With the Underminer, It’s Never About You
There is a certain style of “friend” who capitalizes when they see you feeling deficient, who knock you all the way down once you let on you’re already low. This sort of person takes the opportunity to compliment herself once you freely admit to your own vulnerability in response to your sharing a problem, especially something self-deprecating (which is a problem in an of itself), rather than holding space for you. Predatory friendships subsist on one party’s gaining the upper hand, and when you take the competitive dynamic away, there often isn’t much nourishment to be found.
It’s Not Personal
One thing to hold in mind when you feel undermined is that every action of another reflects how they feel about themselves, not what they think and feel about you. It’s not about you when someone hurts you. There is no law stating that you have to stay small and take on any uninvited comparison to your dilemma, or be the scapegoat for another’s internal conflict.
It Can Be Lonely to Grow
There will be a liminal adjustment phase to almost every close relationship as we begin to know ourselves more deeply and start to change in significant ways. Some people like it when we go to therapy and they change right along with us, gaining from our wisdom and insight. Others don’t appreciate the upset in how things used to be and how we now act differently, which may indicate they feel jealous and thrown off by our new boundaries and our new self confidence expressed in taking care of ourselves first. Unconsciously, they may get competitive about how we are now compared to how they knew us when we were smaller and they could stand on our shoulders to feel taller.
Slow Down and Get Curious
If we notice that we are being undermined in any friendship or family dynamic or romantic relationship, it’s on us to take a step back and to clarify with them, and to create a safer distance for our protection, whatever form that may take.
Do you have any underminers you need to never mind?
Terrify Yourself, Productively
“Perhaps I am not interesting, but I am the only thing I have to offer, and I want to offer something.”
Each human being is infinitely interesting and unique, even though we look more the same than different as a species, like little ants wearing clothes when you zoom way out. In therapy we zoom all the way in and marinate in our subjectivity in order to parse our singular experience, which is how we develop the capacity to change. But in order to be able to truly do differently, first we have to get brave.
Make an Utterance to the World
Go rogue and say the unexpected. Honor your inner truth and attempt to say in your life, and do in your work, what thrills you but also most terrifies you—that which you fancy accomplishing but have been too afraid to try and fail because you have never been creative enough, smart enough, wise enough, or ready enough.
You Are Enough
When you act from a place of courage, your amygdala—the ancient emotional fight or flight center in that cute little reptile part of your brain—will be not only be soothed but you will finally feel like enough, and as a result your self-confidence—located right around your prefrontal cortex—that reasoning, wise, intellectual, sexier part of your brain will develop stronger to be more capable and will improve your sense of judgment. Your confidence will be contagious and others will believe in you, too.
Have Your Own Back
Courage means having the faith in yourself that you will be able to figure out what to do next when you are brave, no matter what happens. We can’t plan any fleeting external validation that feels so good when it does happen, nor can we force it out of any outside circumstance or person; we must learn to validate ourselves and earn our own approval from within. That’s the journey and the work. You’ll never regret believing in yourself on your deathbed. Facts.
The Law of the Diminishing Friend Group
One of the most common issues explored in therapy is that mysterious inevitable exodus of friends that begins subtly after a certain post-college age and continues all throughout one’s life. Especially in a pandemic, college friends marry, work friends move away, and childhood friends move on and may not want to be in your wedding.
A Bruise on the Hearts of the Left-Behind
The further one steps away from college, or any other social organizing principle, the smaller the diameter of their trusted friend circle tends to shrink. The commonalities that once made you close in the first place (being single, needing roommates, finding parties, being into the same books, movies and music) may dissipate and even vanish over time. People change politics, decide to marry and have kids after all, and grow to be more materialistic than we ever could have imagined, and may even become unrelatable. As we mature, we have less energy for frivolity, less patience for superficial fluff and more desire for the raw intensity of pure friendship. What we also unconsciously fear in losing our friends is the fear of losing that piece of us that goes away with them; that piece that we used to be with them, the one that laughed easily.
Get Offline
The antidote to such ambiguous loss is to move. Don’t take yourself so seriously. Nobody is judging you because Nobody is too busy judging themselves. Join a band and jam. Take a pottery class and try a wacky glaze. Go to a meet-up in Central Park where people need people. Fail at a cooking class and laugh. In the face of isolation, the key is to move, safely, and to keep moving and growing and maybe even be a little curious about why you have to be so good at everything you do, anyway. Your efforts to expand your social network may seem to follow the law of diminishing returns, but this will even out in time; initial fluff may just morph into real conversation, and when you’re really lucky, commonality.
Be brave. Be vulnerable.
There is this notion that expressing vulnerability is too heavy or makes you a social vampire. Friend, that’s just status quo to beat you down; that’s not true. People crave to go deeper, and when you open up yourself, empathy is induced in the other and people feel closer to you. But don’t just dump all of your drama and run away; own your struggle and talk about how you’re working through it. You can keep it light at first, while you vet each other’s personalities, but slowly reveal yourself to the world and see what returns are possible.
Be Your Own Savior
Save Yourself
You may have been denied precious attention in your early years because life happened. Even when your loving family meant the very best, something huge and awful fell through the cracks. Pain went unnoticed. Needs floundered unmet.
Trauma Simply Happens
The tragedy about relational trauma is that it’s not personal. It’s not about us. We didn’t draw suffering to us, or cause it to happen; we aren’t a beacon for punishment. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time and our suffering was a neutral byproduct. When relational trauma occurs, needs are unmet for all parties involved. The perpetrator was violated before perpetrating, and in a domino effect, the victim is victimized.
Often trauma makes us look outside of ourselves for someone else to fix our pain and protect us the way we should have been once protected. We seek external validation in attempt to master our past and heal ourselves and prevent any future suffering, accidents, mistakes.
Pain Is Inevitable
But the wound will never quite close up and the only way through pain is to feel it. Certain things will trigger us again and again, and make us raw. The only thing we can do is meet our own needs as purely and kindly as possible. We choose to sit with our loss, yet again, and mourn it by honoring ourselves and self-soothing with conscious holding. We learn to love ourselves in a way that nobody has ever been able to first love us.
Bit By Bit, Day By Day
We have to put in the time to do what we want to do, to become who we believe we really are. Only a little bit—or a lotta bit—every single day, of exercising and honing our chosen craft will lead to mastery—upwards of 10,000 hours to be a professional. Procrastination is a result of waiting for inspiration to strike and usually has to do with feeling unworthy or fearing failure.
Inspiration Will Follow
Set up the easel. Clean your brushes. Mix some colors you feel drawn to. Slip into your tap shoes, click around, and feel your body start to move. Lace up your trainers, walk outside, and start with a jog—or simply take a nice long walk that day. Stop being so precious with your ideas, and thinking they have to be perfect before you start. That’s the sure way to never practice.
Outdated Identity, or True Desire?
Were you always told you were good with words, so you should be a writer? Did you come from a family of lawyers and feel pressured to become one, too? Just as we sometimes fall out of love in relationships because they no longer see us and hear us, we also may fall out of love with our fields. You may be growing in ways that require more depth in your work, more exploration, more creativity. Boredom is a symptom, not a cause. Get curious.
Find Your Balance Between Work, Love and Play
Every part of your life needs attention and space. Honor your different parts, feeding each of them day by day, and notice how in taking full responsibility for your own happiness you will see how you have the agency and room to grow in every part of your life.
The Fear of Fear Itself
Painting by Rachel Lind
So often, we are afraid that we are going to be afraid later. That’s called anxiety—the worry that something that hasn’t happened yet will come to pass and be something we won’t be able to handle. Anxiety has this funny way of convincing us that we might have control over something if we only work a little harder, worrying and overthinking every little thing we said and did, and planning what we will say or do.
Trust Future You
It’s not productive to stay busy worrying. Be here now, said the late Ram Dass. What are you avoiding in the present that you want to distract yourself from by worrying about the future? Or stewing over the past? It can be little more than a hobby to fret, and burns up a lot of energy that you could use to invest in now by being with what is happening.
Accept Former You
You did that dumb, mean, or selfish thing, back then, because it made sense to you, somehow. That’s where you were at in your journey at that time. Let it go. And if it keeps coming back, name the underlying feeling (I said something awful because I was afraid of abandonment or rejection) and then give yourself permission to move on.
How Feeling Good Can Feel So Wrong
Silver Falls, OR
When the Going Gets Good, Self Care Gets Optional
Why do we feel shame in bringing our accomplishments and good feelings to light? Your higher frequency feelings deserve consideration in therapy, too, you know. Oftentimes we grew up not being acknowledged enough, or at all, for our personal development, so we feel guilty for taking stock of our joy, as if celebration is superfluous, but sorrow allows for examination and improvement. We were taught that nobody likes a bragger and that we should be stoic and selfless about our accomplishments, but everyone needs a witness because we are social animals.
When Others Have it So Bad
It’s hard to mark our triumphs and we can even feel guilty for them when those around us are in pain. But maybe we have to celebrate the good, to balance out all of the suffering, and if that inspires envy, then so be it. Envy is on the person who has it, and we are only responsible for our own emotions. People will always be dying and being born at the exact same time. One doesn’t cancel out the other.
Maybe We Like Our Pain
It may sound counterintuitive, but we may irrationally fear that our pain might go away forever if we look at the good side of living. It’s like that familiar soreness of a splinter or a blemish or a sore muscle that you feel drawn to finger and press on, to remind yourself of the pain of being alive, pushing on that old memory of working on a baby tooth before it could be pulled. All feelings mean that we are alive and they will be with us our whole lives.
Therapy Buzzkill
Or what if we take a look at that sweet-sweet good side of living, and pain creeps back up and spoils our joy because our lover or friend or therapist just loves to explore the crack in the facade of something that sounds too good to be true? We just want to ride our high for a while! We are reminded that living is all things, good and bad, all of the time. Integration is the key for healthy living: holding all of our feelings at once, being able to tolerate feelings shifting, and the hope of therapy is that doing this in the presence of another helps to heal those past times that only allowed for one feeling at a time.
Your Art Will Evolve
There is a common misconception that self acceptance might render obsolete the need for creativity and spoil our art or our need to make it, but the exact opposite is true. Sitting with yourself, allowing your suffering and accepting all of the parts of you at once opens you up to be even more courageous, to use your suffering as a source of inspiration and expands your wellspring of art to include all of you. It’s in sharing the specificity of one’s experience that renders the universal and creates highest art.
Fear and Loathing Will Come and Go
Even if you feel good now, your world will crash down around you again. Try not to fear pain of any kind, just know that it will come again, and have the faith in yourself that you will be strong enough to sit with it. Every human is equipped and capable of tolerating and adapting to whatever happens.
Whatever You Do, Don’t Sweep Your Feelings Under the Rug
Emotion will ripple through you and keep going if you only allow it. If you don’t acknowledge and accept an uncomfortable emotion, it will stick around and make you miserable even as you try to fight it. If you push a feeling down and sweep it under the rug, you will keep tripping over the hump of denial, which will eventually grow into something too big to ignore.
Try Not To Should On Yourself
When you zoom out, we’re all samey.
What Is Envy, Really?
Envy is that uncomfortable prickly sensation that seems to bristle up out of nowhere, usually a short time after observing someone else’s prize or achievement, and registering the sense that you should somehow have what they have. A wise supervisor once advised me: Try not to should on yourself.
You’re going about your day, totally content, until you notice that Bridget, who traveled to Iceland just before the pandemic, is reposting her photos on Instagram and reliving that tired old glory that earned her so many likes. Yes, the ice caves and the northern lights and the solitude were and still are all very magical, and she’s become a real photog over the years, but Iceland is so ten years ago! You get to thinking how you need to travel again, and although Mexico City is still fresh with good art and you’d like to go back, it’s also raging with the virus. But Portugal would be new to you, even if the early appropriators are already over it, and you heard you could get citizenship after having a residence there for five years. You think yes, Portugal is the place to be! Firmly, definitively, and almost inexplicably, you decide to move there this summer.
Morbid Curiosity Or Genuine Concern?
Half out of spite and half out of curiosity, you DM Bridget to catch up—you haven’t directly spoken with her since before Iceland—but it’s really only to fish about her romantic status and see if she’s still with the same guy with whom, you assume, she must have gone on such an adventurous, scenic, iconic trip. Meanwhile, you plan your extended Airbnb in Portugal for your midsummer break, after you delight in how dirt cheap the flights are now—even though you had resolved in January to be above taking a vacation this summer because it would be wasteful and selfish during a worldwide pandemic.
Swallowing Envy
If we somehow manage to not manifest our envy into some kind of actionable purchase, we might instead just go on the attack inward, and get twisted and pulled into a knotty, rotten mood for our partner or coworker to steer around and avoid. Not one person hasn’t suffered from irritability roused by envy, at one time or another. Wanting what someone else has is unflattering and slightly tantrum-throwing at its more basic level, and defiling and closet-ragey in a more heightened state—often teeming with hostility, unassuageable bitterness, and express anger that can easily tumble into blind rage, resulting in acts of violence.
Liking Your Assumptions
This kind of emotional spinout could result from simply liking a repost of an old college bestie’s trip that she had taken with her mom before the treatments—who is now in remission—you learn through Bridget’s expressive and generous DM back to you. She had not taken a romantic trip with her boyfriend, after all, which you had assumed, the first time you had liked her post. Bridget confesses that she knows old reposts are so boring but she had only hoped to revisit and share a little natural wonder during a time of collective separation and grief. Your college friend’s repost was her own unconscious celebration of her mother’s healing and survival, and somehow inspired you to move to Portugal in a pandemic. You don’t bring up Portugal with Bridget.
The Fear Of Being Unworthy
Why do we unleash our bad feelings about what others do have—and what we don’t have—by going on some kind of materialistic scavenger hunt, or self-attack for not being somehow more of what we should be? We hop online and window shop for things we can’t afford to charge, gadgets and upgrades we feel should make us happier, younger, fresher, more beautiful, and our actionable purchases do in the short term successfully give us that dopamine rush, but if our inspiration was negative to start, what is our net gain? We can usually intellectually grasp that others with more means have either worked for it, or are privileged by some sort of royal happenstance, and yet we still want to keep up with the richy Joneses, rather than measuring ourselves against an internal arc of self betterment, which is difficult to quantify and nearly impossible to capture in selfies.
What Makes Us So Angry About Our Status?
The question to come back to, every time you find yourself wanting to figuratively tear the face off of your neighbor for having something you want or could somehow better use, is to try to softly unpack, non-judgmentally, what it is that you might be angry about? What are you not prioritizing? How are you forgetting to see your own needs or failing meet them, and why are you instead opting to get grabby, like an overgrown toddler? And why, pray tell, has your whole life and Instagram feed become nothing but chopped liver?
Smile, Don’t Smile
Social media is a breeding ground for envy, we all know. We proudly curate and present our good taste, funny faces, inspiring journeys, political crusades, and tangible measures of self worth—all on display to be adored or ignored. Look confident or else you are pathetic or boring. If you only look and don’t post, then you are the pejorative lurker, and that’s not playing fairly. Don’t be too earnest.
New TikTok Challenge: Show Me You’re Suffering Without Saying You’re Suffering
Rare is the post of depletion, depression, anger, grief, lack, or stasis, although you’ll notice how people do reach out and help pick up those courageous individuals who pay tribute to their dying—they are offered a hand just as surely as someone who has face-planted in a mosh pit. Loss is the one green light to share in suffering, and we’re fortunate on social media in this one important way, as well as in sounding any siren for social justice. Connecting on social media is not all bad, even if we sometimes have to believe that to convince ourselves to disconnect.
We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful
Were we raised to mentally attack the happiness of others? Is it unresolved sibling rivalry—latent for only children—that summons the not-cute but competitive, pouting, unlikable brat in us, who wants to throw a fit for not getting the ice cream cone? Why can’t we be happy with what we do have, and why is our kind of having not good enough? There are no easy answers, just endless difficult questions.
Envy Killed Abel
Abel was able, and was favorited by the bearded man upstairs, and that bothered Cain so much that he canceled Abel, for good, out of envy, in the first cold blooded biblical murder of all time. The medieval everlasting punishment for the deadly sin of envy, in case you’re wondering, was to be put in eternal freezing water. A person suffering envy already feels iced out, and punishment for giving in to envy was an eternal helping of more of the same.
Drop The Attitude and Get With The Gratitude
The same healing salve that soothes all uncomfortable feelings works on envy, too. Count your blessings that have hatched, as well as those of others. Be happy and proud of the gains and accomplishments of others, or at least strive for indifference, especially for those you love. Let someone else shine for a change. It’s not personal! Nobody you envy is doing anything to you, they are doing something for them. Aim for neutrality if you can’t bring yourself to be appreciative of someone else’s attempt to share. You have to wonder, though, if you you can’t ever be happy for someone else, could you ever be happy for yourself?
A Gentle Reminder
This is a groundhog.
You Are Worthy Of Love
Are you waiting to become good enough to finally put yourself first? Do you really think that somehow someday you will actually perfect yourself in a way that will finally make you worthy of loving yourself? You can only accept as much love as you are capable of giving yourself.
You’ll Always Be Becoming
Switching the metaphor now from an adorable rodent—that captivates us by measuring the speed of the impending arrival of spring—to a tree, which will wake up and blossom however soon spring does decide to return: your whole life you will keep growing, until you die. Like a tree.
Rising To The Occasion
We all know that trees are beautiful because they grow around their challenges. Don’t wait to love yourself only after you finally become successful because—guess what? You’ll always be becoming and growing around, through, and over your challenges, like a tree. Like a rodent. Like any organic being that is alive.
You’re Born Whole
As soon as you pass the test, get the promotion, buy the house, build the family—wherever you go, there you will find yourself, and there you will still be. You’re already a whole person now, just as you are, and all you need to do is get to know yourself and your complicated, emotional ins and outs, imprinted into you by your DNA’s responses to your specific experiences. Accept yourself and meet yourself with love, because—why not?
Love Failure-You
Learn to love that part of you that has the courage—the you who tries the things and makes the mistakes—and trust the you that is trying to do better, and just hope to fail better. (The whole of Beckett’s famous snippet gets a little dark and sad, although beautiful, so for now let’s just leave it at those two brilliant coopted inspirational words.)
Let Go Of Your Guilt For Having Feelings
Philip Bromberg theorized that we all have different self states, which means that different parts of us respond differently to emotional stimuli, carrying us from one mood or attitude into another, outside of our control. Acknowledging your emotions and changing moods gives credence to each place you have been relationally before. Everything we experience in life is measured and reflected against how we originally learned to relate. Our experiences pile up and we react in a series of sort of emotional habits. We can’t help or prevent this flow of emotional reaction to our stimuli, but we can observe and allow.
It’s Time To Become Your Own Parent
Some of us were taught by experience to push down feelings and/or to become numb, and so we learned to turn against ourselves. Learning to look at feelings and be with them is an act of love toward ourselves—one that our own loved ones may have been incapable of showing, for whatever reason that wasn’t personal. We must give ourselves that attention now—as little or as great as we were failed as children. Nobody else can give us doting attention in a way that will ever satisfy us, even though we keep expecting it to come from the outside world. Chances are, if we do get any sort of lavish attention it may feel clingy, and we may push it away, like the cat that comes to you for affection but becomes overwhelmed at the reality of being pet, and bites you, hard.
So Many Feelings About So Many Things
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, really sit with yourself and look at the moving parts of the feelings. Likely, if your emotions have piled up to the point of overwhelm, there are many different feelings that you need to process, one by one, with different gradients of emotions attached, probably alternating sadness and anger. Allowing yourself to have your feelings to get through them, and acknowledging them, and attempting to release the guilt for having them is a good way of beginning to really see yourself as you need to be seen, on precisely your own terms, in a way that will truly satisfy you, and not cause you to bite the hand that tries to comfort you, but sees that only as extra.
Disappointment Is Inevitable
We begin to learn too early in life, usually on the playground, that people will tragically fail us, betray us, abandon us. As you go through life, and others are too busy for you when you need attention, you can always be there for yourself. Come back to the breath and feel out what you need. Be what you need first, always, before you offer yourself up to others. Put the oxygen mask on you first and then help your child, your neighbor, your bully-enemy.
Self Contempt May Be Internalized In Response To Your Environment
Self contempt is not innate. When we hate ourselves it’s so often, if not always, because somewhere along the line we learned that hating inwardly was preferable to expressing our anger outwardly to others around us. The habit of beating oneself up usually takes hold early on, when we blame ourselves instead of our loved ones for things we feel they must think are bad about us (otherwise why would loved ones treat us this way?). Kids can’t blame the people in charge for many varying reasons, so they blame themselves. This is so commonly what eventually draws people into therapy to unpack. Children of any age may not recognize or even be aware that they actually do blame themselves for their parents’ divorce—because they internalized the blame and unconsciously hate the self, as a kind of scapegoat martyr—in order to let the ones they love off the hook. We learn to hate ourselves and wear the blame in hopes that it will somehow free others up to love us. But that doesn’t work that way. Self-haters risk being little black holes that suck up the light of love in any relationship.
We Can’t Love In Order To Be Loved
That’s not love, but pressure to be loved back. David R. Hawkins calls that kind of pressure emotional blackmail. Love yourself, and the love will beget other love, and suddenly you will attract love. (This is all so very woo-woo, and also true. Spoiler alert: I’m no theoretical purist and I like me a little woo-woo.)
Let Go Of All Of The Blame Everywhere
What if nothing is ever personal? What if every single crime against anyone or anything is a result of what’s mixed up or short-circuited only in the offending party? If nothing is personal, then we don’t have to react defensively because we’re not in the wrong. If we make a mistake, it’s just a mistake. We don’t have to flog ourselves on top of the mistake, and wallow in the woe of guilt, which Hawkins saw as self-indulgent. We don’t have to flog others for their mistakes. We’re all just rodents and trees, trying to be.
Will You Be Having A Side Of Shame Or Guilt With That Today?
There is a notable difference between shame and guilt, which has to do with the source of the emotion. Shame is an experience of feeling somehow bad, according to an external set of values and our perceived judgment by others. Guilt is what we feel for going against our internal grain, our conscience, our superego—the executive branch of our sense of self and identity—and doing the thing we feel on some level is wrong.
Similar But Different
It’s helpful to identify the difference between these two feelings and to spell that out when we’re sitting in our emotions, on a bad day, attempting to get through them. Sometimes we may be ashamed for something we have actually made up, what we imagine others are thinking, as opposed to how we are in reality perceived. We could possibly even be caught up in our own fantasy—being too in our heads—which has a lot less to do with fact than we might imagine. We could be wrong about our assumptions or perceptions, yet have a whole story plotted out with villains and victims. Shame is what cancels our societal pariahs. You’re probably not a pariah.
Maybe You’re The 2.0 Upgrade To An Obsolete Value System
If it’s guilt that you’re experiencing, there is always a chance that such a pang may radiate from a set of values internalized from an early relational source, potentially an outdated value system. Maybe you don’t actually need to feel guilty for splurging on something your mom would never let herself buy, but you knew she always wanted: fresh cut flowers. Maybe they could only be gifted to her because her own mother had survived the Great Depression and her DNA also got stamped with a peculiar taste for raw onion sandwiches. Somehow you know you don’t have to eat onion sandwiches, so why can’t you also just enjoy the hydrangeas that you bought at a fancy bodega, being the independent hardworking adult that you are, without feeling frivolous and wasteful?
Identifying the source of that gnawing sensation in the gut gives us a chance to own whether we want to buy into that feeling or not. Whether you do or you don’t—and sometimes the stakes are of course much greater than the frivolity of flowers—naming the uninvited feeling and looking at its source helps the emotion to process and move along on its merry way. Which is what we want. Byeee.
Our undesirable emotions are trying to get us to see something we would rather ignore. It’s always a good thing to feel because that means we are alive, and when what we experience registers as discomfort, that’s a helpful reminder that we need to point the camera inward to see what’s going on—in here—instead of what we may or may not have done—out there. Sometimes we feel shame or guilt for useful reasons and it’s time to own up to ourselves.
Nursing The Feels
Sourdough was huge early on in the pandemic, and it was cool to scope out the very best starter. We all self-medicated our suffering by eating our feelings and gaining our quarantine fifteen. This indulgence gave us the sense of having some control over our mass-isolated, social-justice grieving, politically tumultuous, zombie apocalypse virus situation.
In our process of self soothing through hard times, sometimes we overeat or indulge in some other way in order to avoid confronting what it is that we would rather not feel, by self-medicating on our own terms. When we experience unbearable shame or guilt and we then find ourselves set out to eat fast food or a whole pint of ice cream until we could burst, now we can feel bad about something that was in our control.
The connection to make here is that we unconsciously seem to prefer to blame ourselves for something we set up because it’s somehow more tolerable than processing what bothered us in the first place, which is now out of our control to change.
The problem with such emotional displacement is that those original undesirable emotions will push back up later, if we don’t take the time to acknowledge and deal with our feelings. This explains how we may still occasionally feel embarrassed about that one heinous thing we did back in seventh grade, and we can still find a way to blush about it and wince and writhe in our delayed mortification every time it comes to mind.
Don’t Take Yourself So Seriously
The upshot to such embarrassment, in general, and a way you can let yourself off the hook and process and allow that old memory to rest for good, is that people are always paying a lot less attention to your mistakes than you think they are. Others don’t care about your gaffes because they are too busy worrying about their own. We are all just bumbling along through life, and we need to stop taking ourselves quite so seriously. It’s probably somehow pretty funny, anyway, whatever happened to you in seventh grade, when you really stop and think about it.
The Sun Also Rises
Just when it seems like winter should be over, it only just begins. We stuff ourselves through the holidays, and feeling good and fattened up now spring should conveniently arrive so we can work off our gluttony, right?
We’ve Only Just Begun
Especially during a pandemic, it can be hard to muster the gumption to regularly get outside when you fear for your life or for that of your loved ones. But there is something magical and life altering about bundling up with your mask and going outdoors to receive fresh air on your face. Oh, how outside differs from inside: the light changes, the sounds, the smells, the breeze!
Light Therapy Really Is A Thing
If you’re prone to seasonal affective disorder (SAD), you already know it because of how you feel mood-wise on average in the winter months. Our circadian rhythms can really get all out of whack when we are cooped up indoors for months on end.
If you can get outside even long enough to safely walk around the block during daylight hours it will have an effect on your ability to concentrate and later sleep after you go back indoors. Don’t forget your mask, and bring an extra one just in case the elastic loop breaks so you’re not stressing during your adventure.
You’ll Thank Yourself Next Year
If you can afford to invest in a light therapy lamp, which you can find for well under $100 with a quick Google search, basking in those sweet-sweet rays for ten to fifteen minutes in the morning before or after you roll out of bed to enjoy your morning routine will put a pep in your step, even if you’re working from home. You can time some of them to actually wake you up in the morning, and UV-free ones work just fine for light therapy. Read customer reviews and carefully weigh features and options.
Slow Down
Lucy knows.
Stop what you’re doing—wherever you are—and take a minute to feel yourself breathe in and out, for six seconds, each, holding at the top and bottom of each breath for six more seconds. Better yet, if you can spare the time (you can) take ten minutes and close your eyes. After ten minutes of noticing the miracle of your breath, you will come out the other side a little different. I promise.
Eyes On The Gratitude—Not The Prize
I’m sorry to have to break it to you, and on some level you already know this, but there is no finish line to life. There is no prize waiting for you at the end, once you’ve done life the best. There is only what comes after you die, whatever you may believe.
The joy in living is found in the journey, which will be full of both ups and downs. This is why successful people aren’t necessarily happy. Life has no guarantees except for loss. Better to lay off on expectations and outcomes that you can’t control and remember to—ritualistically—appreciate what you do have. Make a list in your head before you go to sleep each night. Meditate, write in your journal, pray, do a jig. Hug someone close, or simply hold yourself by putting your hand over your heart.
Notice The Architecture And Get Curious
The unexamined life amounts to little more than a series of habits and reactions. If you take the time to look inward and acknowledge your feelings, they will tell you something about yourself and your experience, and if you give them the attention they need, they will also pass.
If you push your feelings down, they will pop up somewhere else in your life in the form of a symptom. That’s not to say that once suffering passes it won’t show up again, but the immediacy and intensity of your emotions does become more bearable if you can learn to accept yourself however you show up and process your feelings without judging them.
Witness And Breathe
When you breathe in and out richly, slowly and deeply, this has profound effect on the amygdala, your “reptile brain,” which doesn’t have any concept of logic or time, but regulates fear-related processes including anger and anxiety. Breathing in and out slowly and intentionally affects your emotional processing by acting almost like a hard reboot on a clunky old PC to your frazzled central nervous system. Slowing down tells your amygdala it’s okay to chill.
Notice the undesirable emotion, name it specifically, sit with it, and breathe. If you allow your feelings and befriend them by learning to breathe through them—since you can’t control them anyway—it will get easier. Because science.
The Gaze Of Unconditional Love
Albert. Such a good boy. RIP, old friend.
Photo by Matthew J. Walker
Every physical attachment in life is temporary, including the ones to each and every one of our loved ones. But love outlasts even death, and will live on with us, as long as we are alive to feel it. The irrational fear in grief is that we will somehow forget, but love is never forgotten. Love never dies.
Honor Your Grief
Grief takes on many forms and can be ambiguous, recurring, sudden, or long and drawn out. Grief can feel like anxiety or depression. There is no timeline to mourning or any predictable succession to grief—the stages can appear out of order, or all at once. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you it’s time to move on. Be with this sacred process—breathe through it, and honor it.
In therapy, we grieve our childhoods for what we didn’t get but we needed, and if we don’t, we will continue to unconsciously repeat our patterns in effort to master the wrongs. We grieve our past choices and regrets, but the past is what led us to where we are now, so we should honor our mistakes, too, and whatever pain brought us to the present.
Loss in life is certain because life isn’t fair, and we must honor ourselves every time it shows up. The grief of 2020 will not be forgotten in our lifetimes. The grief of our nation, our world, our humanity.
Love Is Stronger Than Death
But maybe, just maybe, the love that lives on with each one of us, beyond all of this collective loss, can offer the cumulative strength to begin to heal and rebuild our injured world with expanded awareness and perspective.
Hurt People Hurt People
So many of us unconsciously seek out early developmental healing from childhood wounds through our adult love relationships, but that doesn’t work because it isn’t possible to parent adult partners.
Children—Only—May Be Parented
We have to put in the work, ourselves, to identify and learn how to meet our own needs in order to become fully autonomous and develop a solid sense of self.
Being autonomous doesn't mean being alone—people need people—but it does mean feeling complete and capable of handling whatever upset inevitably comes your way, and having the self sufficient capacity to look inward, acknowledge and respect your emotions and value your subjective experience as complete unto yourself as your own authority.
Children May also Be Parentified
When we are not seen as children and instead we are busy taking care of our parents emotionally in order to ensure a roof over our heads, this makes us indispensable to them, but our needs may go unmet, sometimes so painfully so that we are cut off from our feelings and we may not even realize that we have any needs at all. We may instead feel superhuman and nonemotional and jump to offer to carry the load for others, even at our own expense, even as our needs go unmet.
Or we receive the message, loud and clear, that we are too sensitive in reaction to our chaotic environment, and we push down our emotions because for some reason others don’t seem very interested in our kind of suffering. But just like we can’t control our thoughts, we can’t control our feelings, and the only way truly through them is acceptance. We must however be in total charge of our actions as adults and take full responsibility for them.
There Is No Such Thing As ‘Too Sensitive’
We talk about childhood in therapy because those early relational patterns set the blueprint for how we will interact in our love relationships as adults. We examine how our needs were not met, not in order to place blame, but to see what went awry and what may be trying to master in adulthood in our current relationships by trying to fix now what got derailed then, even if it’s all a projection. Therapy helps to weed out projection from lived experience in effort to help us become entirely responsible for ourselves.
Our Parents Were Failed Too
No matter how rosy our early memories may be, every single person is somehow let down in childhood—some much more tragically so than others—and all we can shoot for is good-enough parenting. Even with the best of efforts, accidents, mistakes and traumas happen. Life throws us curveballs that—if we choose to let them—really can make us stronger. We can work to overcome limitations that are not our fault by refraining from placing blame and pointing fingers, and by meeting our own needs and becoming self sufficient.