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Ep. 2 Reclaiming the Authentic Self
1k Plays6 months ago
Ready to embark on a journey back to your true self? In this uplifting episode, I'm talking all about breaking free from societal pressures and rediscovering the real you. I share personal stories, expert advice, and super practical tips to help you reconnect with your authentic self.
Whether you're feeling a bit lost or just looking to deepen your self-awareness, I've got you covered. Let's embark on this exciting journey together and start living a more genuine, fulfilling life. Tune in and get inspired to reclaim your authentic self!
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Misunderstood' podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello, beautiful souls. I'm so grateful that you're tuning in. Welcome to my podcast, Misunderstood, guiding highly sensitive people through an emotional dark age. I'm your host, Candice Van Dal, and I'm honored to embark on this transformative journey with you. Have you ever felt like you didn't quite fit into the world around you or even your own family? Like your sensitivity was a burden rather than a gift. If so, you're not alone.
Sensitivity as a superpower
00:00:26
Speaker
And here's the truth. Your sensitivity is not a flaw. It's a superpower. It's what allows you to feel deeply, to connect with others on a profound level, and to access a higher realm of consciousness. And on this podcast, we're going to explore how to harness that power and use it to create a life of purpose, passion, and true confidence.
00:00:45
Speaker
Here, in this sacred space, we honor your sensitivity as the gift it truly is. Get ready to embark on the journey of unapologetic emotional honesty and next level healing. Let's dive in together. Hello, beautiful souls. Welcome back to the Misunderstood podcast. I am your host, Candace Vandal.
Authentic self vs. societal pressures
00:01:05
Speaker
I want to talk about a really important topic this week, reclaiming the authentic self. If you listen to my first podcast, it was a little bit about my story and feeling misunderstood in a world that's basically functioning on an emotional dark age. Let's be honest, this world has not become fully conscious, so people in it aren't either.
00:01:26
Speaker
And we're all doing our inner work to really reclaim the truth of who we are so that we can step into the purpose we were born perfect to do, right? So I just got off the call with the client and we were obviously deep in this process of the reclamation of self. And, you know, one of the questions is, how do I know if I'm being my authentic self or not? I'm going to dive into that. But what I want to start with is where did the authentic self go? Why is it not just here? Why am I not just that? And every single client I've probably seen in the last 11 years has had some version of this because we're born into this place, right? That's not heaven. It's kind of heaven and hell at the same time. It's unconscious and our systems are unconscious, whether it be the educational system, the healthcare system, systems are unconscious, okay?
00:02:18
Speaker
so My example in my first podcast was me having neurodiversity and being labeled because I wasn't thinking or doing things the way most people were. And that's really scary because that's what causes separation of self, separation of others. That's what causes this everyone needs to fit one size fits all kind of thing. And in my opinion, that's the problem. So where does our authentic self go? Well, if you are doing your inner work, you know that your parents probably didn't. So your parents projected onto you many of their unhealed wounds that they were unaware of. They just were conditioned and that's what happened, right? They were treated the way
00:03:02
Speaker
their parents were treated and you're treated the way they were treated. And so when we are being our authentic self and that doesn't fit the mold or that doesn't get approval or that doesn't get praise or that doesn't get love from the parent we put on a pedestal and think is our God, right? Then we think something's wrong with that and we have to put it in the shadow.
Healing through inner work
00:03:22
Speaker
I talk a lot about shadow work. I have a really amazing shadow work course that just started and the people in there are just Blowing my mind right because when you start to understand what the shadow is and where we put things You also understand there's a golden shadow many of you couldn't get approval from your parents. So you even put your shine in the shadow So we can't get approval for being who we naturally are And we can't get love and we can't make it in our family I often say we try to get approval or healing from the places that cause the wounding right so
00:03:56
Speaker
If we can't get love or mirroring or validation by being natural, by just being naturally who we are, we start to chip away at that when we're really young before we're even conscious of anything. We're just, you know, catering to our conditioning and we start to abandon those parts of self those reels, and we start to claim ideals. What is an ideal self? The ideal version of what does get me approved of, what does make me feel more safe in this survival, right? We need to survive when we're young. We need love and shelter and all the things to survive because we're dependent. So many of us are depending on undependable people because we're not getting the love we need. So we have to shift ourselves. Really think about that. And if we're shifting ourselves,
00:04:47
Speaker
We're becoming something we're not. We're compromising the truth. And over time, that starts to make us forget who we truly are. And so so now we're just living a life to get externally approved of because we're not internally validated. We don't know how to do that yet. We're still looking to our parents to do it. They didn't do it. We're looking to a society to do it. It didn't do it. We don't know how to give ourselves that permission slip to really own ourselves, self-partner and be self-validated and become an autonomous human being.
00:05:19
Speaker
So, that's where your authentic self went. Now, What do we do about it? First, I have to look at this. If you're wondering, am I being my authentic self, I say this. If you're doing things to get something, like approval, you're not being your authentic self. If you need approval, if you need validation, if you're a people pleaser, you're not being authentic. You're doing things to get something that you need, your inner child still needs to survive. So step one is doing some of that inner child work, which means going deep dive into your own
00:05:54
Speaker
inner emotional world looking at many people come to me and they're like okay i've achieved everything in life i have all the money of everything why do i still have these weird patterns in relationships and i say well you probably are in your ego career what does that mean. Well it's the career we chose to get that approval to feel enough. When I was in my teens and 20s, my career was to be an international model and an actress. Well, I needed a positive mirror. I grew up with a lot of shame. I didn't have a lot of positive reinforcement in my
Career choices: Ego vs. Divine calling
00:06:28
Speaker
childhood. So I needed it from the world to prove to my parents that I was good, to prove, okay? So if you're still trying to prove something,
00:06:36
Speaker
You're probably in that ego phase. You're not in that divine calling, right? I call it the ego career versus the divine calling. So as I started doing this career and I was in it for, I don't know, many, many, many, many, many years, I was like, yeah, and my relationships are still tragic. Like I'm sabotaging what's going on here. Why am I attracting this? Why am I doing that? Because the inner wound doesn't heal with external success. Really hear that. The inner wound only heals with inner work. And so many of us are afraid to do that because we're afraid to look at the things we put in the shadow because they didn't get us what we needed to survive and be loved. So we think that they're not good enough, they're bad and they're wrong. Let's reframe that. These things are not good enough and bad and wrong for people who are unwounded that raised you. A society that's not emotionally enlightened.
00:07:31
Speaker
So when we do shadow work, we look at our parents, we look at the potential of our parents, and we look at the wounding of our parents. You are born as the potential of two people. I'll give you an example. My mom has her doctorate in education. She's a really wise woman. She's really smart and has wounding. My dad wanted to be a professional baseball player and probably could have been, but my parents they his parents didn't let him. So he has a lot of wounding. So I look at the potential of my parents and I'm like, yeah, that tracks. I'm really athletic and I'm pretty smart in certain ways of educating people, right? So I took those potentials, but I also took on some of their wounding, abandonment wounds, ah rejection wounds. I took on that until I did the healing to realize that none of that was personal. It was a generational trauma that was projected onto me by unhealed parents. So many of you identify with your parents' shame. I call it toxic shame.
Healing generational trauma
00:08:27
Speaker
It's shame that was pushed onto you.
00:08:29
Speaker
You're identifying with that. What we need to do is shed that, heal that, seeing, really doing that mother wound work, that father wound work, and seeing, oh my gosh, what happened to them? They weren't whole people. They were wounded people, like most of us. So how can I be the cycle breaker? How can I be the change for all the generations to come, for the world by really shining in a message that needs to be received, that is healing, right?
00:09:02
Speaker
so Reclaiming the authentic self also means you have to have the courage to not belong to something that's wounded, to not go back to the ones that wounded you to get healing, but really start to lift up and see a universal law, not a societal ideal. When we start to see these universal laws, we start to see that you were born perfect for your purpose, just like your parents were. They didn't have a chance because they were also raised by wounded people. When I started doing all my healing work, It was a really big moment in my life for my mother to see me for who I've become rather than than the role she placed me in as a child.
00:09:42
Speaker
And we had this amazing come to Jesus moment with each other of deep healing. She said to me, wow, I've always just been seeing you as the kid. I haven't allowed you the space to be seen as this beautiful, dull, mature woman that you've become. And so I'm going to do another episode on just that of how to get people from your past to see the new version of you that's healed.
The internally validated true self
00:10:05
Speaker
That's a big challenge for a lot of people in relationships and family dynamics. But for the purpose of this podcast, reclaiming the true self means stop looking externally for mirrors from other wounded people. We have to look to God's source universe. We have to understand that things that happen to our life that make us feel like we're being punished is just an imprint from our past. The universe doesn't punish us. The universe sends us
00:10:33
Speaker
Let's say tests and lessons, and it's how we relate to the issue that is the issue and how we relate to ourself in our issues is the bigger issue. So a short little episode today just to empower you to see that you reclaiming the truth of you means the one who doesn't have anything to prove, who doesn't need to fight for your identity, who doesn't need anything to be validated, who doesn't need to be defensive of anything you say because you are internally sure of who you are. So obviously if you have questions of this, go check out my Instagram because it can't just end all. I'm doing rules reels on this short clips every single day all day to help you stay on track of really reclaiming the self. So again, thank you guys for listening. I love you guys and I'll see you next week.