We tend to talk about authentic self-expression on this show, but what does that really mean?

Most people equate being authentic to “being real” and always saying what’s on your mind in the moment. However, that’s not exactly correct.

Being “real” in the moment, may not truly be an accurate representation of how you truly feel because your perception of your emotions may be skewed.

It’s this exact concept of our perception of physical and emotional pain and how that relates to our ability to authentically express ourselves that I’m diving into today.

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

• University of Oxford’s YouTube Video: Understanding Human Pain, suffering and relief through brain imaging
• My #LoveEdits Online Workshop

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.

Authentic self-expression is something that we talk about quite a bit around here. It is one of core values at Voice of Influence and part of what we want to encourage in the world.

But authentic self-expression is kind of confusing. It’s maybe a little bit difficult to even explain to other people and in some ways, it’s simple because we think of words or phrases like keeping it real. We’re just going to keep it real. I want to be real. The real me. Things like that.

But I think that the idea of being real or authentic is still more complicated than it seems on a surface, because as I’ve talked about in other podcast, being real isn’t just about saying whatever is on your mind or heart right in the moment. Being real, I think is more deep than that.

We’re going to talk about that here today on the podcast. We’re going to talk about what authentic self-expression can really look like. We’re going to put it in the context of how much we feel we are worth or value. Now, I’m sharing this with you as somebody who feels that you do have a voice of influence. You’re wanting to make your voice matter more.

I’m also sharing it with you in case you have other people that you’re working with as a coach and you’re wanting them to realize some of these things about themselves. You’re wanting to help other people be more authentic in their self-expression.

Today, we’re going to tackle this by first talking about pain perception. So we’re talking about the perception of our own value, but eventually, we’re coming back to that. We’re going to start by talking about the perception of pain.

Now, the reason why we’re doing this is because I think there are a lot of parallels. I’m really excited about the science behind pain and pain perception and the experience of pain and how that relates to other things, such as our experience of our own value and whether or not we believe that we have value in a context. And essentially, it’s about our confidence and how we move forward.

So let’s go back to pain perception. A few years ago when I was starting to really dig into this research about pain and pain perception, I stumbled upon a video on YouTube. It’s a lecture given at the University of Oxford in 2010 by Irene Tracy. I am fascinated by Irene Tracey’s work in this area of Pain Perception.

First, I want to tell you about the story that she tells. I’ve used this story with my own children and even other people’s children to talk about pain. Because you know how when you kiss a “boo-boo,” (if you’re a parent, you probably know this) when you kiss a boo-boo somehow or another, it feels better to the child. It means something when they get a hug. They feel better.

Why did they feel that way? It’s magic. It’s mommy magic. It’s all these different things that we think of ourselves, you know, this really doesn’t help and the Band-Aid doesn’t really help. But I don’t really care; you stopped crying so I’m going to put it on anyway.

Well, through Irene’s research, I’m learning how this actually could be and why it really does matter. Why a mom kissing her son’s boo-boo actually make it feel better and can make them feel less pain.

So she tells this story about this builder in London. He’s building and he’s doing whatever he does as a builder and apparently, a nail gun goes off and shoots a nail right a through his boots. I’m telling you what this guy goes crazy. He is riving in agony from the pain of this nail that just went though his boot. It’s even sticking out on the other side and they bring him into this hospital, this ER. They’re carefully, carefully cutting away the boots while he was screaming pretty much in agony just riving in pain.

They cut away this boots to find out that this nail had gone right through the space between two toes. That’s right. He did not even get a scratch. This nail went through his boots and went through this space between his toes without actually breaking his skin and yet he felt this intense pain because why? Because of his pain perception.

Because even though the nerve endings in his foot were not saying that he was in pain, the nociceptor input was not saying he was in pain, his eyes saw what he should be feeling. His eyes saw this nail go through this boot and signals to his brain to help him assume that it was that bad. Then he should be feeling an incredible amount of pain. Well, of course, when they cut the boot away and he realized that he wasn’t hurt at all, he didn’t feel pain anymore.

The simple moral of the story is that pain isn’t always what we think it is. When we perceive pain, when we think that we are in pain, sometimes it is our brain playing tricks on us because sometimes that input, the actual nociceptor input, the nerve endings that are telling our brain that we have been injured and we need to pull our hands off the hot stove or that sort of thing, those are not actually firing off. It is not as intense as we think it is but there are things that are going on in our brain that can manipulate those perceptions to kind of make us experience the pain more intensely than we really need to.

So if we are hyper vigilant in our minds, our attention is really hyperly-focused on the pain that we’re experiencing. That’s one of the tricks that I used of my son. “So think about something else. Let’s watch this video instead; maybe the pain will go away.” Indeed often that helps to get distracted or even sometimes catastrophizing. If this happens once, it could happen forever or making it this really, really big deal when it really wasn’t that big deal in a first place.

So that some stuff that could go on in our heads. But then there’s also the context and these are all things that Irene Tracey talks about in this video. I’ll link to that in the show notes for sure. But we also have this pain beliefs that, you know what, one of my child’s pain beliefs is that if there is a drop of blood, it is the end of the world. And because of this belief when he sees blood, it feels like the end of the world. So it’s that belief that it brings to that pain experience that makes it worse.

Sometimes, there’s an expectation that this medicine is going to help a lot more than the last one. And so we assume that it will and then perhaps, we feel better and the pain is lost. Or there’s often that placebo effect when we think that we’re getting medicine and it’s going to make a difference. So we live as though this medicine is making a difference which then actually means making a difference for our own health or our own pain.

Then there’s the mood that we have, the emotional experience that we are having at the moment when pain can come. If you’re feeling good then you’re probably able to handle more pain or the more input of pain perception and then your experience of the pain is diminished because you’re already feeling good. Whereas, if you’re already feeling poor, if you’re depressed or anxious and then you get a prick of pain, well then, all of a sudden everything is much worse.

Again, I can see this out play out in my household all of the time with these children. Because if somebody is already upset about something and then we get poked, we get pricked, or I’m helping you up and all of a sudden that hurts to help you up instead of it just being the normal mom picking you up. Well, that mood that is already present has cast a negative light on the sensations that they’re feeling.

And then there is that chemical and structural components to this, so neurodegeneration, metabolic changes, and specifically maladaptive plasticity. So when we have a consistent way of handling pain, it sorts of burns a road or a pathway in our brain telling us exactly how things are going to play out every time.

So we have this maladaptive way of handling things in our brain based on our previous experience. This can lead to some real chronic pain. The plasticity of the brain is such a beautiful thing and we really can change the pathways in our brains to be able to make a difference in the way that we experience pain.

It requires some very intentional disruption. So instead of handling it the same way every time, we start do something else. We have to target some of these other things I mentioned before, our cognitive set, the contexts, and the mood; to be able to reset or retrain our brain so that it doesn’t feel everything quite so intensely.

Now, this is a very personal thing for me because I have personally experienced intensity of pain that goes beyond what most normal people would experience. So I very well know the feeling foolish because some small burst of cold air has all of a sudden made me feel like there are pins pricking me from the inside. They’re pricking my skin and I don’t like that feeling and so I tensed up and they’re all sorts of reactions that I have sort of trained myself to do unwittingly but then make it even worse.

So I have had to do some serious looking at what it would take to retrain my brain so that I’m not doing the same things all the time, and I’m not training myself to handle this pain in a maladaptive kind of way. That is the beauty of our brains. I mean, this is so amazing, isn’t it? That we can really truly change our pain experience by changing our mood, by changing our beliefs, and by changing these things so then our pain perception is not as intense or it doesn’t feel as bad as it used to feel.

So perception is really about how we know this. How do I know that I’m in pain? I know that I’m in pain based on my senses. What do I see? What do I feel, hear, touch, etc? But that pain perception can be influenced by these other things mentioned previously, our beliefs and the way that we’re responding, our mood and things like this. We can take that concept of pain perception and apply it to our emotional pain perception because what is absolutely fascinating is that the same areas light up in our brain whether we’re experiencing physical pain or emotional pain.

So emotional pain is very similar to our experience of physical pain and this makes a difference in how we respond. So just as when we’re feeling physical pain because we put our hand on a hot stove and so we pulled that thing off because, otherwise, it’s going to get burnt, we did the same thing with emotional pain.

When we start to feel emotional pain, when we may back off from whatever situation we’re in, because in a sense we’re trying to protect ourselves and that’s a very understandable experience. It’s a very understandable reaction, and unfortunately, just as our physical pain perception can be off from the actual need to protect so can our emotional experience of pain or perception of our emotional pain can also be off because it may not be as bad as we think.

So we make these decisions based on our experience of pain whether or not they’re right. It is really important but if we’re wanting to be authentic and we’re wanting to move in the world in an authentic way that we get really in touch with our pain experience, our emotional pain experience, so that we know when it is a good time to be self-protective and to take care of ourselves, our hearts or that sort of thing. And when we can actually take risks, when we can say “You know what, this is not as bad as I thought it was so I am going to do this anyway.”

Now, I have a really fun example of this. So I recently went to the movie, I Feel Pretty with Amy Schumer. I saw this thing advertised a few months ago and I was like “Oh my goodness, I wanna see this thing because it was really cracking me up and it looked like it would be funny.” And it was. It was very funny.

But the reason why I really wanted to see it was because I knew it was going to have something to do with confidence and how one decides whether or not they should be confident. Well, it’s truly based on this woman’s experience of emotional pain. She feels emotional pain because she assumes or senses her perception is that people do not appreciate her or want her around. She feels invisible because she’s not drop dead gorgeous.

So in her mind, her perception of drop dead gorgeous is somebody who gets the whole world opened up to them because of how they look. They get whatever they want because of how they look. So that is her perception, then her perception is also that because she’s not drop dead gorgeous, she is not getting what she wants. And there are certain opportunities in the world that are closed up to her because she’s not that person that she thinks she wants to be, which is drop dead gorgeous.

Well, the funny thing about this movie is that she is ends up getting hurt and then her whole perception of herself changes. So instead of seeing herself as a little chubby and not that pretty, all of a sudden, she sees herself as everything she always wanted to be, that drop dead gorgeous woman who can have anything she wants.

So she started walking through the world as though that’s who she was, as though that is what she has. The world is open to her now because she can have whatever she wants because she is that beautiful, that pretty. So of course this is really funny and it puts her in a lot of funny situations.

But what’s really fascinating to me is how people are so attracted to her because she is so comfortable in her own skin. She’s not worried about anything about what other people think of her because she knows who she is and so she just lets people know who she is and she just welcome them in and walks through the world with this great amount of confidence.

So she has this cognitive set that is already saying, “I already know my value. I already know that I am drop dead gorgeous and that the world is gonna open up to me.” Those are her expectations and because of that when people say things or do things that could cause her emotional pain, she perceives it in a different light. She perceives it as their problem, instead of her problem. She perceives it as though that she’s OK and she’s going to be OK and that she can still have whatever she wants.

So that’s how she continues to move through the world and people then are so attracted to that, and she does get a lot of what she wants. It is truly fascinating to think about this because I think a lot of us know…I grew up wanting to be real, not wanting to be fake at all so much so that I that I would just…anything that felt fake to me, I would just totally avoid it. Then I started to learn more about this.

I started to learn more about how, you know, just because I feel like this doesn’t mean that I have to feel like this. Just because I feel this pain doesn’t mean I have to feel this pain. So maybe I need to take another look at how I’m perceiving my pain.

So when somebody asks me “how are you?” I don’t have to say it’s terrible, or “I’m not fine but thanks.” But maybe I could reframe it and think about it in a way that would be more authentic because it’s a deeper thing. I know those deeper beliefs that are more true than that pain perception I’m experiencing in the moment.

So even though I experience this pain if I can tap into something that’s deeper inside of me and know it’s not that bad. I’m not just saying that because I’m trying to make myself feel better, I’m saying that because I really believe it’s true based on X, Y, and Z. And so therefore, I can come back to you and share that I am OK when you asked me how I’m doing.

Our perception of pain whether be physical or emotional pain, may or may not be right. It may or may not be corresponding to the actual amount of pain we should be experiencing. When you do have your hand on that stove and you’re feeling pain, yeah, you should take your hand off of out because otherwise, it’s going to get worse. That can be the same thing with our emotional pain too.

But how do we know unless we start with a really solid understanding of what we do believe about our pain, what we do believe about ourselves, our value. How can we be truly confident unless we go there, unless we take that look inside? You know, I think that there are a lot of us running around thinking that we have nails going all the way through our feet when maybe that nail isn’t deep and breaking the skin. Maybe it’s the same thing with our hearts. We feel like there are some things so terrible that’s causing so much pain. But maybe it’s not as bad as we think.

Maybe if we take a good look, we’ll realize that it’s not actually breaking the skin. That we’re actually going to be OK, that we have what it takes to be able to handle this with grace and humility and to release a deeper sense of freedom. And then be able to experience that in such a way that we really are authentically expressing who we are.

I actually created a little resource about this and I call it Love Edits: The Three Practices of Authentic Self-expression, because I know that there are a lot of people out there who are really wanting to be real. But they’re a little confused how to say what they really want to say and whether or not it is real. There are just a lot of confusions out there about that.

So I wanted to make it more clear and to offer a resource for people so that they can learn these three practices and get better and better at perceiving their pain, their emotional pain. At perceiving their experience of life and emotions that is going on inside of them so that they know how to express them in a way that’s going to be truly loving.

So instead of feeling like you have to say whatever is in your mind and heart in the moment so that you can be real, this is an opportunity for you to learn how to take a step back and dig in deep to kind of find out what is really true about what’s going on inside to filter those perceptions through something that is more sustainable, more reliable. So that then you can go ahead and act on that in a way that is really going to make a difference and really seem, not just seem loving, but be loving and loving self-expression.

So it’s not just about you and saying what you want to say right in the moment but it truly edits. It takes a step back and says “OK, is that really what I wanna do? Is that really wanna say?” And this gives you the opportunity to figure out how to do that.

So if you’re interested in this little mini training, it’s called Love Edits: The Three Practices of Self-Expression, you can go to voice of influence.net/loveedits and find that course there.

So filter your perceptions to something that is more reliable and make your voice matter more.