Post-#MeToo and post-pandemic, we’ve become far more fluent in the language of consent and boundaries. We ask employers to respect them, doctors to honor them, and partners to seek them. But there’s one relationship where consent remains surprisingly underexplored: the one we have with ourselves.
What if consent doesn’t end at the edge of another person?
For the last 11 years, I’ve worked as a doula, accompanying families during childbirth and the postpartum time. Doulas are non medical professionals who provide education, advocacy, comfort measures, and emotional as well as spiritual support during reproductive events. As a doula, before I ever teach folks to advocate for their autonomy with healthcare providers, I encourage them to first encounter their self autonomy, self consent and self boundaries.
By self-consent, I do not mean self-control. Control, as a paradigm, operates through force and scarcity. It is itself a scarce resource, one which begets more scarcity the more we use it. Consent, on the other hand, orients towards liberation and safety. It expands possibilities by placing us in the role of autonomous creators of our experience and relationships. Whenever a client says they “lack self control,” I encourage them to reframe this as “lacking self support.”
Self consent is a form of self support. It’s cultivating a relationship in which your own “yes” and “no” matter to you, and you consistently act on them.
We can violate our internal boundaries through overwork, people-pleasing, or abandoning our “no” once we’ve felt it. Through doomscrolling after our body wants sleep, enabling our inner critic to dominate our inner child, overriding hunger, or abandoning pleasure.
Of course, these examples all have roots in trauma responses. The autonomic nervous system reaches for fight, flight, fawning or freezing when it’s acutely or chronically stressed, and we don’t have conscious control over these impulses when they’re fully activated. Acute and systemic trauma, scarcity or a lack of resources, lack of community and friendship, hormones, neurotransmitters, disability, etc., can all affect our ability to choose.
But speaking from personal experience, I suffered unnecessarily for years as an anxious and depressed autistic person believing I had to go wherever my mind took me. At times, it took me to shallow waters without a paddle and left me there to be eaten by bugs.
It’s been so restorative for me to practice boundaries with my inner self and, when the choice becomes conscious to me, to simply say “no.” To honor a destructive or endlessly circling inner voice as worthy of love, and then put it down for a nap. To embrace the role of wolf mother of my inner child. With compassion, I let the anxious inner piece know it will not be coming with me for the next little step of life and breathing.
When I get into a repetitive thought spiral, the moment I become conscious of that, I have a choice. I can resource myself, or I can stay frozen. In each stimulus, there is creativity and infinite potentiality, and—right there—what we’re fighting for, politically, incessantly, fiercely: our right to choose.
In Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes, “I love my creative life more than I love cooperating with my own oppression. If we were to abuse our children, Social Services would show up at our doors…But there is no Creativity Patrol or Soul Police to intervene if we insist on starving our own souls.”
This awareness—that I am my own advocate internally before anyone else is externally—has saved me many times.
Think about the way violating your own consent over and over in your own mind or body can affect you.
It’s something specific that no other relationship-based consent discussion can fully depict.
The trauma of that…it doesn’t deserve you.
If you can choose, don’t greet it with your being.
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