Life Coaching Translated for People Who Were Adopted — Part One

I’ve been grappling with the fact that early on in the Wayfinder life coach training program, embodiment was taken as a given. What I mean by this is that we were told we are embodied beings who therefore have the ability to utilize a tool Martha Beck calls the body compass. This is a tool people can use to discern whether the body says to go towards or away from something. It’s like the directional system in a rocket that gets it to the moon. It’s what Martha Beck uses to teach people so they can find their North Star. It’s the feelings in your body that lead you finally to the altar with your beloved. It’s the sensations in your body that keep you from walking down a dark alley. The body compass is nothing new. It’s trust your gut stuff. It’s instinct stuff. But Martha makes an art out of understanding and using the body compass by paying deep attention to it and by charging $13,000 for others to understand how to use it along with other tools that are part of the training.

My gut told me something was not right when I asked, “But what if you’re not embodied?” and the teacher and many of the other students argued that but of course I was embodied. I mean, there I was on the Zoom screen, right? I thought about quitting the course. My body compass said, “Run.”

I stayed. What if they were right?

Almost nine months later I’m here to report on my findings.

I’ll start with a story. I was talking to a friend recently, and she said she had an experience that showed her that when she was born, she wanted to die when the world appeared but her mother disappeared. She said life betrayed her when it kept breath going in and out of her body even though she did not want to be there. There’s a reason the first three months of a baby’s life are called the fourth trimester: the baby is not done yet. It’s still cooking.

When my friend told me her story, my brain said, Yes. That is true for me, too.

I think there is something in my brain that is like a skip in a record. The thing is the desire to die. I can be having a perfectly nice day and suddenly my brain hits that skip and there’s the thought, I don’t want to be here. It’s not a fun thought to have. It’s sort of like when radios do that blaring thing where, out of however, they test the emergency broadcasting system. It feels so out of place.

This thought is bone weakening. It’s marrow sucking. It’s a kick in the nuts. It’s a bomb dropped from the blue sky. It’s destabilizing. I’m a person who, somewhere in her head, is waiting for everything to disappear. For safety to disappear. For love. For my lunch. For you.

How can you wholeheartedly love something or someone when part of you does not trust this thing or person will or can stick around?

How can you wholeheartedly love and participate in life if some part of your brain believes life betrayed you, jilted you at the altar? How can you fully live your life if you don’t fully believe in life?

I learned in Wayfinder training the four categories of human experience: circumstances, thoughts, feelings, and actions/behaviors. Martha taught us that even though we are socialized to believe that circumstances control our feelings (I’m unhappy because my pants are too tight.), we have space to change our feelings and our behaviors independent of whatever our circumstances are. While our circumstances are often out of our control, our thoughts are not. Viktor Frankl said, Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom. His circumstance was a seeming death sentence in a concentration camp, a situation over which he had no control. His thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, however, he argued, were his alone to do with as he liked.

Wayfinder training revolves around this power we have to claim our thoughts, feelings and behaviors and to use them to create a life of our dreams. This is also not new thinking. The power of positive thinking and self-talk. The power of affirmations. Of visualizations. Of vision boards. Of acting as if you already are the person you want to be. Of acting as if you already made a million dollars. Of being that person.

I get it. It all makes perfect sense. If I act as if I’m a millionaire, that means I do all the things a millionaire would do. Doesn’t it make sense that one day inevitably the road of my intentions would come into alignment with the road of reality? It’s not even about the million dollars, ultimately, it’s about claiming and living out the feeling having a million dollars would give you.

But what if there is part of my brain that doesn’t want to feel like a millionaire? What if part of my brain wants to feel like an abandoned baby because that is what being alive means to that part of my brain? That is what purpose feels like to that part of my brain. What love feels like. What being alive feels like. What if part of my brain thinks I have to wait for her? What if part of me likes living an uncomfortable life because that feels like home, like safety?

Asking someone whose home base is survival what their dream life is like can be like asking a drowning person what they would like for lunch.

If you try to coach someone without addressing the scratch in the record, you aren’t paying attention, and nothing much changes.