You Have a Right to Feel . . . Better
When your day hands you a sorrow or, perhaps, you have arrived at home and found yourself feeling less than enthusiastic about preparing dinner or doing anything else. How will you pick yourself up? Should you try? Is feeling better a priority for you?
What does your family culture say about navigating feelings and your mood? Your relatives might have believed in pushing through their ill mood and lagging energy. Maybe they believed that we, all, have limited rights to happiness. Was there a too-much-happiness-is-a-bad- thing belief?
Maybe the women in your family were never highly valued. They were expected to work and work and work for the family, not for themselves. No one asked if they needed a break or needed leisure time for themselves. No one considered what was reasonable for one person to do in a day or thanked them for their efforts.
Have you ever been asked by your family how you are doing? What do you need help with? When is the last time you vacationed? Do you give yourself breaks throughout the day? What your family had to say or not say about feelings is likely to have shaped your own attitude about your feelings.
What happened in school and other institutions around navigating feelings? Were you told directly or indirectly by other people’s behavior that talking about how you feel is not worth much. Maybe you learned to push down feelings. Maybe pretending that your sorrow or grief or anxiety or nervousness didn’t exist was what was expected of you.
And, today, are you talking to yourself about how you are really doing? Is your inner chatter very judgmental? Is that inner voice misguiding you and steering you well away from your right to personal happiness?
Would you like to learn what else you might do with how you are feeling besides being stuck with a negative emotion? The people around you, your family, friends, coworkers, and social companions, may not be modeling the best strategies for maintaining good emotional health. You and they might be repeating a cultural norm of not dealing with anything that’s too emotional or labelled “private.”
Often, there is little or no healthy discussion about how someone is feeling because it isn’t the usual and because everyone is thinking, “I should always keep inside thoughts and feelings secret.” Is that right? No one should know what’s going on with you? No one. Who exactly is the real you if your feelings are only obvious as an outburst? Will you wait until bottled up feelings literally make you sick?
There is always a better way. For instance, consider therapy. There are productive strategies that your family members and coworkers don’t exhibit simply because they never had an opportunity to learn them. But you can learn healthy habits for yourself that could influence your family positively.
- When I was a child we tiptoed around my mother and pointedly did not tell her things like a teacher’s abusive behavior or my sister and her friends trying cigarettes or my dad’s true medical condition or my wanting to go to college far, far away from home. As truths leaked out our house went from tense all the time to loud chaos and little or no real and reasonable discussion.
- A woman friend told me that it was her belief that married people should not share everything and that some things should remain your own personal secrets. When I saw her a couple of years later she and her husband were dangerously near divorce. She felt unable to share her feelings about their sex life or about tensions at work. He felt unable to share with her how inadequate he felt because he’d been unable to find work for so long.
Self-care as a Daily Lifestyle Choice
At this time, there are so many earnest considerations to handle in a human life. However, when you consider singularly what the soul wants and needs for its development most of these are distractions. You can pay attention to the noise of the world or you can tune it all out and attend to your deepest needs and what is good for you. Peace within; peace in the world—Thich Nhat Hanh.
Having no idea of what is going on in the world probably isn’t a a good idea but you have knowledge options at a lower cost to your emotional health. Perhaps, you will pick up a newspaper now and then. But making a steady diet of news and noise can only be unhealthy for you. Almost all news outlets are shaping their stories in such a way that calamity and hysteria are the main point. They have a profit bottom line to protect at the public’s expense. Sensationalism is the point, not real discussion aimed at finding real solutions to problems. Every newsroom could be committed to solution-based news. They could introduce us to real people who are already working on possible or known solutions. Solution orientation and learning how to do effective problem-solving could be standards that you set for yourself. You do not have to accept sensationalism, fear-mongering, and dread as normal life on earth.
As an alternative, you can train yourself to begin your day with healthy, peaceful inputs such as a guided meditation, affirmations, peaceful music, hugging your animal companion, or sitting outside for a few minutes. Set an intention for the day. You can check on yourself throughout your time away from home. Ask yourself about your emotions and generally how you are feeling. See what you can adjust if your joy meter is telling you to slow down or to eat something nutritious because you let lunchtime pass without taking a break. Or, maybe, you need to walk away from the gossipmongers or a toxic conversation. Take a few deep breaths and re-center yourself. When driving home are you able to listen to some fun music as a replacement for ruminating about the workday? Are you able to not react harshly to bad drivers’ bad mistakes? Practice calm. Yes, it is a practice. Practice returning to your peace-filled core self. Are you allowing yourself to pull into your driveway in pretty good shape? Will you walk into the house intact, not having left parts of yourself back there in the workplace or on the highways?
What routine do you have as soon as you enter your home? Will you check in with yourself and see what’s needed? A big glass of water? A few nuts or crackers before dinner? What about ten or fifteen minutes of sitting still without making any decisions or worrying about the next thing that has to get done?
You have the option of initiating excellent self-care practices that work for you. This would be a gift to self, motivated by a deepening self-awareness and an increasing self-love. You might become the gamechanger in your family. It’s not about forcing or pushing anyone to change but rather a happy modeling of self-love. Be happy. Be fulfilled.###