Bypassing a Challenging Feelings Makes it SO Much Harder to Change
If you’re White or White-passing and you’re starting to do the work of becoming anti-racist, you may feel a sense of urgency to change your thoughts 💭.
This is an attempt to create different feelings without really sitting with the painful 😖 truth.
It’s called emotional bypassing ⏭️.
And that simply doesn’t work and will keep you stuck in the same old thoughts, no matter how much you try to not think them 😣, to push them away, to ignore them.
And I get how tempting it is to want to leapfrog 🐸 over feeling the feels, because sitting with the fact that you have implicit bias is painful.
And brains 🧠 are built to attempt to avoid pain, to avoid change, aka maintain biological efficiency.
So let’s take a big deep breath 🌬️.
Deep breath in and out.
You get to recognize 👀 that urgency in you and feel into what those thoughts are creating within you.
Look at it, really raise that mirror in front of yourself.
And a big part of doing that work is to get right with your guilt 😬 and your shame 😔.
Those feelings will stop 🛑 you from stepping into acceptance and action 💪.
Those feelings will just keep you spinning 🌀 and ruminating and not moving forward to be of service.
Self-compassion is vital here.
Feel into the difference between being cruel 🤬 to yourself for having the thoughts you have, those old cassette tapes📼 in your head 🧠, and recognize that someone else wrote those scripts 📝.
And you can meet those feelings and thoughts with radical self-compassion and self-love 💓.
Feel into how different that feels.
From that latter place of giving love to your younger self 🧒 who heard 👂 these tapes on repeat, you can start to shift and change in ways you can’t from beating yourself up.
Move through it with love ♥️ so you can be of service.
The time is now.
Victoria Albina
Victoria Albina, NP, MPH is a licensed and board certified Family Nurse Practitioner, herbalist and life coach, with 20 years experience in health and wellness. She trained at the University of California, San Francisco, and holds a Masters in Public Health from Boston University and a bachelors from Oberlin College. She comes to this work having been a patient herself, and having healed from a lifetime of IBS, GERD, SIBO, fatigue, depression and anxiety.
She is passionate about her work, and loves supporting patients in a truly holistic way - body, mind, heart and spirit. A native of Mar del Plata, Argentina, she grew up in the great state of Rhode Island, and lives in NYC with her partner. A brown dog named Frankie Bacon has her heart, and she lives for steak and a good dark chocolate.
