How to Be Your Future Self Now

You know that feeling when you are super motivated and you can picture yourself exercising daily, waking up early to meditate, cleaning and organizing daily, or batch cook for the week? You can feel the amazingly powerful feeling of being this on-top-of-things version of yourself. You want to be that version of yourself so badly in the moment as you see it in the future, but then when the alarm goes off, or when it’s time to do one of those desired healthy things, you just—well—don’t. Why is this? Why are we so prone towards self-sabotage, to staying stuck, to not living in the way we can envision for our future selves? Why don’t we follow through with what we claim to want, but just don’t? While there might be a number of reasons why, no matter the reason it doesn’t have to mean this is how it has to be for you forever. You actually CAN become your future self now.

You do have the capacity to become your vision of your higher self, future self, up-leveled self in the now. You deserve to live in a space where you feel whole, healthy, confident, peaceful, and joyful. Why you aren’t always living in a way that supports becoming your best future self is often rooted in a lack of self-trust, low self-worth, and an out of balance nervous system.

The pain of staying stuck is often perceived by your nervous system as less uncomfortable now than when imagining the fear of failure in the future. Your memory networks in your brain are essentially a recording of everything that has happened up until this very point, and so it will plan accordingly, sink you into default mode, and keep you in that stuck place unless you create a lot of opportunities to show it another way to be. This is the first key to how you begin to become your future self—now.

The ability to become your future self in this moment requires having a calm nervous system. If you are living in a constant state of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn and struggling to feel safe and secure from moment to moment, it makes change very difficult to create. If you have past trauma, this will become the default, living in a state of a constantly over activated nervous system. However, even without past trauma this can become the default when living with overwhelming pressures, stressors, lack of fulfillment, and any other mental health struggles. 

Learning to regulate and calm your nervous system is step one. It’s a powerful key to creating the possibility for progress. If you find that you are often stuck in fight-mode, you most likely feel on edge, like you can’t relax, frustrated, angry, irritable, easily reactive, and tight and uncomfortable in your body. If you find you are often stuck in flight mode you may feel a lot of worry, a desire to escape or self-isolate, like you need to overwork, or stuck in cycle of anxiety inducing perfectionism. If you find you are often stuck in freeze mode, you may feel shut down, blocked, numb, exhausted, stuck, in a cycle of constant anxiety inducing procrastination, and generally burned out. If you find you are stuck in fawn mode you may be overly concerned with the needs of others, feel overly responsible for everyone else, struggle with speaking up for yourself, dismissing your own needs and feelings, and always in people pleasing mode.

When you are stuck in any of these nervous system responses connected to being over-stressed or in response to past trauma, you will not feel capable of becoming your future self as your brain will always sink you into default mode as an effort to keep you in a perceived state of reaction to present or future harm. Self-awareness is another key part of this process as well, and is super empowering as it allows you to develop a plan to help yourself regulate, ground, and find your way back to rest and digest mode. When you are in rest and digest mode, (where your body is designed to live when not in a state of emergency) you are present, clear minded, connected to your self, and you feel capable of anything that you will to do.

Creating a consistent, intentional relaxation practice is yet another key to becoming your future self now. Intentional relaxation is all about offering balance to your nervous system while being fully aware of what is presently occurring in your mind, your body, and your overall energy. Intentional relaxation practices provide the opportunity to shift feeling states from any of the over-reactive states back to rest and digest mode. Intentional relaxation practices include things such as breath work, meditation, guided imagery, guided relaxation, journaling, self-massages, baths, walks in nature, gentle stretching etc… General relaxation is different than intentional relaxation, both are important to help support your nervous system function.

General relaxation is when you can check out a bit and turn off your brain. General relaxation practices include reading, watching TV, exercising, listening to a podcast or book, anything where you are in a relaxed state but not self-focused. Ideally we can engage in both intentional and general relaxation experiences daily to help create a stable, balanced, and grounded nervous system. When you are relaxed and present, you can be more open to becoming your future self now.

Once you are in a regulated, present, and relaxed state, you can do the work of living as your future self now. This is where you begin creating opportunities to show your brain new ways of being, living, and experiencing your life through imagery. This is where having a clear vision for your future self is so important and powerful. You start to show your brain other ways of being and imagining actually doing them when your body is calm and relaxed. In a therapy setting we do this with cognitive rehearsal, and in EMDR therapy, with future templates. In EMDR you practice rehearsing how you want your future self to be in certain circumstances using positive cognitions, affirmations, or positive adaptive statements, to help build the belief in yourself that you are indeed capable, while feeling that capability as truth in your body as well as in your mind.

When this future desired outcome is practiced and rehearsed consistently with the resource of a positive cognition in a calm and present state of mind, you create the opportunity for this new outcome to arise in the future. When you do this consistently, you will find that there is less resistance, fear, push back, and self-sabotage—Yay! For it to truly stick, you need to practice consistently and calmly until you just notice that you are one day living as your future self in the here and now.

Clarity is the final key to becoming your future self now. You need to get very clear on what you want, why you want it, how it will feel when you have it. Then practice getting into this feeling state regularly, creating opportunities to feel how you want to feel as your future self—now. Empower yourself to visualize this daily, practice rehearsing it in your mind and experiencing how it will feel in your body. When you do this consistently from a space of feeling calm, grounded, and deeply connected to the present moment, you create the life you want, you create the capacity within your nervous system to feel secure, and to live as your future self now!

EMDR Therapy + Manifestation

The concept of manifestation is not new, however, the way it is practiced has changed significantly over the years. Information about the brain, consciousness, imagery, and self-worth, continues to be studied and researched, and there is great evidence to the science of manifestation. So much evidence has been offered to understand more logically how and why it actually works.

I remember hearing on the Oprah show years ago, and it struck me in a big way, “you don’t become what you want in life, you become what you believe.” This is the foundation of manifestation, and why some of the concepts that popularized it, and made it seem a little out-there of just picture it and it will happen, have not proven to be how or why manifestation actually works. What you are unconsciously creating in your life, is created directly out of your level of self-worth. If you believe you are not good enough, destined to fail, are unworthy, inadequate, unloveable, or even always in danger, then no matter how much you want something, most likely you will find yourself in patterns of subconsciously sabotaging any efforts to create it in your life.

This is where EMDR therapy can be a very powerful and useful technique to integrate with your manifestation, or self-worth improvement process. EMDR therapy (if you want to learn more about EMDR therapy, you can read previous blog posts HERE, HERE and HERE) works to reprocess the memories, experiences, and feeling states that have created or reinforced the negative internalized beliefs that hold you back from living your best life. These negative beliefs create unconscious blocks to moving forward in your life. I know this to be true from both as a certified EMDR therapist, as well as a client receiving EMDR therapy. I have experienced how it helped me unravel more than one negative cognition, or negative internalized limiting belief, which has allowed me to take more intentional and subconscious action towards what I want. EMDR therapy has helped me embody how it feels to be worthy of what I want.

If you are familiar with some of the concepts of manifestation and cast it off as woo-woo, I totally get it. However, there are more and more studies and books out there explaining the brain-based science of how it actually works. I have been doing the work of To Be Magnetic (interested? try it out here with a coupon code here: TBM) for a few years and have seen it work really well with EMDR therapy. The process is logical and there in no woo-woo belief required. What I like about TBM specifically is that she has partnered with a neuroscientist and an EMDR therapist to create the process, which is a wonderful compliment to EMDR therapy, or any therapeutic technique.

Once doing the manifestation work (or any self-development work) many find that they discover that they have one or more blocks related to self-worth. Working through these blocks with an EMDR (or any) therapist can not only speed up the work of manifesting (creating the life you desire) or feeling more grounded in your sense of self, but also create more ease, self-awareness, emotional tolerance, and overall improve your mental wellbeing on many levels. 

When you create a vision for what you want and know why you want what you want, you set in motion opportunities for your brain to subconsciously seek it out. When you incorporate how it will feel to have what you want, and align it with your personal values, the why you actually want it, and then practice being in that desired feeling state, you again, set in motion opportunities for your brain to subconsciously seek it out. When practiced repeatedly while simultaneously clearing out the past memories, traumas, and experiences that created the blocks in the first place, you open yourself up to living in alignment with your new internalized beliefs, such as: I am worthy, I am lovable, I am good enough, I deserve what I want, In this moment I am safe, I’m ok…

Curious about integrating EMDR therapy with other types of self-worth development work? Feel free to reach out and schedule a complimentary consultation. You are capable of creating the life you want, the life you desire. You deserve to feel worthy of what you want and to do the work to support your mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual wellbeing.

Calming Your Inner Critic to Release Body Shame

When it comes to having a healthy relationship with your body, one of the most challenging obstacles to overcome is your relationship with your thoughts. Do you notice what goes through your mind when you look in the mirror, when you look at a picture of yourself, when you are trying on clothes in a dressing room? If you struggle with body-image, most likely there is an inner critic who has some less than kind things to say.

Body shaming often starts very young and is deeply engrained into the fabric of our culture. Commenting on other people’s bodies based on size and shape has happened forever in the media, and this is not likely to change. However, for many people who struggle with body-image, the shaming most likely began within familiar environments, such as at home or in school. Sometimes the body shaming could look like a parent commenting negatively about their own body, their child’s body, their partner’s body, their neighbors body, and so on. For many people, the body shaming happened in school, where kids are often bullied for how they look. Sometimes the shaming came directly from parent or caretaker to child, where the parent constantly commented on their child’s body, and even made decisions about food for their child based on how their child’s body looked. All of these experiences often leave a residue of shame, feeling not good enough, resulting in trauma, and the development of a very unkind inner critic.

When a child feels shame, they internalize the negative language said to them and then begin to say these unkind things to themselves. This happens as a protective measure in our psyche to help reduce the suffering of when it’s heard from an external source (especially a parent/caretaker). This is where the inner critic is born. This is where this part of ourselves develops and sinks its roots in deep. It begins as self-protection, this is a maladaptive coping mechanism that served a purpose for the child to reduce emotional discomfort. This then becomes the language of our own thoughts, creating opportunities to develop perfectionism as a way of managing inner fears and anxieties.

The inner critic starts as someone else’s voice, and then becomes our very own. The words it says are unkind, even cruel, and cause hurt, pain, suffering, and increased feelings of shame. Shame triggers the belief that there is something wrong with us, such as not feeling good enough, unworthy, or deeply inadequate, which causes tremendous psychological pain. This pain limits how much we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, open, to feel deep connections, and even limits our experience of finding joy.

When we can learn to see our inner critic as a part of ourselves, not our true self, we can begin to heal it. When we get to know this inner critic part, it often is a very young, child-like part of ourselves, and we can more easily begin to understand why it is there, how it came to be there, and what it’s trying to protect us from. With this information we can begin to develop the capacity to lean into healing and self-compassion by working with this part. We work to give this part a new job that is supportive, healthy, and useful.

To begin to get to know your inner critic more intimately, it requires listening, and then getting curious about why it says what it says. Curiosity becomes the anecdote and where the healing can truly unfold. The next time you hear a self-critical thought about your body— or anything else really—try going through this process:

• Acknowledge your inner critic, and see it as a part of you, not your true, authentic self.

• Get curious, ask it what it wants you to know? Does it have a specific message for you?

• Ask it how old it is, when it learned to speak in this way.

• Ask it if it would be willing to reframe and shift into more self-compassionate language, just to see what happens? If it’s willing, try it out and see, if it isn’t, ask it if you can try again later. Let it know you want to get to know it, to understand it, and to validate its fears and feelings.

• Ask it if it might consider a new task, as this one it has learned to do so well is no longer serving you, in fact, it’s causing significant harm. If it’s open to that, offer some suggestions, or get ideas from it. If it’s not, let it know that change is difficult and you will try again later.

• Thank it, let it know that it is worthy of being seen and loved unconditionally.

• Practice reframing, reframing is looking realistically at the fear based negative thought and using mindfulness to answer what is really true right now. (If you want a deeper dive into thought work you can read a blog I wrote about examining your thoughts here).

• Try this reframing example, if the inner critic said something like, “you look terrible today, you don’t deserve to be in the pictures” try reframing with, “although I am having a bad body-image day, I still deserve to have the memories of this event and to be in the pictures.” Or, “Even though I don’t feel my best, I am going to choose to be in the pictures to remember this event.”

Over time you will be able to create a new inner language with the assistance of your inner critic. The more you get to know your inner critic, understand its role, you will get better and better at reframing. This process of reframing will help your inner critic to find—and get just as good at—a new job internally. This new job will be non harming, supportive, and a job that most importantly increases your capacity for self-compassion, and self-love.

Through this work you can create a deeper appreciation for your body, just as it exists within this moment. Your body deserves this, this hurt protective part of you deserves this, you deserve this. You are worthy of creating a new language within, and shifting from inner criticism to inner kindness and inner peace. If you feel overwhelmed with where to begin or as though your inner critic is unmanageable, you may benefit from EMDR therapy, IFS therapy, or an EMDR intensive. With this work you can reprocess the traumatic memories that have created or reinforced the negative beliefs that have given your inner critic so much power. Healing is possible, you deserve to release the internalized shame and feel your best in mind, body, and spirit.