Ольга Примаченко – Love yourself tender. A book about self-appreciation and self-care (страница 3)

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.