Our Nervous System & Our Self Concept

Are you familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs? It's pyramid shaped diagram that indicates as human beings we have five levels of needs. Starting from the bottom is our physiological needs. These are the needs we have that are necessary for survival, like food, clothing & shelter. The next level up is safety, things that contribute to our health, safety & security. After that is belongingness and love, which includes being accepted by others and feeling connected. Next is our self-esteem needs, feeling respected, confident, and having a sense of accomplishment. And finally at the top of the pyramid is our self actualization needs. This category includes our identity, beliefs, morals, & self concept. It's also about our engagement in self development and personal growth to move towards fulfilling our potential as human beings. We all have an inner impulse or drive towards self actualization, it's how we are designed. For some people that impulse is really loud while for others it is more in the background.

It used to be thought that a person must meet the first level of need (physiological) before they move on to the second, and so on, like climbing the stairs. What we now know is that the levels are dynamic, and that self actualization affects all the other levels.

This means, among other things, that how we perceive ourselves affects our sense of safety, belonging, self esteem and capacity to meet our physiological needs. Can you see how that would be the case? If we operate from an underlying assumption that the world is not a safe place, that we are helpless and at the mercy of it, that assumption is going to negatively influence our ability to create safety and our overall sense of safety in the world. If we believe that we don't belong, that other people don't get us, that we are somehow different or defective, we will show up in ways that affect our love and belonging needs. If we think we aren't good enough or aren't worthy, our self-esteem needs are affected along with our capacity to fulfill our potential. Our self concept can also affect our sleep and our ability to generate the income or the supports necessary to meet our physiological needs.

Coming back to safety for a moment, this is where your nervous system comes in. We can go through all of the tools for regulating the nervous system, somatic interventions, and bottom up signaling of safety, but at the end of the day if we are still operating from a old assumption of "I'm not safe" it is going to be extremely difficult to maintain the gains ongoing from nervous system interventions and to create a new baseline of regulation, especially in the face of stressful events that trigger that old assumption. That is why we need to combine nervous system interventions with self concept work.

The place to start is to be the curious observer or detective of our experiences, starting to notice the assumptions and expectations that we automatically hold as true for us (they are usually below conscious awareness and we don't even question them). Stepping into a growth mindset of openness and possibility we can start to challenge those old assumptions and start to show up in ways that align with a newer (healthier) version of who we are and what is possible for us. In this way, we are aligning ourselves with our ability to meet our safety needs, and from here the interventions that we use can gain more traction. We can apply this concept to all of the other levels as well, thereby increasing our ability to our physiological, belonging, self esteem and self actualization needs.

A very Happy Mother's Day to all of the wonderful mothers out there! Know that by engaging in this work you are making a difference in your children's lives, and that, my dears, is something to celebrate! 💜

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Candy Widdifield, M.Ed., Certified Master Coach

candywiddifield.com candy.thriving@gmail.com