by it now in who I am. I could have – and was tempted through the years – to engage in time management, productivity training, confidence-building, and the myriad of other strategy programs designed to help you ‘write that book’ or ‘break that writer’s block’. For me, the resistance, the struggle, were signs of a need for me to learn about me, which no strategy can touch.

What does this mean? Let’s just say there are no floodgates in this moment. There are no fireworks, no grand AHA. There is space to breathe. There is ease in writing this. There is alignment. There is joy. For me in this moment, those are constructs that still won’t fill my trunk, but are definitely filling my life with purpose and the hunger for more. I know and value my privacy, and respect the privacy of those with whom I engage. Secrets? To me there is no more insidious poison in my life or in the world. To secrets I say no thank you. I carry way to many of them now, and as my journey of clarity and choice continues my invitation to self is to touch each one like a dusty ornament and decide what’s next.

In this crazy world, I am grateful for this emerging awareness, and for my words – and yours – to guide me.

 

Want to learn more?

As a CODE Model Coach™, I engage Quantum TLC ™ for my own discoveries and can guide you in learning how to engage it for yourself.

CODE Model™ or Creation Out of Deep Energy™,  and Quantum TLC ™ are part of the WEL-Systems® body of knowledge developed by Louise LeBrun.

Visit
https://wel-systems.com/self-directed-evolution/

This new space for exploration includes articles, audio files, and referrals to CODE Model Coaches™ who can support and guide your journey.

Contact me

I can offer:

• 1 on 1 conversations/explorations/coaching to discuss your writing and the story behind the story of not writing
• Whispers from Within ™, a 10-day email exchange that delves into writing and limiting beliefs through daily writing and written conversation
• Small group conversations, in person or virtual, among those of us called to write, exploring what lights us up in writing and what challenges us.

If any of these options resonate or pique your curiosity, email me and we’ll set up a time to chat.

Thanks for reading and for showing up!

Jennifer

Jennifer Hatt is an author, communications consultant, publishing doula and CODE Model Coach™ .
ownyourstorynow.com