Three Practices To Knowing Yourself More

By Marshall Burtcher.

Codependency hijacks our identity and sense of self, filling us with beliefs, rules, and principles that others declare are truths for us.

Further, the impact of having our three core needs of safety, belonging, and worth neglected, attacked, and denied trains our body to live from fear and insecurity, leaving very little room for our true self and power to be known and realized.  It is just too dangerous to discover and be ourselves.

Then we grow into adults that feel lost, empty, frustrated, and burdened.  We long to be known, to be free, to express and live out our dreams and desires, but we experience massive walls of shame, guilt, fear, and doubt from within us and skepticism, criticism, and a lack of warm, consistent support externally.

To truly heal and be free of codependency, we must learn who we are with we’re coming from our aligned, true identity and self.  

This all starts with establishing a foundation of emotional safety, relational belonging, and independent self-worth (I lead my students through this in my FOUNDATION course).  

This sets up the individual to have enough safety to risk discovering themselves and revealing a new reality and way of living. 

I teach my students three practices to accelerate and integrate knowing, loving, and being themselves, and I want you to have these so you, too, can experience the clarity, confidence, power, and peace my students develop while practicing these.

Practice One:  Curiosity

We’ve not been encouraged to discover ourselves.  Instead, we’ve been told who we are and who we are not.  This shuts down our curiosity and activates our perfectionism and people-pleasing impulses, trapping us in an endless loop of survival and codependency.

Curiosity is the way out of this loop.  

This starts with asking questions like, “What am I aware of beyond my initial impulse to people-please?”  or “What am I aware of beyond this shame that is showing up?”

These questions help you develop your awareness of what else you’re aware of.  This helps you detect your intuition, your desires, your limits, your judgments, and your emotions.  

This leads to the second practice:  Validating Yourself

Practice Two: Validating Yourself

Validation in codependency is entirely external, and used as a means to determine our sense of safety with another person.  This is especially potent in the people-pleasing and perfectionism impulses codependency has.

Internal validation turns this inward, putting you in the seat of being the authority regarding the legitimacy of what you feel, experience, sense, and desire. 

“I believe myself” is an expression of this internal validation. 

Knowing yourself requires validation, as it deepens your connection to yourself and builds trust and deepens your self-attunement.  

A way to start this validation is to use a particular type of What-Shift’s Question:  “What shifts when I trust, just for a moment, that my (experience, desire, hurt, sense, perception) is legitimate regardless of other people’s opinions?”

This helps you start to gently trust the validity of what you feel and experience without overwhelming yourself.

This brings us to the third practice:  Letting Yourself Have Judgments and Limits

Practice Three: Letting Yourself Have Limits

Codependency often has us trying to be overly understanding, empathetic, and “nice” in order to avoid the discomfort of conflict and difference.

This is limiting your ability to know your own satisfaction and fulfillment, your own intuition, and your own path. 

You are a being with defined edges and limits.  These factors help you know your shape and fit and function in the world.  If your desire is satisfaction, peace, or fulfillment, you must know and value these limits as they direct you to what works for you and helps you avoid what does not.

Limits, such as, “I don’t like this. I like that more”, are guides to your purpose, power, and fulfillment.

Giving yourself permission to have these limits, you’ll find yourself having a much easier time knowing what you want and don’t and then choosing those things that work for you.

You can start cultivating this with this What Shift’s question:  “What shifts when I give myself permission to have this limit?”

Note what you discover and allow it to guide you.

These three practices empower you to deepen your knowing of yourself and build safety to leave codependency behind.

Go gently with this work.

Marshall Burtcher is a Codependency Transformation Expert. He specializes in helping codependents, people-pleasers, and perfectionists get aligned with their real worth, purpose, and satisfaction so they create a life they enjoy. Learn how to start actually loving yourself in his free CLARITY course: https://clarity.freetheself.com