Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner Voice and Living a Life of Authenticity

by Helene G. Brenner, Ph.D.

I laugh to myself when my clients tell me how calm I am, because, like many women, I am an emotional person. I easily get my feelings hurt. I have deep needs for connection and intimacy. I have always been this way and I still am.

We women constantly get the message that our feelings are something we need to rise above or get over or think differently about or somehow fix. They're fine if we keep them in check and don't let them "affect our thinking." But we have to be on guard to moderate our feelings, and deny our anger or sadness, lest we be called too emotional, or hysterical, or "hormonal." We have to be careful about showing our desire for connection and intimacy, or we could be labeled "needy."

Yet our awareness of our inner selves and our desire for connection are great gifts. I would never for a moment want to give up the incredible richness of my inner life, or the blessings in my outer life, that my emotions and desire for intimacy have brought me. As one of my clients said to her husband after seeing the movie Pleasantville, "I live in Technicolor-you live in black and white."

I love helping women find and live from their true selves, which is what I get to do every day in my psychology practice at Women's Counseling and Psychological Services. As a psychologist, I've worked with over a thousand women in one-on-one therapy as well as in workshops on the east and west coasts. Early on in my career, I decided to devote myself to finding the best ways to help women be both as feelingful and as effective in the world as they wish to be, and to claim their own selves yet develop and maintain the intimate connections with others they so deeply desire.

Women have such amazing stores of passion and compassion. Almost all of them, deep down, are motivated not only by what is best for themselves but by what is best for other people, indeed, for all of life. Yet they're twice as likely to be referred for treatment for depression and anxiety disorders, because they've been deprived of the tools they need to make their natural gifts work for them rather than against them.

Almost all women live their lives standing outside themselves, always ready to judge their bodies, their feelings and their thoughts from an external standard, and find themselves wanting. Why do women do this? After all, supposedly we have all won equality with men, and are free to follow our dreams and do anything men do. But, though women's lives have changed dramatically from what they were only a few decades ago-in countless ways, big and small-women do not operate on an equal footing with men. What's more, women's ways of feeling, knowing and being continue to be relegated to second-class status, treated as inappropriate for the "serious" business of the world. Women still are given the message that to succeed in life, they must be more like men, be attractive to men, or be both.

Practically every woman, at some point in her life, has felt that she has lost track of herself and is living according to what other people wanted and expected from her. Part of the reason, of course, is the many real-world pressures affecting women. But women also carry within them an inner legacy, shaped by thousands of years of women's experiences, that tells them to accommodate, adapt and mold themselves to serve others at their own expense.

What causes lasting change? Pursuing the answer to this question has been a passion of mine for nearly thirty years. One thing I've learned is that women don't usually change their lives, or begin to feel permanently better about themselves, by adopting self-improvement regimens or telling themselves to change their thoughts and beliefs. Real change occurs when a woman has a different experience of herself.

I call this a "self-acceptance" book, rather than a "self-improvement" book, because I truly believe that you don't have to change or fix or improve yourself in order to be happy. I believe that living a fulfilled life comes from learning how to listen to your inner voice, to the truth of your inner being in all of the ways that it speaks to you, and to live from it.

Of course, everyone knows that they should love and accept themselves. It may be the most common piece of psychological advice in the world. It sounds good, but if you don't know how to accept yourself, it becomes just another item in that long list of things you "should" do to be a better person.

Self-acceptance is not something you tell yourself to have. It's something you experience when you discover that you can pay attention to your innermost feelings and desires with care and compassion. You can also pay attention in the same way to the feelings you block because they cause you pain, and to the parts of you that you think are unacceptable. Then these aspects of yourself can be welcomed back into your conscious self with the life-giving message they are holding for you. When you do this, you become more spontaneous and alive, quite literally more full of yourself, as you once were as a girl, before you learned that girls and women can't live from their inner selves and follow their own inner lights.

Working with my clients, I found that at some point in therapy, they would have moments when a switch would occur in their consciousness. Sometimes these moments were dramatic, sometimes they were subtle, but always they were meaningful.

Women would go from seeing themselves and their lives from the outside to feeling them from the inside. They'd feel a surge of good feeling about who they were, and whatever they thought they had to change about themselves they'd see in an entirely new light.

Copyright © 2003 by Helene G. Brenner, published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., all rights reserved, reprinted with permission from the publisher.

About the Author

Helene Brenner, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist and the director of Women's Counseling and Psychological Services in Frederick and Bethesda, Maryland. She is a master therapist and seminar leader who has used the ideas and methods described in this book to help hundreds of women experience the fulfillment of living from their true selves and Inner Voices.