Have you met my latest lover?
I've just spent a romantic week in the Italian countryside with my Inner Asshole.
I’m on a romantic holiday, in the Italian countryside, no less. My love nest is a sixteenth-century villa nestled in a tiny hilltop hamlet in the Le Marche region, whose undulating landscape is all sloping striped vineyards and spire-topped peaks, framed by the crystalline horizon of the Adriatic Sea. Honestly, it’s enough to make a cherub weep.
For the past five days I’ve been immersed in a mastermind retreat with the Confidancia Collective, a small group of women entrepreneurs with whom I’ve been on a year-long odyssey of personal and business transformation. We’re on our third retreat together, and the theme this time is “romancing the self.” Each of us is flirting with the idea of falling madly in love with ourselves.
When we’re in love, all we want to do is please our sweetheart and show them how much they matter to us. We bring them coffee in bed, rub their feet, listen to their stories, and marvel at how witty, clever, and sexy they are. We bring them the kindest, most generous and affectionate version of ourselves.
This week, we’re invited to consider: What would happen if we treated ourselves this way?
Here’s what it looks like for me: Keeping my hotel room tidy and laying out my things in a pleasant way; serving myself a perfect cup of tea on the terrace. Dressing slowly and choosing my outfits deliberately. Knotting my wrap just so at my right hip and sensing its swing and sway as I pad down to the pool. Wearing lipstick to lunch and rose oil to bed. Revelling in the silk of my bare skin.
The sensual aspects of romance come easily to me – I am an earthy woman with a pleasure-seeking body. But I’ve had some resistance to the emotional side of this love affair. I felt shyness, or maybe it’s shame, when invited to explicitly celebrate myself.
At the beginning of the retreat we each set an intention, and mine was to be radically kind to myself. This is a simple proposition but not an easy one for me, especially when romancing the self is on the agenda.
Understand, I’m no newcomer to the concept of self-acceptance. I was reciting affirmations into mirrors as far back as the early 90s, when my first therapist handed me a copy of John Bradshaw’s Healing the Shame that Binds You. I have done years of inner work to meet my wounded parts and love them into wholeness. But that doesn’t mean I’m always nice to myself.
I mean, I’m a lot nicer to myself than I used to be back in the bad old days. But my inner critic still snipes at me, unrelentingly inventorying every one of my flaws and failings. An uncharitable observation about another person, a selfish impulse, a moment of weakness or needfulness or ineptitude – it all goes into the ledger of misdeeds. This voice finds fault with my face and body, the way I talk, my work, most everything about me. It even polices and punishes me for my private thoughts and feelings. Especially my private thoughts and feelings.
Jennifer Pastiloff, whose excellent memoir On Being Human I’m reading now, calls this voice the Inner Asshole, or IA for short. My IA is sarcastic and cynical. Its vocabulary is familiar, sounding a lot like certain men through whose eyes I once measured my worth (which always clocked in lower than I had hoped.)
Mostly, these days, I just try not to give it too much attention. I tune it out, like the honking grind of traffic when you live on a busy road. Let it bitch away in the backseat; I’m up here driving my life forward and my eyes are on the road ahead. I get to set the destination. I get to choose the route. I get to decide who rides shotgun. And I’m not going to let that old grinch spoil the vista unfolding before me, which is pretty fucking gorgeous.
This mastermind year with the Collective has been an exhilarating adventure deep into the wilds of authenticity and soul-expression. To create the life of your dreams, you first need to know what you really want. So I’ve been asking myself, What do I truly value and enjoy? What burdens are not mine to carry? Which goals and conditions no longer fit into my vision for my life? What would I prefer, if anything were possible? (Because it is.)
The answers to these questions tiptoe forward. I want to write, not only for my business, but for my heart. I want to travel; to have experiences that feed my soul. I want more love and friendship, and less time at my desk.
Saying yes to these yearnings has required me to drop old stories, break patterns and habits, and even walk away from commitments that no longer make sense. I’m saying no to the people and projects that make me feel tight, small, and weary, and saying yes to those that feel enlivening and expansive, even if the stretch is sometimes uncomfortable.
The invitation to “fall madly in love with myself” on this retreat made my IA sit up and bark louder. Self love?! Pft, don’t you think you’re oversupplied in that area already? It’s always meanest when I lean into loving myself. Compassion for my own humanity, forgiveness, self-validation, approval, self-soothing – these crimes bring out the long knives. It rolls its eyes at my joy and winces at my enthusiasm. It casts a cold eye on my gestures of self-care.
Paradoxically, I think it’s all this inner reflection and self-acceptance that has brought my IA back out into the spotlight. If I’m going to be completely honest about what’s true for me, well then, I have to admit that it’s true I still have a ton of head trash running in the background.
What I learned on this retreat is that the primary act of self-love is a counterintuitive one. It’s to tune into this IA, acknowledge its existence and hear it out. Hello, old cranky-pants. Look at you, judging me for admiring my outfit and enjoying my body.
Ignoring this voice doesn’t make it go away, it only makes it more insidious, because what happens in the backseat doesn’t stay in the backseat. Left unacknowledged and unchallenged, the mean-spirited lies of the IA will cloud the lens through which I experience the world, including my experience of myself. An unconscious IA can profoundly distort my reality, all without my conscious awareness.
It takes a lot of humility and self-compassion to acknowledge the existence of that mean internal voice (especially after years of therapy, which my IA accuses me of failing at – ironically holding herself up as proof!). On this romantic retreat, being my own ardent lover means embracing all of me, Inner Asshole and all. After all, she’s only trying to protect me from the slings and arrows of a world that can be very unforgiving.
So when my IA says: GOD, you can’t get through a single day without a defensive overreaction, can you?!, instead of pushing this thought away, I pull her onto my lap and stroke her hair, and we talk it out, owning what is true and rejecting what is not. Oof, those are harsh words. That hurts, doesn’t it, poor thing? You’re right, we did have a defensive reaction back there, and I think you’re embarrassed and anxious. It’s ok, all of this is part of being human. We can apologize if we need to. We can also just let the moment pass and not make a mountain out of it.
In other words, I am radically kind to myself. There, there… the monsters are only shadows. See how they disappear when we shine a light on them?
If joyful self-expression is the purpose of life, compassionate embrace of the shadow self might just be the master move that makes it possible. You can’t be partially whole, or partially free, so let us leave no parts behind on this journey.
Sweet soul, let me love you the way you long to be loved: Tenderly, solidly, generously, passionately, patiently, and completely.