What has agency got to do with health?
How will our life unfold?
As children, if we didn’t get what we needed from our caregivers to establish a stable sense of self, we are left with the belief that we can’t do it on our own, and that we’re not capable of trusting that we are good, valuable and worthy. This has a big effect on the way that we psycho-biologically self organise, and so those of us that have that experience can find it more of a challenge to maintain health, relationships and well being.
One important capacity that becomes compromised with this belief system is agency. Agency is the ability to feel that one has ownership about how life will unfold for us. Without it we have a diminished sense of optimism and responsibility. We can feel stuck and tend to blame ourselves and others for our misfortunes. Life is much more difficult with this perspective. Feeling like you are a victim of circumstance is a trap. It’s stressful, hard work and demoralising.
We disconnect to survive
With an absence of agency comes the development of a negative self concept. In order to protect from the emotional pain of not feeling worthy, the child will often adopt a strategy of disconnection from the body and dissociation from self, in order to survive. This strategy works in the short term but as an adult, distorts the capacity to feel and know yourself and others. This can be a lonely place to be because the love and connection that we long for, is cast as something to protect against – a confusing and painful dilemma.
Confidence in our capacities
Agency is often thought of as the capacity to externally act on something, but really it’s the state of mind that supports confidence in our own capacities and allows us to take an empowering action in the first place.
Limiting beliefs are from a child consciousness
Our formative patterns of belief and behaviour develop in response to our experiences throughout our early years. We tend to take those beliefs from childhood with us as we move through adolescence and into adulthood. At least part of the way that we unconsciously respond to the world then, depends on conclusions that we formed at at age when we were wholly dependent on others and indeed had no real agency of our own.
It’s sobering to realise that all those limiting beliefs that we have about ourselves are quite literally, coming from a part of us still stuck in a child consciousness – or the child we once had to be. There’s no blame or shame in that either of course – it’s a normal response and we all do it.
The realisation is just what needs to happen though. As we begin to see that what we thought was reality, is in fact shaped by unconscious beliefs and behaviour patterns left over from childhood, a dormant space opens up in our capacity to understand ourselves. A newly emergent adult consciousness comes online, one that can hold the awareness of how the past influences the present and is big enough to hold the felt sense of both at the same time. Doing so creates the space for insight and understanding and a mindset underpinned by compassion and an inherent move towards connection without fear.
Agency as a bridge between past and present
This is the beginning of a growing sense of self agency. In their excellent book ‘Healing developmental trauma’ Laurence Heller and Brad Kammer say, ‘Agency serves as the bridge between child consciousness and adult consciousness’.
Agency gives us access to a deeper and wider perspective of who we are and therefore we can respond appropriately and wisely to our experiences. This in turn nurtures our sense of psychological safety and consequently improves the tone of our nervous system, overall health and sense of well being.
How craniosacral therapy supports agency
Craniosacral Therapy supports the strengthening and development of agency in several ways:
Through providing a clear explanation of it’s importance and how it might have come to be compromised in your own story – getting help to make sense of why you feel the way you do is important in order to properly engage and commit to the work that needs to be done to heal.
The development of the capacity to feel and tolerate sensation feeling and emotion in the body. Adult consciousness is nurtured if not characterised by developing the capacity to hold an understanding and an awareness of the whole body felt sense.
The therapeutic relationship provides a new point of reference from which to self organise in relation to another person; one whereby you no longer have to give up your sense of self in order to feel seen and valued. The repeated experience of being validated in a context of safety changes the way the nervous system perceives self and other. We become able to choose for ourselves when to shift between autonomy and connection.
Learning to stay with the felt sense of the body in mindful awareness allows the potential for insight into our own stories and a new perspective on how our lives can unfold.
Please get in touch if you would like to do some work around developing agency.