Chapter Six: Self-consent.
For those new here, welcome!
I’m taking a few months semi-off because I injured my hand, but I’ll still be sharing weekly chapters of my book, Expanding Consent, that I’m publishing on here!
It’s all about centering consent and noncoercion in our homes and beyond, in order to move away from patterns of domination, authoritarianism and extraction.
You can catch up on all previous chapters right here.
Chapter Six
The inner landscape: Self-consent
One of the key elements of creating a brand new culture where consent can thrive, is looking at our own inner landscape. We look internally and seek to reflect what we wish to see on the outside. In a way, we embody within, the sort of culture we’d like to see without.
This is not to say that consent is an individualistic pursuit, far from it. Consent is fundamentally a systemic issue. But our inner landscape matters: that’s where self-consent, non-judgment and unconditional positive regard (which I include in the Wheel of Consent in the previou chapter) come in.
They are all part of the ways we build a culture of consent within ourselves, of ways we work on the inner landscape.
The things we show and those we hide
When Phoebe was a newborn, she wasn’t drinking enough milk and we needed to supplement with high calorie formula - she was born with a medical condition and this impacted her ability to feed herself.
Still, she didn’t particularly seem to love breastmilk, or formula. She reluctantly sucked, turned her head away, lost interest. She was otherwise a calm, happy baby, and we thought perhaps she was allergic to dairy but never pursued it. We kept trying to get her to drink, in lots of creative, excruciatingly long-winded ways.
Leo showed a lot of the same signs as a baby, but amplified. He’d scream out when I breastfed him, and equally when I tried formula. He’d throw up an entire bottle, and what felt like virtually an entire boob-full of milk. He was an externaliser from day one: putting his whole self and all his wild emotions out there, for us to witness.
At three months, I switched him to non-dairy formula. The results were almost immediate. He guzzled it down as if to say, “Finally the good stuff!”. I tried to take dairy out of my diet so I could continue to breastfeed but it was too late – my milk supply was low, I was too exhausted to pump like I’d done for 6 months with Phoebe.
These radically divergent experiences taught me something: to honour my children’s internal sense of when something is just not right, even if the cues are subtle, even if they are easily overridden.
Leo has always made his needs so painfully clear, we couldn’t help but honour them. Phoebe though, has not. It was more subtle for her. Me and her, we internalise. We put up with it. We mask. We override our gut. We overthink and convince ourselves it’s okay. We keep it all in. Until we don’t.
I can’t explain to you how much guilt I still hold around the sometimes small, sometimes rather big, ways I consciously ignored my daughter’s messages of consent. As I wrote in the last chapter, babies can express consent. We should be watching and listening, even when it’s tempting to barrell on with our own agenda.
There are so many ‘should haves’ that still come up for me, and they are deeply linked with a sense of failing to notice, failing to do better: I should have seen that there was something she was communicating about the milk. I failed to feed my baby the way she deserved to be fed. I should have done better – switched to non-dairy milk, taken dairy out of my own diet, stopped trying to distract her so she would eat enough to keep her weight on track. I failed at all that.
This is strong language to use, but it’s how I feel. And, also, I didn’t realise I was supposed to listen to my gut. I didn’t realise I even had a gut! I felt ignorant, but also in some ways stuck in denial. I was still wallowing in a puddle of unresolved issues myself: my relationship with food and my body, my precarious mental health, my inability to seek actual help or to even know I needed help, or that I had the right to ask for help; the harmful narratives I believed about myself because I didn’t understand that it’s not that I chose to do a bad job of things, I literally could not make myself do a better job. I couldn’t. I am responsible, but in so many ways, I’m also not.
Inner work
Eventually, I began to raise my children to listen to their gut, to check in with their bodies, to honour their whole selves. It has not always been easy. I have been triggered to no end. Like when my toddler said they weren’t hungry at dinner and then needed a snack immediately after that. When my daughter, age 5, chose her own clothes that (gasp!) didn’t match (I know, it sounds benign but it’s the Italian in me rearing her head!) and insisted on wearing a sparkly plastic tiara AND a hairband over her forehead for literally months, every single day. Everywhere. When my son decided “reading wasn’t for him” and refused to even try, for years.
Honouring our children’s inner sense of who they are and what they need is not the easy path.
I took deep breaths and long walks, because my own irrational rage was not for them to deal with. I began to look deep within the territory of me, and stare into the often blinding reality of my brain and body, armed this time with actual information, and with compassion rather than shame.
Because before we can look at our children with unconditional love and non-judgment, we need to be able to do the same for ourselves. And, “when we begin to know ourselves in an open and self-supportive way we take the first step in the process that encourages our children to know themselves,” write Daniel J. Seigel and Mary Hartzell in Parenting from the Inside Out.
In other words, knowing our inner landscape will help us look upon ourselves and our children with curiosity and non-judgment, and encourage our children to know themselves and treat themselves with compassion too.
(Eventually, I stopped caring about matching clothes, the tiara and headbands were at some point lost or forgotten, reading was mastered, and I got over my annoyance with post-dinner snacks. Our fears are so often just fears, not predictors of what is to come.)
What is self-consent?
Self-consent is fundamentally about having a consent-based relationship with ourselves. It is knowing who we are, and committing to staying true to ourselves by unequivocally being on our own side. Being in solidarity with ourselves.
Self-consent is the root of our understanding and practice of consent with ourselves and in community. Sophia Graham, who writes the Love Uncommon blog, defines it as: “treating your needs, desires and limits with respect. It is about being curious about yourself, and making choices that express your authentic self. It is central to learning to have a consensual relationship with others because it embeds consensual practice in your life and all your interactions.”
Sophie Christophy has spoken about how this cannot happen if we don’t inherently feel we are worthy of love and belonging, just for being us. There is a direct connection between consent and self-worth, and there is a direct connection between patriarchy and the beginning of systemic imbalances, and the systemic stripping of self-worth from entire groups of people.
Self-consent, solidarity with ourselves, is not only a personal job. It is also about the systems we exist within and how supportive or marginalizing they are. The extent to which they allow us to care for ourselves, to ask for help, to understand who we are and to feel worthy for just being us.
Self-worth
Feeling worthy is crucial for knowing who we are, and what we really need and want. And knowing what we need and want is crucial to be able to exercise consent.
Self-consent is about fostering that sense of worthiness by tuning in to our internal voice – the voice that tells us what feels good and what doesn’t, the voice that speaks out our needs clearly, that stays true to our authentic self. The voice we are so often trained to ignore, mute, and distrust.
John Holt alludes to this when he writes that in order to trust children, we must first learn to trust ourselves, to unbury and recognise our own authenticity, AND honour it. This is hard because, to quote Holt, “most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.”
Before the expression of consent out in the world, we need to actually know what it is we need and want to express, and practice being on our own side. That is self-consent. Sophia Graham emphasises that self-consent is a combination of skills that are designed to be practiced, and that most of us do in fact need to practice them.
Authenticity
Self-consent tells me that consent is deeply about us, and getting to know ourselves. Once we can honour our inner voice, hold space for it and make choices rooted in authenticity, then we can also make space for our children and young people to practice it – to get to know themselves, to build awareness of who they are, to figure out how to stay true to their authentic selves, to celebrate themselves, to listen to their inner voice, to work on regulating their own emotions. We can be on their side as they practice being in solidarity with themselves. Practicing these skills helps us create a culture of consent, and in turn supports our young people in making consent-based agreements and choices.
I want to say more about being our authentic selves: this has been hard for me. Partially it has been hard because in the world we live in, it is hard; but partially it has been hard because perhaps there is no such thing as one authentic self.
Hear me out.
For the longest time I felt like multiple people. I was the me that lived with my family, and the me with my school friends; the me at work, the me with my university friends; the me with my husband, and so on. On the outside, I felt duplicitous, like I was lying to everyone; and inside, it felt like constant scrambling to remember who I was supposed to be at any given time.
Then I began to recognize this as a few things: one, I was masking. Masking is what many neurodivergent people do out in the world to hide parts of themselves that appear less socially acceptable, and in the process, both shield themselves from hurt, seek to please others, and attempt to be ‘normal’, or fit in. Most of my life, I did some high-level masking (those of us who grew up as girls are particularly good at this, since all women have to some extent had to mask who they really were since the beginning of time!). Oh, and neurotypical people mask too, especially those who are marginalized in other ways. It’s a means of self-preservation, and a way to feel part of society. Not all masking is necessarily a bad thing! But if you’re having to mask all day every day, it can take its toll.
Two, I recognized that an absolute, deep-seated terror was at play here: I was afraid. I was afraid to really live. I was afraid to actually figure out who I was (perhaps because I couldn’t actually accept and love who I was). I was afraid to take up space. I was afraid to show emotion. I was afraid to be vulnerable. I was afraid afraid afraid. One of the best things anyone has ever written about fear is what Liz Gilbert writes in her book Big Magic: fear is so utterly, predictably boring.
This isn’t to minimize it – I have lived for decades avoiding everything that scared me while also pretending like I was doing all the things I wanted to do (which I wasn’t, because the things I wanted to do scared me). Fear can be a looming, all-encompassing presence in a life.
Writer Liz Gilbert points out that fear is also, ultimately, so so dull. It is a minimizing, repetitive, grey emotion. It holds us in its grip with the same exact refrain: avoid it, run, stop, don’t do it. Gilbert writes, “My fear always made predictably boring decisions, like a choose-your-own-ending book that always had the same ending: nothingness.”
The opposite of fear, for me, is not fearlessness. I need my fear with me, because it serves a purpose; but it’s not going to be in charge. Gilbert describes it perfectly: fear is with her, on the roadtrip of life, firmly sat in the backseat. She is bringing her right along – but fear doesn’t get to make any decisions, or determine the route, or even change the music.
The antidote to fear, for me, is curiosity. Where fear is boring and predictable, curiosity is open-ended and interesting; where fear says “stop!”, curiosity says “I wonder..?”; where fear is always the same, curiosity is always something new. Where fear is diminishing, curiosity is about expanding.
To paraphrase psychoanalyst and author James Hollis, I tell this to myself, and I tell this to my children too: if given the choice, would you choose to diminish or expand?
It’s always, always expand, for me.
Scarcity
My last reason was steeped in the systems we inhabit: it was scarcity. Our systems promote a culture of scarcity that pervades everything. It is intimately woven into our conditioning. It is baked into white supremacy abd capitalism and all oppressive systems.
Part of my sense of paralysis was neurodivergence and nervous system challenges, but part of it was also a sense of scarcity that comes from existing in the world.
Scarcity is both personal, and environmental.
I would literally sit in restaurants staring at the choices on the menu, and not know what to pick. Not because the choice was overwhelming, but because I couldn’t reach the part of me that knew what I actually wanted to eat. Salad or veggie burger? No clue. Years of overriding my intuitive sense of the foods I enjoyed, of whether I was hungry or full, of internalised fat phobia and diet culture and beauty standards, had left me with a void when it came to decisions around food (and around most thing, in fact).
The way people essentially force you to eat as a child, and then suddenly stop being quite so excited about your healthy appetite as a teenager, was confusing. I was supposed to know what I enjoyed, but instead I knew a lot about food without actually knowing how I felt about it.
Food here was a metaphor for almost everything else. I had no idea what I was good at, but even more importantly I had no idea what I enjoyed, liked, felt strongly about, wanted to spend my time doing. I flitted from one thing to another but never got stuck in, or gave up as soon as it got hard or unpleasant. I had no internal compass, no intuitive sense of what felt right and what didn’t.
Often I would feel something in my gut, and actively ignore it. It felt like an intrusion, rather than legitimate intuition. It almost felt like my intuition and my brain were in competition – and my brain won out, virtually all the time.
Part of this was about who I was, but part of it was about the society we are growing up in and its culture of scarcity.
Never Enough
Scarcity culture is where our social, political and economic systems conspire to persuade us that we are never enough. I want to be clear that scarcity is not independent of the systems that create it: patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, colonialism, ableism, and so on.
Scarcity tells us that we are constantly competing with ourselves and others. We must always do better, we must always progress. The internal narrative is, “I never have enough time/energy/money/friends/love.”
The opposite of scarcity, says Brené Brown, is enough: having enough, and being enough. In other words, worthiness. It is the internalizing of the belief that from birth and throughout our lives, at all times and circumstances, in all places, in all versions of ourselves, we are worthy of love and belonging. Scarcity culture does not support this belief. In fact it actively works to condition us to believe the opposite. Its overwhelming assumption is: you are a work in progress, you are not enough, you can do better, you need more, you should always aim for more, you must earn your worth, if you don’t win you lose.
When we are surrounded by a culture that emphasises scarcity, we struggle to figure out who we are and what we really want; to be solid about how we really want to show up in the world; to sit in our own sense of self and make decisions that come from a place of worthiness.
Self-consent is the work we do with and on ourselves, the inner work, to learn to trust ourselves, listen to our intuition, deconstruct societal conditioning, and also sit with the messy, contradictory, complex humans that we are.
Through the tunnel
Figuring out the barriers to knowing myself has been tough, ongoing work. I love psychologist Amelia Nagoski’s words in an interview on Medium: “Emotions are like tunnels. You have to move all the way through the darkness to get to the light at the end. You exhaust an emotion when you get stuck in the tunnel.”
I’ve realized I need to walk myself through the metaphorical tunnel, to a place where I feel connection, alignment and a sense of being full, worthy, complete.
So is there ONE authentic self?
Probably not. We are always changing and adapting, after all. There is no one self, in the same way there is no one truth.
And it would be blind and naïve to deny that we are a product of our genes, culture and society; that to an extent we are a product of the systems we are raised to uphold.
But like Paulo Freire writes, “we know ourselves to be conditioned but not determined.” We can become aware of our assumptions and where they come from, and also inhabit our personal sense of autonomy and direct our own future. We can grow and connect to an inner sense of being and knowing – a sense that is perhaps more intuitive than intellectual, a sense of feeling like we are sitting in our own worthiness, and seeing other people’s worthiness too. We can divest from the systems that hold us all hostage.
Noone is doing this alone
This is inner work, but I don’t want to give the impression that this is work we do alone. We get to know ourselves alone, but the place where we practice showing up is in relationship. There is no inner work, without the outer practice of it. It is personal work, but also systemic. Self-consent matters, but it has to go hand in hand with change in relationships, institutions and systems. With connection to and care for others.
This is the work we do to then turn around and practice being in partnership with our children.
Next, I’ll talk about the roles of non-judgment and Unconditional Positive Regard in tending to the inner landscape of consent culture.
(A note on this chapter: I wrote this over a year ago, and if I had to write it again I think I would talk more directly about systems and less about scarcity, for various reasons! However, I’m trying to stay true to the evolution of my thinking, so here it is.)
As always, thanks for reading.
This is my favorite chapter so far! It was so vulnerable and relatable, Fran 🫀