How can you change your life from a position of anxiety to one of peace and serenity? The answers are inside of you, not outside. Mechelle Wingle knows all about this. She is a founding partner of The Wholeness Network. She talks with Adam Nugent and Kate Strong about the amazing work she has done with children and how helping them to verbalize their feelings is such an incredible tool for unlocking what they are experiencing inside. Learn more about uncovering your wholeness and discover how you can capture it all today!
Listen and subscribe now!
Mechelle Wingle spends her time helping people achieve overall wholeness and peace. She’s the host of The Wholeness Network podcast, author, master energy therapist, and NLP coach. In this podcast excerpt, she talks about the struggle of finding balance between attachment and autonomy—two very important biological needs.
MW: We have two biological, like deep in our DNA, needs as human beings. One is autonomy and the other is attachment. And so when we’re young, your senses are on complete high alert, trying to understand and navigate the world that you don’t necessarily understand. So kids learn really quick what moves them into attachment with their parents. And this need for autonomy gets pushed to the side in order for that attachment. And so we push ourselves away. We push parts of ourselves away because that attachment is so important.
In our generation, we would sit there in class, and you just gave up yourself for the group. I think that causes a lot of problems. I think females were giving up pieces of themselves for this ideal female. I think males or masculinity has been compromised by not having this autonomy.
We’ve really kind of made this group to be so important, and we’ve sacrificed ourselves for this attachment. And I think what’s happening now is this autonomy is saying, we make the group better with autonomy. We make attachment, expand and grow, and multiply through autonomy.
KS: You talked about attachment and also autonomy. So what I think I heard you say is that we’re willing to give up our autonomy to experience attachment. We want to be part of a group, so we might give up that autonomy in order to be included or to be part of something. Is that where you’re going?
MW: Yes. There’s this need for the attachment that is so strong that it causes a trauma when we don’t get it. But there’s also this need to be autonomous. If we don’t have an inner knowing of ourselves, you know, we’re talking back in the stone ages. If you didn’t have your own sense of what was happening, then you were not going to make it. So these are biological needs.
But when we give that piece of ourself away, it causes trauma and, and trauma is not about the traumatic event. Trauma is like an injection of anxiety into our nervous system that comes up and meets us anytime we get close to it.
Visit thewholenessnetwork.com to learn more.
► You’ll also like: Episode 31: Becoming Your Best with Rob Shallenberger
