Getting Real About How You Are Feeling
Perfectionist and codependent thought fantasies can lead us to think that if we are feeling terrible, there’s a problem to solve. That drive to try to make everything look perfect can lead us to not acknowledge when things do in fact totally suck, when things are actually not great.
And that drive itself creates so much suffering for us humans as we struggle against reality, versus stepping into acceptance of life as it is. Do you find yourself doing this? Are you surprised to hear me say that some circumstances are just plain garbage?
I talk a lot about how the thought work protocol helps us to see that we always have the option to see any and every circumstance in life as completely neutral. That as humans with an amazing prefrontal cortex, we really do have the capacity to decide how we want to think and feel about anything in the world.
And this fact is profoundly mind-blowing to most folks and it sure was for me at first too because I had this story in my mind, as many of us do, that some things are always terrible. Like being ghosted by a date, getting sick, getting a divorce, losing a job.
And the thought work protocol has helped me to step out of the old narratives I learned about what things obviously mean, which has been so wildly empowering. Because it has taught me and shown me as I apply it to my life each and every day that I get to choose the narrative I want to live in.
I don’t just have to live on default from the narrative I’ve heard my whole life. Totally mind-blowing, right?
You don’t have to think anything is good or bad unless you choose to. You really do get to create your own story.
And through that process, we can decide how we want to live, how we want to experience life, and I love using thought work to feel better about a situation that is out of my control. And that’s one of the most beautiful things we can do, to intentionally make that choice.
I’m not going to assume that I have to feel bad about this. I’m going to choose my own thoughts. Particularly when the circumstance is one you cannot change no matter how much you’d like to.
And it really does work. It’s very efficient and very effective. I really love thought work. And at the same time, it behooves me and it’s really important to me to make note that there are all sorts of things in this world that I personally do not choose to use thought work to feel good about.
Namely, those things are genocide, racism, discrimination, prejudice of any sort, poverty, homelessness, hunger, abuse, assault, the list goes on. But it’s mainly in that same theme of folks in systems of oppression doing other folks wrong.
Sure, I mean, I could do thought work to get to a place of feeling okay about those things, but I’m just not interested because I don’t want to think about those things as anything other than wrong and bad.
So while I do believe that we do have the power to recognize our habitual thoughts in relationship to our circumstances and can consciously choose to get neutral, to see that there’s no inherent good or bad, right or wrong in many – I don’t believe all – but many situations.
And we can therefore see that it’s possible to step out of our conditioned thinking, the thoughts we were taught to think about the situations in our life, about ourselves, our bodies, our minds, our choices.
Applying this as a blanket statement to everything in our lives and doing endless mental gymnastics to try to feel good about something that sucks is just not realistic, honest, loving, or kind to ourselves.
And often, it can be a kind of emotional bypassing where we try to change our thoughts to feel good or okay or even neutral about something before we’ve really recognized or accepted that circumstance as something terrible, or something that just plain sucks.
You can’t skip steps in healing. It just doesn’t work. And before you can change your life, it behooves you to step into acceptance of life, on life’s terms.
My beauty, it’s okay for things to feel lousy, terrible, rotten, to just suck. It’s okay for things to not be easy. It’s okay to attempt to do the thought work, to change your thoughts about a situation, and for the thought work not to work. To not believe the new story.
And we don’t lie to ourselves in this family, my beauty.
We don’t try to force ourselves to believe something that’s not believable.
It’s okay for your body to object to a thought that things are okay when that’s not what’s real for you in this moment. And it’s in trying to force that shift that we create even more suffering for ourselves.
My love, life is 50/50. 50% amazing, joyful, beautiful, wow, and 50% suffering. And you can’t change that through sheer will, by muscling through and trying to change reality by jumping to change your thoughts. I know, I know, you want to.
Trust me, there are times I want to too, but being human means having this balance of emotions and we can’t just avoid the ones we don’t like and expect those feelings to just magically evaporate.
The energy of those feelings, those molecules of emotion will stay in your body if you don’t get real with them and process them through, allow them to process through your body.
If you try to ignore your own shadow or life’s shadow and try to change your thoughts to put your face in the sunshine while Rome is burning around you. That was a bit of a mixed metaphor, but you know, it’s how I do.
And so we try to avoid present and future painful emotions, try to say and do and be the right thing to avoid criticism, try to make the “right” choice, which is always in air quotes because you never actually know how something will turn out until you go for it, take courageous action for your own life and either fail and learn, or have it turn out just as planned. And then live into that new reality and see what that does for your life, which quite frankly at the time of making a decision is completely unknowable.
But the truth is that attempting to manipulate things now to avoid future yuck is just unrealistic. It doesn’t work.
And it makes this moment suck while you’re sitting around worrying about future terribleness. You’re borrowing tomorrow’s potential trouble by worrying about it today.
And while the emotional experience of something being terrible is created by your thoughts about it, not recognizing when something is causing you pain or anguish or distress is just doubling down on the suffering. As individual humans and in different moments of our lives, we may respond differently to different circumstances.
But one thing we have a responsibility to do is to acknowledge the feelings a given circumstance engenders.
And yes, as I’ve said, you can use the thought work protocol to leap to changing those feelings, and sometimes it works. And it’s the right thing for you.
And I’m inviting you to do something important first, to acknowledge and tend to those feelings, even if, perhaps especially if they are hard and feel shitty. You can’t skip that step, my love.
I’m urging us all to give ourselves permission to acknowledge the hard stuff and to get really real with it.
We get to get real with all the suckyness, all the terrible, all the garbage fire of it. And many of us resist this. We resist feeling the depths of this ugh because we want to feel like life is sunshine and rainbows and we give lip service to being here for the struggle of it, but when it comes time to name it and get real with it, we want to jump right on over it.
And I totally get that impulse, but my beauty, you know it doesn’t serve you.
And when you drop your resistance to feeling your feelings, starting with acknowledging the hard things, then the feelings you feel in response are rarely as challenging as that intense resistance to letting yourself feel.
It’s just so much worse when you try to resist reality, when you hold it all in, bottle it all in, and you feel that tension and that armoring and your body pushing against acknowledging that things suck. So okay, things might suck right now, acknowledged, okay. I don’t like this, I want it to be different, but right now it can’t be.
And once you can get to there, then the other door opens to acceptance to the facts. And from there and from feeling your feelings about it, well, it’s just not as terrible as struggling against it, maybe actually being the level of terrible it is. Because when you’re resisting it, you’re actually making it worse on yourself because you’ve got the thing that happened and your own resistance. It’s like wrestling two tigers instead of just sitting with the one tiger you actually get to sit with right now.
And one reason why for many of us is that our perfectionist thought habits tell us that if things suck, we’re a failure, that we have to be able to see the bright side or the lesson or whatever, that we have to find the solution or the fix, or we failed at being a grateful or positive person and that we have to keep up a positive appearance of seamlessly floating right on through it all, unfazed by the everything.
And our codependent thought habits tell us that we need to keep things seemingly copasetic for those around us, lest they doubt our unfailing ability to keep it together and take care of them, to suck it up, buttercup, lest they doubt our ability to manage their feelings for them by acknowledging our own hard times, challenges, and experience of things being terrible.
And as usual, I want to call BS on all of that. Things suck because they do. Things feel terrible sometimes because there are terrible circumstances, and sometimes things feel terrible because our brains have a habitual response to a circumstance without really looking at all sides of it.
What’s true is that things don’t suck because you’re deficient or lacking some capacity to make the unchangeable better.
It is nothing to do with that ever. It’s not that you’re not strong enough or good enough or doing your internal work enough. That’s just not real, my tender love, so put that one down.
Your situation doesn’t have to be dire or dramatic for you to prioritize acknowledging what’s hard, getting real about it and how it impacts you so you can get real about what you’re feeling.
I recommend you allow yourself to really sit with it, to get really real with it, to feel all the feels in your body in a real way so you can metabolize it all and move through it, not push against it by trying to find some lesson while things are still terrible.
And often, I’ve found in my own life when I drop the desire to find the lesson and I acknowledge the terrible, the lesson presents itself, so that’s pretty cool.
Furthermore my beauties, the call here is for you to get into deep awareness, honest awareness around when your circumstances really do suck and those other times when you’re using your circumstances as an excuse to not take radical ownership and responsibility for your life.
Just because shitty shit happens doesn’t mean you can’t overcome it. But it’s also real that our circumstances sometimes just plain suck. And attempting to positivity wash that is just some perfectionist and spiritual bypassing garbage that I am never ever about.
And simultaneously, we get to remember that when bad things happen, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.
It’s not about you as the human that you are. It’s not that you called them in or whatever your brain may be saying. Your worth is in no way connected to the shitty circumstances that may happen, or you’re feeling bad about them.
My darling love, there is no right way to do this being a human thing. You get to see what works for you, what truly honors you and your mind, body, and spirit, and for me, that means getting real with life being 50/50 and honoring the facts of it all, good, bad, and ugly, because that’s just life.
And the more trust you can build in yourself to get honest and real and to accept it all, which is so different from condoning it, you give yourself the opportunity to see and feel that you truly can survive feeling any and all emotion.
None of them are going to eat you whole, and I know it can feel that way.
I know, I know, I know. I have so felt that in my body, the fear of saying something, speaking something, feeling something, and feeling like the world will literally just explode and end around me. And with time and self- love and courage, I’ve done it. I’ve allowed myself to feel the terrible feeling, tell the story of the horrible thing that happened, and I have survived it each and every time.
And my beauty, so can you, truly.
And the good news about feeling the suffering deeply is it means you can feel the joy and the beauty next time it comes around just as deeply.
Thank you for taking the time to read Feminist Wellness. I’m excited to be here and to help you take back your health!
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