Express yourself, don't repress yourself
Mar. 13th, 2006 01:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pphaneufSo, you want to smile stupidly all day (heh, funny, this just appeared, LOL!), just like me? Here's the first trick I found.
Repressing your feelings is not good for you.
Feelings are input from your psyche. They tell you where to go, what to do, what's right and what's wrong. It all hinges on being aware of what's happening inside you. How can you fix what's broken if you don't know what's wrong?
Note that the opposite of repressing one's feelings isn't necessarily to express them (despite my humorous subject to this post!), but more simply to accept to feel them, not to block them away. But when "learning to feel", if you will, it helps to express those feelings readily. It helps, but it's not a strict requirement.
Learning to read one's own feelings isn't as easy as you'd think. This might come off as slightly nutty (but hey, try to argue that I'm not crazy!), but I've had coaching in this department. One thing I did, every evening, before going to sleep, was to write down in a paper diary, with a pen, what I felt that day. It's important not to skip, because your subconscious is ridiculously smart, and will "make you" skip on the day where something tricky comes up. LiveJournal users might already be familiar with this, where they write when they feel good (or when they feel bad, depends on the people), and don't really write when they feel the other way. Why use a pen, rather than a pencil? More thwarting of that pesky subconscious, so you can see as much as possible, with as little editing as possible. When reading it, you can find out trickier parts having more mistakes, scribbling and so on, it helps.
I'd read those diaries in entirety, every week, to try to find patterns, and analyse them, but I did find that just writing them out was excellent practice, and helped understanding myself (at a very simple level) a great deal.
One discovery I've made through this was that there seems to be some feelings that you just can't have more of, and that they aren't necessarily good ones. You've seen those people with self-defeating attitudes, maybe you're one of them yourself? I seemed to have an addiction to guilt. I'd put myself in all sorts of situations where I'd end up guilting myself, but I just didn't realize I was doing so.
But it gets better!
After a while, I got to catch myself when I was setting up those situations. Turns out your subconscious is strong enough to prevent you from taking action, even when you are consciously aware that you are doing something wrong! This is a bit like being with someone you like, thinking how you should tell them how you feel, kiss them or something of that nature, but for some reason, you don't, your body just wouldn't fucking listen to you!
Now, that was painful, as I felt like a helpless spectator of my own demise. Turns out also that you can't "un-see" what you've seen (see this presentation, about the classic "you can't un-see the cow"). Let me tell you, that amount of pain gets you real motivated to fix up your broken psyche!
Speaking of pain, it's one of the most common feeling being repressed, and for good reason. It's just plain not fun! Something to be remembered, though: your feelings are trying to tell you something. Even those that seem like they may be negative, like pain or anger, they're trying to tell you something. The best way to shut them up is to listen to what they have to say, find out what's causing them, and doing something about that.
This is one of the reasons why I won't drink alcool while I'm still feeling something strongly. I want to wade through it and let it go through me, to better understand what it is that's fucking with me so badly.
It does seem like it's not every feeling that has a cause like that (love, for example, just seem to come semi-randomly). It's quite unfortunate, but when it all comes down to it, we're still very much biological machines, and there's all sorts of odd chemicals in our brains. Men like big boobs and women like firm butts for pretty straightforward reasons that aren't so aesthetically minded as much as natural-selection minded (larger breasts for nursing offsprings, and firm butts for better thrusting power). Sigh. Still, you've got to work with what you're given, right?
Remember, the goal here isn't to make you a "better person", whatever the fuck that means. Screw that, that's for chumps. It's for you to be happy!
Repressing your feelings is not good for you.
Feelings are input from your psyche. They tell you where to go, what to do, what's right and what's wrong. It all hinges on being aware of what's happening inside you. How can you fix what's broken if you don't know what's wrong?
Note that the opposite of repressing one's feelings isn't necessarily to express them (despite my humorous subject to this post!), but more simply to accept to feel them, not to block them away. But when "learning to feel", if you will, it helps to express those feelings readily. It helps, but it's not a strict requirement.
Learning to read one's own feelings isn't as easy as you'd think. This might come off as slightly nutty (but hey, try to argue that I'm not crazy!), but I've had coaching in this department. One thing I did, every evening, before going to sleep, was to write down in a paper diary, with a pen, what I felt that day. It's important not to skip, because your subconscious is ridiculously smart, and will "make you" skip on the day where something tricky comes up. LiveJournal users might already be familiar with this, where they write when they feel good (or when they feel bad, depends on the people), and don't really write when they feel the other way. Why use a pen, rather than a pencil? More thwarting of that pesky subconscious, so you can see as much as possible, with as little editing as possible. When reading it, you can find out trickier parts having more mistakes, scribbling and so on, it helps.
I'd read those diaries in entirety, every week, to try to find patterns, and analyse them, but I did find that just writing them out was excellent practice, and helped understanding myself (at a very simple level) a great deal.
One discovery I've made through this was that there seems to be some feelings that you just can't have more of, and that they aren't necessarily good ones. You've seen those people with self-defeating attitudes, maybe you're one of them yourself? I seemed to have an addiction to guilt. I'd put myself in all sorts of situations where I'd end up guilting myself, but I just didn't realize I was doing so.
But it gets better!
After a while, I got to catch myself when I was setting up those situations. Turns out your subconscious is strong enough to prevent you from taking action, even when you are consciously aware that you are doing something wrong! This is a bit like being with someone you like, thinking how you should tell them how you feel, kiss them or something of that nature, but for some reason, you don't, your body just wouldn't fucking listen to you!
Now, that was painful, as I felt like a helpless spectator of my own demise. Turns out also that you can't "un-see" what you've seen (see this presentation, about the classic "you can't un-see the cow"). Let me tell you, that amount of pain gets you real motivated to fix up your broken psyche!
Speaking of pain, it's one of the most common feeling being repressed, and for good reason. It's just plain not fun! Something to be remembered, though: your feelings are trying to tell you something. Even those that seem like they may be negative, like pain or anger, they're trying to tell you something. The best way to shut them up is to listen to what they have to say, find out what's causing them, and doing something about that.
This is one of the reasons why I won't drink alcool while I'm still feeling something strongly. I want to wade through it and let it go through me, to better understand what it is that's fucking with me so badly.
It does seem like it's not every feeling that has a cause like that (love, for example, just seem to come semi-randomly). It's quite unfortunate, but when it all comes down to it, we're still very much biological machines, and there's all sorts of odd chemicals in our brains. Men like big boobs and women like firm butts for pretty straightforward reasons that aren't so aesthetically minded as much as natural-selection minded (larger breasts for nursing offsprings, and firm butts for better thrusting power). Sigh. Still, you've got to work with what you're given, right?
Remember, the goal here isn't to make you a "better person", whatever the fuck that means. Screw that, that's for chumps. It's for you to be happy!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-03-13 07:15 am (UTC)And then what? <grin>
no subject
Date: 2006-03-13 07:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-13 07:44 am (UTC)I have yet to find one to explain how not to repress the positive ones.
Really. Some of us do that.
Pain is rather easier to deal with that happiness.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-13 09:19 pm (UTC)This "writing what I feel" regimen was very strict, skipping even just one day was very much frowned upon, and if it'd be all bad or all good, there would be some questioning as whether really did NOTHING of the "other" kind happened.
Not all that easy!