It's not scary to feel hate even once for your loved one It's scary to not allow yourself to feel anything towards him except for love.
Feelings are always about now, and not about character. If you are feeling angry, it does not say anything about the kind of person you are but it might say a lot about what is going on. Perhaps, someone is breaking into your personal boundaries or denigrating something dear to your heart. Or maybe you feel overworked and your body has switched into red-alert mode, perceiving everything within your sight as a threat.
The same goes for fear. If you're afraid, it doesn't mean that you're a coward. Your feelings just overrule your thought process and you feel threatened before you can explain what is going on. There is a good saying for it: if something feels wrong, then it probably is.
If you're hungry, exhausted, or tired, don't expect Buddha-like calmness from yourself when you come across mess that your children have made. Your anger won't be proof of your bad character, it will only be a signal that right now you are at a low point.
Whenever we burden other people with hopes they cannot live up to, we face a conflict of expectations. A newborn has no idea that mommy needs some sleep. A husband cannot read his wife's mind and therefore cannot possibly know what she is keeping silent about. It is pointless to expect support and sympathy from a friend who is known for being critical. They all do what they do, not out of spite, but because they do not know better. It is not that they are bad, it just shows that something is wrong with our expectations (I would like to highlight that: expectations, not us).
Now, it is quite different when you are being told how exactly you should feel, or when you are judged for your reaction to something. How can you be happy to quit a job? You are supposed to feel worried like all normal people do!
I remember feeling a vivid rage, not grief as everyone expected (grief was present, but only as a backdrop) when my first husband and I started divorce proceedings. I don't think I would have felt that way had we just had different characters, or had our love vanished into thin air with the passing of time. I was enraged because I felt helpless watching something I treasured and had invested my time, efforts, and money into, methodically and inevitably collapse before my eyes.
However, I am absolutely adamant not to feel something just because it is deemed an inappropriate or unwanted feeling. ( I love you. Thank you. Well, that wasn't exactly the answer I was hoping for Thank you very much?).[6]
You are saying I am hurt, and someone tells you Not, you're not.
You are not hurt. You are not afraid. You are not feeling bad. You are not tired. It is all just your imagination, pull yourself together, get up. And you do pull yourself together once, twice, three times, four, five, eighteen times, forty-three. And that's when you start noticing how stoic and strong you've become, thick-skinned, almost armor-plated. And where something living and warm previously was, a cold emptiness now forms.
And one day, you wind up hearing yourself saying to someone else: you're not hurt; you are not afraid. You neither believe nor measure anything against yourself; the benchmarks are low, and the lack of faith paltry, but that other person who approached you with their woes is left sad and lonely and burdened.
I dislike it when someone asks What happened, and when they hear the answer, they ask: Why are you so upset? It's not worth it! Well, first of all, every person has a right to feel how they would like to feel towards what happened, simply because he or she knows best what can ease their pain. Secondly, that kind of response casts doubt on the person's ability to react appropriately to events, degrading them from a position of an adult with their own formed values system to the position of a child whose experiences are not enough to adequately judge what is going on. Thirdly, no one has a right to say chill out until they have walked in the other person's shoes. Only someone who has experienced a loss knows how hard it is to endure that. People do not grieve for fun.
It was Melody Beattie who wrote in her famous book on co-dependence Codependent No More: Stop abandoning ourselves, our needs, our wants, our feelings, our lives, and everything that comprises us. Make a commitment to always be there for ourselves. We can trust ourselves. We can handle and cope with the events, problems, and feelings life throws our way. We can trust our feelings and our judgments. We can solve our problems. We can learn to live with our unsolved problems, too. We must trust the people we are learning to depend upon ourselves.[7]
Quiet emotions
Sometimes emotional detachment is not a sign of exhaustion or a conscious suppression of feelings, but rather an individual, inner characteristic. You shouldn't blame yourself for not being emotional and shouldn't try to force yourself to experience reality in a more vivid way. Quality of emotions does not depend on the way one expresses them and is not measured by how high you jump for joy or how many gallons of tears you shed.
It is normal to love passionately and madly, it is also normal not to love that way.
Tenderness to yourself means learning to value your own set of tools, instead of being jealous of someone else's. Someone else might have a magnifying-glass that allows him to notice something significant amongst the small things. Another might have an axe that allows him to chop away the unnecessary. A third person might have a tape rule for measuring everything he comes across, and a fourth person might be equipped with ink for blackening up the picture. It is normal if your own toolkit lacks an emotional amplifier. It is not a deficiency, but a peculiarity.
For most of us, it's an extra credit question that allows us to feel negativity without doing anything about it, be it fixing ourselves or feeling ashamed. We're not afraid of feelings per se, but rather the risk of what we might do under their influence badly thought through actions, razor-sharp words that might slip off our tongue. It's scary having to deal with the consequences later: spoiled relationships, lengthy disagreements, and the tattered reputation of a usually calm and friendly person.
Many of us are afraid to feel sexually curious about another person when we're in a stable, monogamous relationship, as if it would be akin to adultery and acknowledge problems in relationships. This is not exactly right. The more often we force ourselves to suppress our spontaneous interest in somebody (don't you dare to look!, don't even dare to admire!, don't you dare to admit you like what you're seeing!), the more likely it is that a long-restrained pressure will cause an explosion and infidelity will happen for real. We could also lose our passion for things in general, including towards our long-term partner. ( Let's go to a bar! No more bars. Let's go fishing! No more fishing. Any regret you got married? No more regrets are allowed.)[8]
There are many decisions and concrete steps between sexual interest and cheating. It's ok to feel sexually aroused if that's all you take home.
One cannot influence the kinds of feelings that are born inside. You cannot force yourself to fall out of love or stop being hurt from betrayal at will. The good news is: you always have powers to cope with any of your feelings.
Not even one feeling can kill you because, if it could, they wouldn't exist in our nature at all.
As Anne Lamott once wrote, But you can't get to any of these truths by sitting in a field smiling beatifically, avoiding your anger and damage and grief. Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth. We don't have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not to go into. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in then we will be able to speak in our own voice and stay in the present moment. And that moment is home.[9]
Run, Breathe, Talk, Repeat
When you experience strong feelings, the most difficult part is remembering to breathe. When you feel adrenaline coursing through your body, you must continue breathing, consciously prevent yourself from freezing, and detach yourself from what is happening. In my experience, muscles remember numbness best, and it requires many hours of body-relaxation practices to soothe away those freezing effects that turn your body into a pillar of salt. (And on this topic, I am truly amazed by the Siberian salamander that lives in permafrost areas. This little, slow-moving newt can lie frozen in a cliff crack for decades (!), and when the sun shines on it again, it unthaws and gets back to its business, as if nothing ever happened. I envy that a bit.)
Damage from emotional freeze can be compared to the damage spring frost causes to young sprouts on a plunge bed. Water in plant cells turns into ice, cellular structures break down and we are left with a limp green mess where just yesterday squash was supposed to be growing. We are doing the same when we freeze the hurt, fears, and pain we have experienced: we are carrying icicles inside of us and cutting ourselves with them.
In The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, sisters Emily and Amelia Nagoski[10] talk about the stress reactions our bodies experience when under threat. A wolf in a forest, getting through flight turbulence, a weirdly behaved stranger on the subway, or a brazen driver cutting us up on the highway our bodies perceive all of these as a threat and immediately start to pump the stress-hormone levels up in order to help us safely get away from such situations.
According to the Nagoski sisters, if you want to be healthier and happier it is absolutely essential to break the stress-reaction cycle, not just in your mind, but by performing active responses. This basically means that telling yourself I was afraid, but it is ok, let's forget about it and move forward is a bad idea. Don't think for a moment that you could calm trembling hands, shivering knees, ringing in the ears, heart pumping like crazy, stomach in knots, high blood pressure, and tunnel-like vision, simply by saying: There, there, buddy, everything is all right now, relax. That time when you were sitting and smiling, and on the inside you were bubbling with rage, or when someone yelled at you and you were afraid to talk back because todo so would have triggered even more aggression, in each instance your body experiences as much stress as it would inside an elevator when the safety cable snaps.
In Nagoski's words, the most efficient way to end a stress-reaction cycle is to perform some physical exercises. It serves as a sort of signal to your body that you have successfully survived a threat and it is safe to be in your body again.[11]
Long before I came across this information, I used intuitively to turn to movements and sport to get rid of tension and get a hold of my anxiety. You are probably doing the same.
I vividly remember long bank-holidays in May when I would be overwhelmed with a horrible identity crisis: it didn't just feel like I was out of it, but like my whole self was melting in the sun and solidifying into an ugly, formless mess. Am I in the right place? With the right people? Where am I heading towards? Why is everything so hard? Tons of questions with zero answers.
While everyone was out enjoying shish-kebab, picnicking outside the city limits, I would be smoking cigarettes, dressed in my pajamas, and writing work documents. I would take work home for the weekend because I didn't know how to stop, nor would I allow myself to stop. I was nearly burned out at my job as editor-in-chief, exhausted by work pressure, loneliness, and the fact that it had been a year and a half since my divorce, and I'd had no luck to speak of with any new relationships.
Apples, chestnuts, and bird-cherry trees would all be blooming dopey-sweet, while I clicked away on my keyboard, trying to fill up my inner emptiness by consuming condensed milk and five-to-six packs of ice cream at a time. Inevitably I gained weight and I hated myself for it. I was eating to make myself even angrier, make my inner conflict even worse, I'd reached a point of no return, turned myself inside out, time to die and be reborn as a new, different person that someone at least will need.
Late at night, when I was already asleep, I received a message from my ex-husband. He'd written to say that his new woman was his personal eighth wonder of the world and that he was in love and oh-my-God-so-happy, you can't even imagine how great it is. My heart skipped two beats, and a tear slowly slid down from my left eye and into my ear.
I realized that even my little self-destruction, pity-, hate-swamp has its boundaries. So, one warm, May night, in the midst of leaf-rustling, wine-drinking, and falling stars, I reached my personal lowest point.
I woke up at 4:30am the next morning, took a piece of paper, and frantically started scribbling my own manifesto. Straight from the shoulder, in the beautiful block letters (almost caps lock) of a straight-A student, I wrote everything I thought of myself, my life, and my perspectives. Nobody is going to solve your problems for you. Nobody is going to come and save you, because is there an end to your miseries at all? Nobody is interested in the vivid range of your depression and when it comes to it, nobody should be interested, goddamn it. So, pick yourself up, put on your running shoes, and run. Run until you drop from tiredness, and when that happens start crawling to your home.
I got up from my bed, put on my running shoes, stroked my cat who was wondering what was going on, and ran off. Huge chafers made love and fell onto the asphalt with a rustling sound. The dawn sky was so clear and blue that it hurt to look at it.
Running became a way to get the blood going and keep evil thoughts at bay. Sometimes I would run to the point of exhaustion to not give myself a chance to start crying. For eight months straight I would put on my old pink jogging pants that had been in my closet since I was a teenager, I'd put my headphones and music on, and set off for a daily marathon along the road.
Примечания
1
Here and further on half-title pages of the book are located poems of Ksenia Zheludova. You can read other poems of this author by following a link: https://vk.com/tovarishzhe.
2
Song Young and beautiful by Lana Del Rey, authors Eliza-beth Grant (Lana Del Rey), Rick Nowels.
3
Louise Hay (19262017) is an American writer, one of the founders of self-help movement. At the very core of her book lies an idea that the root of emotional problems and diseases is in wrongful beliefs about yourself that you can change with the help of affirmations (positive affirmations) and by doing so gain health and happiness.
4
Mihailova E., I am the only one I have, or Vasilisa's hand-spindle page 210
5
Post on Elizabeth Gilbert Facebook account from 16.08.2016 [electronic resource] // URL: https://www.facebook.com/GilbertLiz/posts/dear-onesonce-i-went-to-visit-a-therapistbecause-i-was-afraid-i-might-be-a-soci/1086540191428095/ (date of reference 01.05.2020)