From Surviving to Thriving: The Emotional Work of Unboxing Your Sexuality

0:00 From day one, we are told who we should be, how to live, and what's acceptable. Before we even have a chance to discover ourselves, our society has already drawn those lines for us. But what happens when those lines are keeping us from knowing and embracing who we truly are? Welcome to Unbox Yourself with Samantha Fox, a podcast about unpacking and unlearning everything that's kept you from living as your true self. Through honest conversations about your internal emotional landscape, sexuality, coming out later in life, relationships, and the journey to self-acceptance, we break free from the boxes we never chose.

0:38 Hello and welcome to Unbox Yourself with Samantha Fox. Today I am here to talk about how your emotional system interacts with your authenticity. As many of you that are here listening know, I work with folks that are coming into their sexuality later in life and are struggling with feelings of shame, guilt, feelings of needing to forgive themselves for ruining everybody's lives, feeling down on who they are as they are coming into this authentic self. folks that have been living a heterosexual, heteronormative, monogamous lifestyle and realize there's something not quite right.

1:30 And upon realizing that there is an attraction to the same sex, encountering a lot of intense emotional backlash that gets in the way of moving forward to continue exploring what these feelings even mean and then what that actually means for your life, right? Because the minute these feelings start to come up, we have parts of our self, parts of our emotional system, we can call them protective parts, that want to shut this type of exploration and this type of curiosity down. There are many reasons why our system wants to shut it down.

2:17 The biggest reason, at least for the parts of us that are doing this work, is because those parts feel that it is dangerous to explore this. And these parts of our emotional system that want to shut it down. They want to protect us. The way they go about protecting us may not feel good. They might have nasty things to say about you. They might gaslight you. They might fill you with shame and guilt and self-hatred. These parts are trying to protect you and they actually keep you from being able to take any little steps forward so that you can do the exploration, that you would need to start getting answers about what is aligned with you, what feels authentic to you, and then from that place to start to widen that conversation with a partner, if you have a partner, with a spouse, and start to explore what this does mean for you, because there is no one path.

3:34 As a therapist and sexuality coach, I work with women in all stages of curiosity, questioning, coming out, being all the way out, and still having to do the work to unpack your emotional system, unpack what society has taught you, unlearn those things that are keeping you stuck and away from your authentic self. All you've got to do is drop me an email at samanthaatunboxyoursexuality.com. You do not have to do this alone. I've got steps and I will take you through them so that we can connect you with the full you in whatever ways are aligned for you in this lifetime.

4:23 I am exposed to women who are in the midst of this process. What I find is that we have not learned how to work with understand accept and embrace our emotional systems And because of that we end up living in what I going to call survival mode I going to explain a little bit about what that means and how that looks, so you can take a look inside and see if this applies to you. And if it does, I encourage you to join me in doing some work unpacking and unlearning what your system learned so early in life so that you can free yourself today as the adult that you are.

5:15 When we are born as humans, we are born with an intact emotional system. That system consists of core emotions. They are wired from our gut to our brain and are meant to be felt in order to move through life, process emotion, process feelings. By process, I mean feel the feelings, move through the feelings, accept and embrace the feelings. Some of those are joy, excitement, and sexual excitement. When we have those, we're meant to feel them and to let them wash through us and continue going forward.

5:52 It doesn't mean we're meant to stay in them or never feel anything else. And they're not good emotions or bad emotions. They are just ones we are wired with. And we're also wired with emotions that, you know, don't feel as good. And those are sadness, fear, anger, and disgust. Our systems are set up and wired with these emotions to help us survive. Because as humans, we are wired to survive. What do I mean by that? When you are born, there are a number of years where in order to survive, our systems need to adjust to the environment around us so that we are taken care of in the ways we need so we can survive.

6:40 Our systems will do whatever they need to do to ensure that we survive. So our emotional systems have their own intelligence that is built in. It is wired in. What this means is if you grow up in an environment that is extremely chaotic or terrifying, that our systems will align to make sure that however we respond to this environment is going to be a way that we will survive. Our systems all come up with different ways to go through this. Some systems go toward some kind of numbing agent like addiction or overachieving or perfectionism, eating disorders, There's, you know, ways to numb out from feeling.

7:30 Other systems might go into depression or black and white thinking at a time when we are so young and we don't have any tools. We don't have any way to think things through. You know, as a four-year-old or a seven-year-old, we are not thinking about the ways in which our family is dysfunctional and that people need help and that you wish you could send them to therapy or you wish you could have a deep conversation with them. Our systems are not thinking about that. Our systems are thinking about how are we going to survive this?

8:03 And because we live in a trauma-filled society where we have parents who are traumatized and haven't done their work, and also the systems of oppression that exist in our society keep us in a state of traumatic response, our systems will put off to the side the things that slow us down or are not helpful. from very early on. For example, if you grow up in a home where anger is not acceptable, and you learned this because you expressed anger as a young child, and there was some severe punishment, which might have been being sent to your room or being abandoned, not spoken to, being shamed, being made fun of, being beaten, then our systems learn that being angry is not okay, or being fearful.

8:53 It's not okay to express feelings of being scared because you're going to be bullied about it. You're going to be shamed about it, right? So early, early in life, our systems understand what our environment is And because we human and we are born to survive they adjust to our environment There comes a point at which we leave that environment We no longer have the abusive parent, the narcissistic parent, the highly immature parent, the alcoholic parent, right? We're no longer living in that space, though our systems have been set up in a way where that's how they learned to function and survive.

9:43 So they are functioning in a survival space, but we are no longer living in that survival environment any longer. We have moved out into the world, whether living with friends, we have a partner, we're single, we're in our own apartment, we're figuring out our career and what our path forward is. Our systems are still functioning in survival. So if it was not okay to feel anger then and the only way you were going to get your needs met so you could survive was to cut off from anger, then you will continue living in a way where you are cut off from anger.

10:21 And when that anger starts to bubble up for something that is really valid to feel angry about, your system will find a way to shut that down and not let you feel it. Or what you might feel is, oh my God, it's so scary to feel this feeling. It's so uncomfortable. I can't handle it. And maybe you go to controlling how much food you intake or how much you exercise or how much you work, right? There's some way that your system moves into trying to control things so that you don't feel the feeling that was not acceptable in your early childhood environment where your system was set on survival mode.

11:05 But you're an adult. And the truth is, is that you're actually no longer just surviving. You are thriving. You have left that environment. Your system doesn't know that. It is still living in survival. And so you spend years and decades not able to fully feel and process and move your way through certain emotions that were just not accessible for reasons of survival when you were a child. This collides with authenticity. I work with sexuality, so I'm going to bring this into the sexuality realm, but it really could come into any authentic realm that is real for you.

11:49 Any place in life where you are struggling with showing up authentically and your system just keeps showing up in the way that it thinks other people need and want you to. In terms of your sexuality, when you have not done the work to unpack your emotional system and what it is carrying from early in life and learn how to actually feel the feelings when you're thriving in adulthood, as opposed to cut off from those feelings that were not going to help you survive. and you're starting to tap into same-sex attraction, there can be a lot of chaos that happens.

12:33 And this is where I meet many women. They're terrified. They don't know how to feel their feelings all the way through. The parts of them that are trying to keep them safe so they can survive are very, very active, have not been seen, understood, softened, spoken to, so that they can allow the space for you to come into who you are today. That might mean people around you don't love it. It might mean that you're going to need to feel a lot of grief and loss, and it might mean those around you might feel grief and loss.

13:11 But that doesn't mean that you don't move forward with those feelings. It just means you're an adult, you're a human, and you are doing what you were built and meant to do. which is feel and process the emotions that you were born with that are connected and wired from your gut to your brain. I can't tell you how many people I work with have emotional systems that are trying to keep them safe so that they can survive and that these adults that I work with who are super high have no idea that this is what is happening They stymied They are stuck They unable to move through emotion because they are living in a young emotional system that never switched its mode into thrive.

14:06 So today it's my offering to you? Do you know and understand your emotional system? Which feelings in your family of origin or in your early environment were not allowed, were not accepted, were punished, meant that you would spend a lot of time alone or be ignored? Which feelings were not acceptable? And are you still struggling today to feel those? And do you have parts of you that when those feelings come up, try to move you away from them because these parts are trying to protect you and make sure that you're going to survive, right?

14:55 They're just doing their job. I'm offering you an opportunity to think about these emotions, these parts that protect you from feeling them, and how all of that gets in the way of what might actually be authentic for you. There is no right or wrong to authentic. I have seen every iteration of relationship possible in my work. It is not only a situation where becoming real, aligned, and authentic with yourself means that you've lost everything and that you're gonna be alone forever. There is every possibility out there.

15:37 But until you free your emotional system from doing the work to ensure that you survive, which thank you so much, thank you so much for having done that work for so long, but until you inform your system that you're no longer just in survival and you're actually thriving today, you won't be able to access what is authentic for you. And that is the work that I do with folks in my programs and one-on-one. We start there. We start with becoming curious about our emotional systems and what they are keeping us from, why they're keeping us from that, acknowledging how hard they've worked to get us to where we are today and finding ways to let them rest, not to get rid of them, but to let these parts rest so that we can show up in our thriving adult state with ourselves, for ourselves, have compassion for these parts of us, have compassion for the younger inner child inside of us who had to shut down all of these ways of being because of the environments we grew up in.

16:57 That is where the work begins when you are unboxing your sexuality. That is my offering to those of you out there. I hope it makes it feel a little bit less daunting and a little bit less scary to lean in, to join the women in the bi-life community, which is for all not straight sexualities and for every relationship iteration you can imagine. And if you're ready to do the work to start unboxing your sexuality, I'm here to work with you while you do it and go through the Unbox Your Sexuality program.

17:34 Thanks for listening in. Thank you for spending this time with me on Unbox Yourself with Samantha Fox. If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review. It helps more folks find these conversations. If you're ready to unbox from something that's keeping you stuck, I would love to support you. You can find the application to the show at unboxyoursexuality.com. Let's stay connected. Find me on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube at Lesbian Curiosity Coach.

18:10 Give me a follow and join the conversation. Remember, we only have this one time through. Why not unbox yourself and let your true self shine in all its beautiful glory?