The Safe Enough Podcast
Episode 20 - You Must Be Right?
Welcome to the Safe Enough Podcast! This podcast is an exploration of what it means to feel safe enough in order to live the kind of life, or make the kind of changes that transform our lives, into those with all the love, connection, belonging and purpose that we seek and strive for. My name is MacPherson Worobec, Executive Director of the It Begins To Move studio, where we support your safe and gentle embodied healing. I am a safety and self-worth recovery partner, and I’m so happy that you’re here.
This is the first of three episodes in a series on how working with professional providers during a healing process is a tricky thing. In this episode I talk about expertise and evaluation. In the next episode, episode 22, I’ll talk about the impact an inaccurate evaluation can have. And in the final episode in this series, episode 23, I’ll talk about the critical ingredient in a successful healing partnership, but is often missing.
Your body is a whole organism. There are so many different parts to it, and all parts are doing different things. Most of the time, those things actually connect with and influence parts or processes from other systems within your body, all which combine together to make up one whole, complex organism, which is your body. So for example, your lungs bring fresh oxygen into your blood, and then your heart pumps your blood so that the fresh oxygen can go to all the other areas of your body, and all the tissues and organs can receive fresh oxygen in order to function properly. So this means that every single one of your muscles - all the big ones, and all the teeny, tiny ones at the tips of your fingers and the tips of your toes - have a relationship with your lungs. And perhaps we can go a little bit further and say that every single one of your muscles - big and small - has a relationship with your respiratory diaphragm, the diaphragm in your chest that helps pump your lungs so that they can get carbon dioxide out of your body, and fresh oxygen in. AND that means that all your muscles, big and small, ALSO have a relationship with your nervous system through the phrenic nerve which runs from your spinal cord to your diaphragm to give it power to pump your lungs, AND your brain which manages the signals your spine sends, but also processes information that your diaphragm sends back. There’s SO MUCH connection between different parts and systems of your body, that all work together to keep you alive and thriving. One of my favorite books is The Book of Secrets by Deepak Chopra, where he talks so elegantly about how our body systems are so intertwined. But I’d like to come back to the term “Thriving.” It’s actually a clinical term. And individuals are often evaluated for their level of “thriving” say, generally as someone goes through what would be called normal life development, or after a medical procedure, or after a life event or big change. Something like that. And there are clinical benchmarks that define an individual’s level of thriving. They vary by discipline, and can be very specific, so I won’t go into any of them here. But what I want to highlight here is that they’re evaluative. Meaning, someone else who has been given the authority to assess and evaluate you from THE OUTSIDE, becomes the source of truth for determining your level of thriving. Of how well you’re doing in life. And I actually love that there are individuals who have this kind of training, and the qualified ability to use information that has been tested and formalized over time, and notice when what’s happening might need particular attention in one way or another, in order to thrive. However, I think that this can have two major implications that are not only unhelpful, but can actually become harmful if there’s one critical ingredient that’s missing. Firstly, if the power to evaluate us and our experience is placed on an external person, someone who’s not us and someone who’s not having our experience, then there’s always the possibility that an expert will get it wrong about us. And secondly, if they do get it wrong, but the power to evaluate us still remains outside of us, namely with the expert, then the biggest problem with them getting it wrong isi that the wrongness might not ever be corrected. Meaning, if an expert uses their expert opinion to tell us that the world is flat, when it’s actually round - I’m just trying to use a very simple and obvious example here to illustrate what I’m saying - if someone who is considered an expert on the shape of planets, like say, an astronomer, says hey, I know more about shapes of planets than you do, and I insist that the earth is flat based on my ability to observe and measure and reason, you might say, well shoot! You must be right. You know more about the shapes of planets than I do. You’ve been studying that for your whole life, and you understand how to use the tools that observe, measure and reason about planet shapes. I guess I am ignorant here, and you are the expert. Their sheer expertise makes it nearly impossible to push back against their insistence that they are right, even if you have an inkling that they might not be. If you cannot prove that they’re wrong, then by default of their expertise, they remain correct. But in this particular example about the shape of the earth and the fields of astronomy, physics and mathematical equations, an astronomer wouldn’t necessarily be discussing something about your individual experience. I mean, we could totally make the case about how the shape of the earth DOES in fact impact every individual who lives here. But I really want to emphasize that the point I’m making is more about things that impact you directly, on a day to day basis in a more obvious way. Like things that involve your body and it’s function. Or your relationships, happiness, and what you do with your time. So to give a more relative example. If you go to a physical therapist for shoulder pain, and they do an evaluation, that means that THEY decide what the problem is, and then THEY decide what you need to do in order to fix the problem. Now, again, I’m not saying that licensed experts or the processes of diagnosis or prognosis are inherently flawed and should be abolished. I actually think that a beautiful and affirmative relationship between an “expert” and a client can be tremendously helpful and revolutionary to the person who is seeking help and relief. But! the critical element in that kind of beautiful and helpful partnership is whether there’s a kind of checking-in, with the client’s experience. An equal importance of the information and knowledge that an expert can bring about a general human who seeks help and relief, and the simultaneous importance of the information and knowledge that an affected human being can bring about their own experience. In the next episode I’ll talk about the effect of what not having that special element can be, and in the episode after that I’ll talk about the absolutely super important role of your own experience. Those are the next two episodes in this series, but also in next MONTH’s series I’ll be talking all about the best, safest and gentlest process for connecting with your inner wisdom, and finding that just right solution, that I’ve ever come across, and how you can experience it firsthand. Stay tuned. I’ll see you in the next episode. Take care, kind soul.
