Hello everybody! This is not a post about beauty or anything, but I felt like I had something important to say. I’d like to state that this is all my opinion, and there is no clinical evidence behind what I’ve written.
This post is about emotional pain and devastation (intense, I know.. sorry.). It’s about all the pain and strife that comes with human relationships and the relationship you have with yourself.
Firstly, what many need to understand is that everyone has a core set of values. And when they go into a relationship (any type), they are looking for one or more of these needs to be met. It can be anything from emotional support, to love, to sex, to companionship.
What are you looking for from another person? And once this need hasn’t been met and an emotionally traumatic event ensues, what happens to you? How do you cope? How do you move on and heal? Who are you and who have you become in this relationship? Have you stayed true to yourself? Have you changed for the sake of the relationship or the other person? What values have you compromised that have lead to you to this place? There are a LOT of questions. Some of which we don’t even know how to answer! Sometimes you wake up and think, how the hell did I get here :S
Pain is one of the hardest emotions to feel in life. When that break up first happens, and you’re devastated, you go numb. When you get that piece of bad news, you feel your world spinning around you. You feel the heat rising up in your face, or the coldness in the pit of your stomach. Your brain shuts down and you can’t think straight. Your hands start shaking and all you can think is ‘I cannot believe this is happening to me.’
You find yourself in an awful mental space where there’s a struggle to digest what’s happened. You can’t even begin to process how it’s making you feel.
Processing is an art. It’s a skill. The next step is expression. Express how you feel! Then, you embark upon your journey. Your journey of self-actualization.
But before any of this happen, how do you process and heal from this incident?
First thing’s first, open yourself up. A guy on Youtube from actualised.org talks about being a ‘super conductor’. Your emotions are the current and your mind is the conductor. Without impeding your free flowing thoughts, let them vibrate through you. It’s difficult to recognise what you’re feeling to be honest. It takes a lot of work. But if you can do it, say it to yourself. ‘I feel disgust, anger, betrayal, hurt, impotence, sadness, despair.’ One by one, identify each pang of heat, each sensation of coldness as it ebbs and flows through you.
A lot of the difficulty behind processing what’s happening at first during an emotional devastation, is some don’t recognise that a) something has even happened that affects them because they try to block it off straight away or b) how they feel about it because they don’t like the notion of feeling their feelings. Let me tell you something. It does not make you weak. It does not prolong your pain. It does not hurt you more. It does not make you impotent. IF anything, it does all of the opposite! The empowerment you feel from being able to identify what essentially makes you, you, will make you feel invincible. You will feel at peace with yourself. This state of angst and confusion will dissipate. It will be wonderful, I promise. Not only will you be able to quip back so quickly from a situation, but you will be able to not only move on quickly, but evolve from it very quickly.
The next step is taking time. Distance yourself from the situation as much as you can physically and emotionally. Take the time to adjust and let your mind catch up with the incident. Then you need sleep. Your brain needs time to heal from the incident, don’t you think? Once you wake up you can feel anything. Worse, happy, exhilarated, forget it even happened. Your brain will have reset, and you will have a fresh palette to continue to process how you feel, and heal.
They say time heals all wounds for a reason. Your brain and your body are massive organs, and they need to heal as well! Invisible scars and damage need assistance on a cellular level to repair. Just like when you get a wrinkle or a bruise, you put creams and oils and ice and everything you can think of under the sun to heal and make it go away. Just because you can’t see emotional damage doesn’t mean it doesn’t need the same reparation and attention. Unfortunately, this is all very taboo isn’t it. There are books and courses and programs and everything you can imagine on healing physical wounds – massage, physiotherapists, chiropractors, chiropodists. There are algorithms online accessible to anyone who wants to treat a strain or a sprain using the RICE (rest, ice, compression, elevation) anagram, for example – almost guaranteed to work every time as it is clinically researched and evidence based.
There isn’t much similar available for emotional health. It isn’t given the importance that it deserves.
Only now is society and education starting to not even understand, but realise, that your emotional health plays a big part on your quality of life. It isn’t taught in school from a young age, and ‘mindfulness’ isn’t written on a prescription by a doctor. Emotional wellbeing has an impact on your career performance, on your health/disease state, your happiness, the success and healthiness of all of your business and personal relationships, your ability to succeed personally and professionally, as well as your resilience.
During a time of constant mindless consumption – the internet, Netflix, video games, substance abuse; almost every method is available to help you do anything BUT face your feelings. Please, society says, please! Here’s a new way to ignore how you feel, so you can get on with your life so you can wake up and go to work tomorrow morning without disturbing or impacting business. A way to blunt the pain, ignore the sensation as it’s happening so that you can undermine the impact whatever is happening on you.
This is not healthy, it is not intelligent and is a crutch. If we don’t learn how to deal with our emotions and confront our pain it will take so long to heal, and maybe never heal at all. You end up getting stuck in this consistent cycle of pain – of choosing to form relationships with the wrong people, of making unhealthy life choices for ourselves and others. Not being able to move past the pain, and jumping into the next relationship to dull the impact of the previous one. And the list goes on. Then things like chronic depression, alcoholism, suicide, alzheimers, parkinson’s, MS – all these debilitating neurological diseases develop as a result of the stress and emotional trauma. Obviously some of this you’re predisposed to and it can even be genetic – but I firmly believe that a lot of it can be avoided.
I know this is turning into more of a rant than anything and I don’t expect anyone to read this but I feel like it has to be said.
Albert Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Having said all of this, it is incredibly difficult to put into practice. If you aren’t surrounded by like-minded positive people it’s very hard to implement. And all these blogs and videos etc. have the people saying: cut out the damaged, negative and toxic people and surround yourself by positive people! Um, hello? That is completely impractical. Everyone has a multitude of sides to them! Your own parents can be manipulative and toxic, but at the same time be caring and supportive. You yourself have negative sides to you. Do 100% positive people even exist in this world? I don’t think so. Everyone is fighting a battle. Everyone’s life is difficult, and not everyone has this zen ability to overcome trauma as it’s happening, smile and only see the silver lining immediately. Unless this person is detrimental to your existence completely (i.e. a toxic boyfriend, girlfriend, friend), it is not logical to just cut them out.
Going within yourself to heal is the answer. Take the time that you need for yourself. Be a super-conductor. Feel your feelings! And if you don’t know what the feelings are, get a chart with lots of adjectives and choose them from a list. Write them down. Express yourself. If you don’t have friends or family who will understand, speak to your pets. Speak to a mirror, Write a journal. Film a video on your laptop (then delete it lol) if you want. You need to get it out. I know you will feel lonely. When you’ve been hurt and damaged, the last thing you want to do is go within yourself and experience a world of pain by yourself with no outside support. But, the more you do it, the easier it will become. You will learn yourself. You will be able to master the emotions a lot faster as you keep doing it.
No one is perfect though. It is difficult to do this every time. Sometimes you need a feel good movie to siphon off some of the pain. Or to eat a large pizza, or a box (or 5) of chocolate! Do anything to take our minds away from some of the pain in order to cope. A little bit of this is okay. Unfortunately, if you completely resort to this, I feel like it’s an expression of abandonment and maybe even a bit of ‘self-hatred’ against yourself. You are not giving yourself the dignity of valuing how you feel.
How infuriating is it when your boyfriend or girlfriend or mother ignores you when you you have something important to say? When you’re trying to express yourself but you can see that they’ve zoned out and they aren’t listening? Or they’re listening but they don’t HEAR you? You feel humiliated, angry, indignant. Like how could they do this to me?! You’re supposed to love me enough to care about how I feel!
Well, if you think about it, you’re doing the same thing to yourself. You are feeling this whirlwind of shit, and you’re ignoring your own self. It will breed similar feelings within you, and place itself somewhere deep in your brain- and it may manifest unhealthily in other ways in the future. So as painful as it is, just try a little bit. You’ll love and value yourself more. Promise 🙂
The next step is to embark on a journey of self-actualisation. Learn who YOU are! Write it down “I like pizza, I hate how glasses look on my face.” As mundane and ridiculous as it sounds, you will realise things about yourself you probably already knew, but by expressing it and making it reality, you will be more conscious of what you like/dislike and make choices in your life accordingly. And see, how different you will feel about what goes on around you. How much control you will have and the power you will feel over your situations.
The next time that guy dumps you, or your friend says something to upset you, you will be able to pull yourself mentally out of that situation and say, okay. I expected this, I knew that this person had the ability to make me feel this way because I LET THEM. I got myself into this situation knowingly, consciously, and I chose to ignore the red flags. So it’s okay. This was my choice. I am not the victim. So now, I am choosing to exit this situation and move on with my life. Why? Because I value myself. I know my self-worth. I did not spend all this time getting to know me, and falling in love with me, to let you walk all over me and treat me like shit!
I will still need time to heal because of how I feel right now. But I know it will be okay, because I will not let this happen to me again.
And remember, there are people who love you no matter what. And if you feel like there aren’t, I do. You will be okay, you’re an amazing person, and I support you 100%. Always remember, a bad day doesn’t mean you have a bad life, and this too shall pass. Promise.
xoxo
dapperpineapple 