From Human Doing to Human Being: My 5-Step Transformation

Last week, I talked about how I spent the first half of my life as a Human Doing. Today, I’ll talk about the realizations that motivated me to transform into a Human Being.

The five steps I outline below summarize the birth of my awareness as I curiously embarked on a journey to the depth of my true self. I will be elaborating on how I worked through these steps in the new year.

1. Shedding the roles formed in childhood

Photo by Xavi Cabrera on Unsplash

When we grew up, each of us was assigned or picked up a role that allowed us to feel a sense of uniqueness and usefulness to the family we belonged to. In dysfunctional families, this may take on extreme and rigid forms of the following roles, such as Superachiever, Caretaker, Nice Guy, Star Student, Perfect Daughter, etc.¹

When we played one or several of these roles, we might have felt the need to suppress certain feelings in order to play them well. The scripts with which we played these roles may have been passed down by our parents through their speech or behavior, or they might have been transmitted to us by the education system, the mass media and the broader culture.

My childhood role was a combination of a Superachiever, Caretaker, Star Student and Perfect Daughter. These roles called for me to be competent, constantly striving for the best, smile and look happy, be obedient and trouble-free, and avoid being sad or angry. The invisible hand behind the script was my mother’s emotional fragility and insecurity, and my father’s reticence in confronting her. I learned implicitly that by being impeccable and trouble-free, I wouldn’t evoke my mother’s nitpicking, criticisms, anger, rage or wrath. As a highly sensitive child, I could detect the slightest hint of a rage boiling under the surface, which could erupt at any given moment.

To survive the volatility of my home environment, I became addicted to doing. Doing my best in every situation was a survival mechanism I adopted. This developed into a highly competent Inner Manager adamant on pre-empting any destabilizing situation that would threaten my safe attachment to my primary caregivers.

Over the years, this Inner Manager has drowned out the voices of parts of me who wanted to experience something other than a pretentious harmony. These parts needed to experience fun, spontaneity, access to the full range of human emotions, including negative and dark ones. They also needed to say “No.”

This is how my authentic self was sacrificed in service of the roles I adopted — all for the purpose of surviving my childhood.

At midlife, as I experienced a prolonged period of depression, the voices of those forgotten and suppressed parts of me started clamoring for attention.

I realized the roles I had been playing all my life, and the things I did to fulfill their requirements, were the obstacles to my desire to live a meaningful life — a life that belongs to me and no one else.

I decided to take off the costumes and masks that I wore to play those old roles. They felt like straitjackets. They were suffocating my true self, crying to be released.

I then started to ask myself:

What would you choose NOT to do anymore?

One by one, I experimented with not fulfilling my functions and observed how others reacted and how I felt. It was a tough process laden with tremendous self-doubt and guilt.

If you are like me, feeling exhausted while playing demanding roles without giving them a second thought, I encourage you to pose the same question to yourself, and find out what you are willing to stop doing so that you won’t be playing your old roles anymore.

2. Turning away from people-pleasing

Closely connected with playing our childhood roles is the tendency to please. In fact, you may consider People Pleaser as one of the roles, too.

I’ve found that getting rid of my people-pleasing tendency is the hardest step on my journey toward “being.”

As women, our society conditions us to be the perpetual pleaser. On top of this, the Chinese culture I was born into carries heavy patriarchal overtones, with specific roles and expectations defined for daughters, wives, and mothers. These rigid roles make the people-pleasing conditioning even deeper.

The psychological term for people pleasing is “fawning.” It was coined by therapist and author Pete Walker, who wrote the book “Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving.”² It describes a person’s coping mechanism learned in childhood to bring back the balance in a conflicting or emotionally threatening situation.

I can’t help but marvel at the innate intelligence of chidlren when they turn to this strategy to restore homeostasis in their home environment. Those of us who have developed this strategy — and they are predominantly women — deserve major credit for our contribution to an otherwise chaotic home life created by adults who aren’t emotionally equipped to deal with the stress arising from maintaining a family.

Trauma specialist Gabor Maté has raised the alarm about the connection between chronic diseases and the prevalence of women who have them. In this interview, he cited that women make up 80% of the people suffering from autoimmune diseases. He believes that because women are conditioned to be people pleasers, they sacrifice their authentic selves in exchange for a secure bond with their parents and later in life, their romantic partners. The suppression of their authentic emotions and desires have a detrimental effect on their physical and mental health.

Without going into details here, I myself have had a series of serious health conditions and difficult-to-cure chronic illnesses. I do believe that the adversity in my childhood, and the dysfunctional relationships with my parents, which continued in my adult relationships, have had a great impact on my physical and mental health.

All of these are significant warning signs for those of us who default to people- pleasing behavior to side-step emotional conflicts in our life.

So I asked myself:

What would happen if you just stop doing one thing that’s supposed to please someone?

3. Getting off the validation train

As I mentioned in my essay last week, I realized I had a strong tendency toward codependency. I depended on others to validate my accomplishments, to mirror my usefulness and thereby my existential worthiness. I’ve understood that I had a deficit in this kind of mirroring in my childhood due to my mother’s narcissistic ways. She saw me (and still does) as a mirror of herself instead of the real me, separate and different from her. Feeling hopeless in being seen, I turned to the world as my surrogate mother.

But this search for recognition became unsustainable as I realized I couldn’t depend on others to validate my existence all the time. Some people distanced themselves from me. They probably smelled my neediness cloaked in beautifully packaged social media posts or attempts to volunteer service to get them to compliment me so I’d feel worthy.

So how do I wean myself off codependency? I had to go through a painful detoxification process. I stopped expecting compliments from others. Instead, I checked in with myself and asked:

Are you satisfied with what you’ve done? Are you happy with yourself even if you didn’t do it perfectly?

Gradually, my focus turned from what I’d done to how I felt as a person. I’d ask:

Are you happy with yourself? How do you really feel?

As I reigned myself in, I appalled at the frequency with which I used to fish for validation in the form of social media “likes” or a confirming nod or praise by people close to me.

I’d ask myself:

What would happen to your self-worth if you stopped posting and getting “likes” on social media? Are you worth less of a person if you did that?

Getting off social media has created a big empty space in my mind and in my world. At first, it felt weird. There was a sense of emptiness. Where were “my people”? And then I realized that the majority actually didn’t realize or care that I was gone.

After a period, I noticed that I no longer “lit up” the same way I used to when someone liked the photos I occasionally posted, or gave me compliments. I didn’t get that rush of dopamine as if the “likes” confirmed my existence and worth. I felt more of a calm appreciation. It was like a heart-felt bow rather than a jump and a high-five. Most importantly, I’ve trained myself to be content with my offline/real life, and stopped being dependent on online accolades.

4. Shrinking the to-do list

I used to be hooked on checking off my to-do list, whether it was on paper or on Trello. Each time I checked off an item, it gave me such a dopamine rush. At the height of my to-do mania, I managed to check off over 20 items a day.

But this practice became excessive, and I couldn’t stop doing more, until I felt completely drained. One day, I was so tired that I managed to only complete three items on the list, and I noticed how defeated I felt. Then I realized I was setting myself up for disappointment. If I relied on finishing all the tasks to feel satisfied with myself, then I’d be in for major disappointments again and again.

So, I started reducing the number of tasks on my to-do list to a maximum of three a day. I dabbled with the Kanban Method, using three columns for my tasks: To do, Doing and Done, moving items from one column to the next. But after a while, I still felt tethered to all the “doings.”

At the beginning of 2022, I decided to cast away my to-do mentality and follow my intuition and impulses that aligned with my soul from moment to moment. “Aligned” was the “word of the year” that I had chosen.

Initially, it was hard to get rid of the compulsion of doing. It felt like getting off of a drug. Nothing to check off, no mini-achievements to congratulate myself on. I’ve since understood that the compulsion to constantly fill my day with “doings” was a form of addiction, too. It wired my brain in a certain way and to wean off of it, I needed to let go and rewire the brain in a different way.

Nowadays, I never make any to-do list, and I feel such a beautiful sense of freedom, moving from one moment to the next, allowing my inner being to guide me in taking inspired rather than obligated or robotic actions.

If you’re hooked on your to-do list, try asking this question:

Are you less of a person if you didn’t check off all the items on your to-do list?

5. Getting in touch with the Self

After shedding the straitjackets that we unconsciously put on, the pure being inside us will naturally emerge. This process may take a while, depending on how many layers of straitjackets you have been wearing up until this point of your life.

Even if you’re still wearing all or some of those straitjackets, it’s still possible to access your inner being. Certain forms of meditation can help you get in touch with that, such as mantra meditation. It basically helps you temporarily quiet down the chatters in your mind coming from the younger, wounded parts of yourself who need your attention. When their voices recede, there is a spaciousness in your mind that allows your true self, or soul, to come forth. This can sometimes feel like bliss.

I’ve experienced quite a bit of bliss during the 20 years I practice mantra meditation. However, the contact with my pure inner being was temporary and mostly restricted to the duration of the meditation. It didn’t heal the deep childhood wounds and trauma in and of itself.

I’ve since been practicing mindfulness through a variety of methods that help me to step into my conscious stance as a witness to my experiences. This allows a meaningful gap between what I hear and how I perceive the message without getting a knee-jerk reaction.

When triggered, I would take a pause and make a self inquiry to acquaint myself with the nature of the inner wound that led to my specific reaction. Healing the wounds has become an ongoing process on my journey to recovery from childhood emotional trauma.

In this process, I was fortunate to have come across these methods: Real Dialogue, The Whole Soul Way, and Internal Family System. I’ll spend some time introducing these modules in the future.

For now, let me just say that working with these tools, I’ve been able to gradually gain clarity and connect intimately with my authentic self.

The lengthening of life

To round off today’s newsletter, I want to share with you a passage in "The Book of Awakening" by Mark Nepo that expresses beautifully how living in our “being” feels like:

"In truth, our aliveness depends on our ability to sustain wonder: to lengthen the moments we are truly uncovered, to be still and quiet till all the elements of the earth and all the secrets of the oceans stir the aspects of life waiting within us."

As I practice the art of being and gradually rid myself of the compulsion of doing, I've started to feel a lengthening of time in the moment.

The subtle feeling that time moves more slowly now is similar to being in a lake instead of rushing through a roaring river. It is there where my sense of life lengthens. No one can truly control how long our physical body exists. But we can surely find a way to subjectively experience a lengthening of life through changing the quality of time inside us.

Also, I believe in reincarnation, so the length of this physical life isn't as important as the quality of it, and that also helps reduce the desperation of having to “do it all” in one lifetime. In other words, I adopt an anti-YOLO attitude.

Lastly, I'd like to share a lovely quote by Kahlil Gibran:

“In one atom are found all the elements of the earth; in one motion of the mind are found all the motions of existence; in one drop of water are found all the secrets of the endless oceans; in one aspect of you are found all the aspects of life.”

May you also find a way to experience your unique sense of being and the feeling of being at one with the universe.

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1. John Bradshaw, “Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child"

2. Pete Walker, “Complex Ptsd: From Surviving to Thriving”