Strongshape - Mishmash

you have to admit there are some joys in life that can only be felt due to hardship. a common example is steaming hot showers. it takes a cold day, or a sickness, for someone to experience the joy of a hot shower. you can’t enjoy it in the heat. then there’s the joy of a fulfilling sleep, often achieved through a tiring day. and there’s the joy of a reunion, achieved through separation. and there are many more examples. sometimes difficulty carries a special range of joys and that’s something to be thankful about.

merry christmas to the people who have to pretend to be someone they’re not for their families, who don’t have family to celebrate with, who have bad past experiences with the holiday, who are having a rough year and just want to reach the end of it, who couldn’t afford gifts this year and feel guilt over it. merry christmas to everyone but especially those of you who are feeling down.

I’m about to save you thousands of dollars in therapy by teaching you what I learned paying thousands of dollars for therapy:

It may sound woo woo but it’s an important skill capitalism and hyper individualism have robbed us of as human beings.

Learn to process your emotions. It will improve your mental health and quality of life. Emotions serve a biological purpose, they aren’t just things that happen for no reason.

1. Pause and notice you’re having a big feeling or reaching for a distraction to maybe avoid a feeling. Notice what triggered the feeling or need for a distraction without judgement. Just note that it’s there. Don’t label it as good or bad.

2. Find it in your body. Where do you feel it? Your chest? Your head? Your stomach? Does it feel like a weight everywhere? Does it feel like you’re vibrating? Does it feel like you’re numb all over?

3. Name the feeling. Look up an emotion chart if you need to. Find the feeling that resonates the most with what you’re feeling. Is it disappointment? Heartbreak? Anxiety? Anger? Humiliation?

4. Validate the feeling. Sometimes feelings misfire or are disproportionately big, but they’re still valid. You don’t have to justify what you’re feeling, it’s just valid. Tell yourself “yeah it makes sense that you feel that right now.” Or something as simple as “I hear you.” For example: If I get really big feelings of humiliation when I lose at a game of chess, the feeling may not be necessary, but it is valid and makes sense if I grew up with parents who berated me every time I did something wrong. So I could say “Yeah I understand why we are feeling that way given how we were treated growing up. That’s valid.”

5. Do something with your body that’s not a mental distraction from the feeling. Something where you can still think. Go on a walk. Do something with your hands like art or crochet or baking. Journal. Clean a room. Figure out what works best for you.

6. Repeat, it takes practice but is a skill you can learn :)

“So self-sabotage, as the name suggests, are the behaviors that we engage in which both consciously but also unconsciously take good things from ourself. So it might be success, it might be happiness, it might be the very things that we need or that we hope for. And again, we might ask ourselves, why on earth would you do that to yourself? […]

There was a psychoanalyst called Ronald Fairbairn, and in the early 50s, this was something that he wrote about, particularly within a relational context. So he spoke about the internal saboteur, and the internal saboteur is a manifestation of taking something good from ourselves, but it comes from early experiences of being rejected. If we feel rejected, particularly as a child, this can give way to quite unbearable and intolerable feelings of anger, which feel difficult to manage.

So the way that becomes processed is by denying the very need that we have for the other. So any kind of neediness that we then feel within us becomes despised, hated and unacknowledged. And as such, we will then deliberately take good things away from ourselves or avoid engaging in certain relationships because to sit with that need and to be met with rejection feels absolutely annihilating.

So we deny actually having those needs to begin with. So in some way, you then leave yourself feeling safe from being rejected, but you unintentionally then rob yourself of the very thing that you crave.”

— Ryan Bennett-Clarke, Conversations with Annalisa Barbieri: Self-sabotage

a normal and average sunday consists of lying on the ground thinking about how much I'd like to go back and do everything again because this time I'd do everything right

Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

Michelle C.