FIERCE AUTHENTICITY:

Show Up. Be Seen. Get Love.

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Shirani M. Pathak

FIERCE AUTHENTICITY: SHOW UP. BE SEEN. GET LOVE.

Copyright © 2019 by Shirani M. Pathak

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical or mental health advice that can be provided from your own physician or mental health provider, nor does it, or should it, be perceived to create a therapist-client relationship between us. The intent of this author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your path towards emotional and spiritual evolution and well-being. Throughout this book, the quotes and stories attributed to clients are fictional, but are based in real-life situations. The identifying information specific to each client has been changed to protect client confidentiality. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, the author assumes no responsibility for your actions. 

For additional copies of this book, contact the author at www.ShiraniMPathak.com.

Print ISBN: 978-1-7331756-0-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-7331756-1-6

First edition, June 2019

Dedication

Quote

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Practice of Fierce Authenticity

Wired for Connection

Fierce Authenticity as a Practice

Commit to Honoring Yourself

Building Your Foundation

No Woman Is an Island

Relational Anatomy

The Wound

Stress, Drama, and Chaos

Relational Mirrors

Healing Your Relationship Wounds

A Word on Blame

Chapter 2: Fierce Love (for Yourself)

The Insta-Wall

What Stories Do You Tell Yourself?

Loving All of You

Bonus: Into the Shadows

Showing Up for Yourself

Enough or Not Enough? The Choice is Yours

Chapter 3: Fierce Care (of Yourself)

Anger and Resentment

Taking Fierce Care of Yourself

The Relationships-to-Nurture List

A Fierce YES to You

Ask and Receive

Chapter 4: Fierce Authenticity (the Goal of this Book)

What is Authenticity, Anyway?

Know Who You Are

Be in Fierce Integrity with Yourself

Violating Boundaries

Showing Up as Yourself

The Truth About Fear

Tuning into Yourself

Your Values

Living in Fierce Alignment

Meditation to Meet Your Fiercely Authentic Self

Being a Beacon of Light

Chapter 5: Fierce Communication (of Your Truth)

Verbal versus Nonverbal Communication

Fierce Respect for Yourself

Being Responsible to and for Yourself

Harnessing the Power of Words

Living in the Present to Create a Different Future

Being Authentic with Your Words

Fierce Trust in Yourself

Difficult Conversations

Chapter 6: Transitions (the Fiercely Authentic Way)

Types of Transitions

Navigating Transitions

Love Is All There Is

Forgiveness

The Gifts and the Lessons

Loving Kindness Meditation

The Long Form

The Short Form

Creating the Space for Miracles

Conclusion: Welcome to the Revolution

Further Resources

Community Groups for Support

Additional Reading

Suggestions for How to Pick a Therapist or Mentor

Acknowledgments

About the Author

A Special Invitation: Welcoming in More Support

Dedication

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This book is dedicated

to all those who have gone before me,

and all those who will come after me.

♥

Quote

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One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

— Sigmund Freud

Introduction

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I’m going to let you in on a little secret: Love always surrounds you and is constantly seeking a way into your life. It’s there, waiting for you. Like a lost little puppy dog desiring to be cuddled, eagerly seeking you out, craving for you to welcome it in, love is there. Waiting for you to see it, waiting for you to acknowledge it, waiting for you to invite it in. Love is just as available to you as the air you breathe, in quantities as vast as the stars in the night sky.

The problem is, you can’t see it. You walk around with blinders on, looking for love in all the wrong places, all the while living behind walls built so high that you have no idea love is on the other side, waiting to be let in. You have too many stories and beliefs about yourself to let love in. Somewhere along the way, you created stories about how unlovable, undesirable, and unwanted you must be. Deep down inside, you fear that if you really knew me, you wouldn’t like me, and you sure as hell wouldn’t love me.You walk around hiding behind masks, knowing exactly which mask to bring out for which situation or interaction, while trying so hard to hold the fragile pieces of yourself together.

You’re tired. You feel disconnected. You feel isolated at times, and if you’re honest with yourself, you sometimes feel pretty alone, too. You could be with your closest friends, or even your partner, and still get the sense you’re all alone. Sure, you might be close to people — you might even already have found the love of your life, and at the same time, you could be keeping them at arm’s length, keeping them from truly getting to know who you are.

You want so badly to be loved, but you always seem to pick lovers who can’t love you back. And when you do find a lover who loves you back, you find them boring. You do something stupid to fuck it up.

In the beginning, you’re both filled with desire and the passion is hot. Then, just when the relationship starts to deepen, it starts to fail. One of you either goes MIA, completely ghosting the other, or one of you changes. They stop showering you with the attention and affection they did before they slept with you, or you do the same to them.

If you’re the one who got left, you do everything in your power to draw them back to you. You de-prioritize your friends, you stop taking care of you, and you make the one you lost your everything, sitting around waiting for a text or call. When they don’t reciprocate, you try harder, and harder, and harder, bending yourself into pretzels to get them to love you again. When you finally realize it’s done, that your lover is gone and isn’t coming back, you spiral into the rabbit hole of the not-enoughs: I must not have been pretty enough, thin enough, funny enough, smart enough, witty enough, sexy enough . . . because if I was, they would still be here with me; they didn’t stay, which simply goes to prove that am not enough.

If you’re the one who got bored, you start to pull away. You get annoyed when your partner seems to get clingy. You push them further and further away, until either you finally break it off or they’ve had enough and call it quits with you. At first you feel free. Then, after some time has passed, you realize that you miss them and that you might have fucked it up. You reach out and you’re hurt when they want nothing to do with you. That’s when you start to go into your not-enoughs: I must not be lovable enough, worthy enough, skilled enough, sexy enough, charming enough . . . because if I was, they would have come back; they didn’t, so how bad I suck is confirmed once again.

Whether you were left or did the leaving, your not-enoughness meter has been turned up to high. You turn to your friends, and to ice cream, brownies, cookies, wine, and as many self-help books as you can find. You have an insatiable hunger to be loved, and you turn your obsession with your lost love into an obsession about everything that’s wrong with you. If you could just fix yourself, you could go out there and get the love you so badly desire.

If any of this sounds familiar, then welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.

I know how it feels to bend myself into a pretzel to get someone to like me. I know how it feels to put the lovers in my life before my family and friends. I know how it feels to walk around constantly juggling all the different masks so no one gets to know the real me and discover how unlovable I believed myself to be.

It’s a terribly painful and lonely place to be.

Just like you, I used to question what was wrong with me. Why did lovers never stay? When I had a good guy, why did I always push him away? I had no idea, so I became a seeker, a searcher, and a learner. I sought out therapy, self-help books, 12-step programs, workshops, and more self-help books. I was a high-functioning, overachieving doer. I needed to know what was wrong with me so I could fix it. I was determined to figure it out so I could feel better.

Then one day it hit me: I was the one common denominator in all my failed relationships. The problem was me. It wasn’t about them. It was about me. Much to my surprise, though, by digging in and doing the work, I learned there wasn’t anything actually wrong with me. I had simply developed some very wrong beliefs about myself. Those false and erroneous beliefs led me to act in ways that took me out of integrity with myself, led me to de-prioritize myself, and ultimately, led me to abandon myself time and time again.

As a relationship therapist on my own healing path, it never ceased to amaze me that every woman who showed up on my couch, whether she was single, married, or something in-between, was a woman walking through the same experiences as me. Because I am a seeker and a searcher and a lifelong learner, I took everything I had learned on my own personal and professional journey and began to apply the principles and theories with my clients and others I mentored.

What I found was that every single woman who struggled with her relationships had stories about her enoughness. Stories she developed in her early years were unconsciously running the script of her entire life. She had the same few scenes on repeat, as though they were reruns of the same familiar Friday night sitcom. The people were different and some of the details in the scene might change, but her feelings were always the same: She was not-enough and she was unworthy of love and affection.

By applying what I had discovered in my own healing journey to the women I worked with, I was able to help them uncover their own stories. We discovered the experiences that led them to create these stories about themselves. We developed the deepest and most-intimate relationship a woman will ever have in her life: the relationship she has with herself. Time and time again, as each woman worked through her stories, the blocks she had stacked against allowing love into her life were slowly removed. Piece by piece, the stories that kept her isolated and walled off, protected but not connected, came down. Revealed behind them was a woman who stood tall in the truth of who she was, knowing that she was a lovable, valuable, worthy human being.

The woman who emerged from behind those walls had developed an unwavering love for herself. She used that newly rediscovered love for herself as the compass to navigate her entire life, and she did so with dignity and grace. Each woman learned that if she allows herself to show up and be seen in the fullness of who she is, she gets to experience a love she never knew was possible.

That’s what the process of fierce authenticity, and this book, is all about. It’s about how to engage in the practice of being fiercely authentic to yourself, so you, too, can allow yourself to show up, be seen, and get the love you’ve always desired.

This book is based on my own story and the stories of women I have supported in their own process of healing, awakening, and personal evolution. Whether you are in a relationship, single, married, engaged, or in a different type of arrangement, you will find something in here for you. It’s best to read this book from cover to cover, in sequence, because each part of the process builds upon the one previous to it. The practice of fierce authenticity is a multipart process that includes fierce love for yourself, fierce care of yourself, and being fiercely and authentically you, and culminates in fierce communication of everything that came before it.

You’ll find stories, ideas, and concepts, some spiritual in nature, some based on the latest research on relationships, and many combining the two. They’re meant to help you understand your own stories— how