"The curious paradox is that when I accept myself, just as I am, only then I can change" Carl Rogers
When we were children, we soon learned that there are some things about ourselves that are not accepted by others. We then learned to suppress those parts of ourselves and we exaggerated the parts that are accepted in our environment. For example, a child that whenever he is angry or upset receives a punishment, will soon learn that is not ok to show his anger (a part of him) and will learn to keep it to himself. On the contrary, if he sees that he is being praised when he is making jokes or pleasing others, he might overcompensate that trait by people pleasing and making jokes whenever he feels angry or upset, repressing those emotions.
All of those experiences will continue to fragment us into parts that are "accepted" and parts that are "not accepted" by others. And those "not accepted" parts will also be rejected by ourselves in our own psyche. We push them out of our consciousness because they "cause us trouble".
So we internalized what happened in our environment when we were children and that became the way we relate to ourselves. But when these suppressed parts of us are not integrated in our personality (meaning that we are not aware of them), we "recreate" them in our behaviour or they come back to our consciousness as a symptom (anxiety, depression, addictions, etc).
If, for example, we learned in our childhood that we are only loved when we please others, it is very likely that now as adults we will enter relationships where we overly give and please the others, only receiving the same that we received as children (maybe indifference or abuse). So we continue to recreate this cycle of relational traumas because that's the only way we knew how to love or relate to others.
The good news is that Life will always bring us opportunities to become aware of those patterns and rejected parts of ourselves, so we can integrate them in our personality. Reality will always mirror the aspect of ourselves that we have suppressed, but only by becoming aware of those parts and offer our presence and compassion (instead of rejecting them) we are able to heal and integrate them in ourselves.
When you face your healing as a way to “fix you” because “you need to change”, you keep rejecting those unintegrated parts of yourself that need your presence and acceptance. Healing should be a process of embracing who you are and all your parts (even the parts that "cause trouble" or that feel intense emotional pain).
When you were crying as a child, you didn’t want your parents to fix you or "make you ok", you wanted them to be there for you unconditionally. You wanted them to be there for you when you were feeling pain inside. But when that didn’t happen, you learned that their presence is conditional. That you have to be a certain way for them to be there for you. Now as adults, when we reject those negative feelings (or numb them by using drugs, medication, TV, sex, etc), we make that relationship with ourselves conditional as well. We then say to ourselves that we only deserve our presence when we feel a certain way (happy, calm, joyful, etc).
When we feel a negative emotion we tend to push it down or distract ourselves because we wanna keep things in order. Sometimes we even say that "we shouldn't be feeling this way". We resist what we are already feeling. But those emotions will still be there even if we don’t want to face them or decide to suppress them, because they want our attention. They want to be felt by us. And whenever we decide not to, they will continue to accumulate in our bodies, many times causing physical pain or symptoms.
We escape from our own selves to feel better, but the only way to actually feel better is to go in and give those feelings our presence. The goal of emotional mastery is not only “to feel better”, but “to become better at feeling”.
When we decide to FEEL, that is to give our unconditional presence to that part of ourselves that is screaming out for help, something magical happens: the feeling subsides and there is relief.
To release the resistance of something, you have to turn in the direction of it, instead of away from it, because turning away from it just reinforces your resistance to it. Whatever we resist, persists.
But how can we work with our emotions so we can understand their message and release that energy that is so desperate to be released?
It is simple but not easy. It means to sit down with ourselves every time we feel sad, angry, overwhelmed or any kind of negative emotion that we often prefer to reject or numb. We sit down with our pain as if it were a crying child that needs our help. We offer that unconditional presence we would want from a loving parent.
Here is a simple exercise that we can use whenever we feel a negative emotion that we want to release. This form of Vipassana meditation (which means “to see things as they really are”) has been used for thousands of years and it teaches us how to be unconditionally present with ourselves:
-The first step is to sit down comfortably and identify the emotion we are feeling (sadness, shame, guilt, anger, etc). This step is really important because we are focusing our awareness on that “negative” feeling that we usually decide to suppress or avoid. We move from resisting it to sitting with it.
-After you identify the emotion, close your eyes and focus on the bodily sensation of that emotion. Where in your body you feel it? You might feel a tightness in your stomach or your chest, or maybe a tingling sensation in different parts of your body. When you locate the emotion in your body, send your awareness and breath to those sensations. This will help to calm you down and move the energy from your mind to your body, creating a more grounded sensation. This way we start to become familiar with how these emotions manifest and express themselves in our bodies. We move from “I’m sad” to “I’m experiencing sadness in my body”.
-The third step is to give that feeling our unconditional presence. This could be done by literally welcoming the feeling. You can say “I welcome you…” and name the feeling. When we give it our presence, we let go of resistance. When we let go of resistance and we let the feeling be there instead of trying to change it, it starts to change by itself. We don't have to do anything more than giving our attention and our body will know what to do to process the emotion.
Some mental images might appear and our internal dialogue might start a conversation (telling the story of why we are feeling the way we are feeling, maybe because "this person did this" or "we did this or that"), but our job is to let those mental components be there, not fight them, and just redirect our attention to whatever is happening in our bodies. The bodily sensations and our breath will be our allies in this process.
Again, this exercise is simple but not easy. Facing our difficult emotions require us to be brave and be willing to see and feel things that are not pleasurable, but you’ll reap the rewards of this courage sooner than you think. The goal is to start being there unconditionally for ourselves, the way that sometimes we would like others to be there for us. The goal is to BECOME that friend that we always wanted to have.
I believe that to create unconditional love towards ourselves and to feel fulfilled and happy, we first need to deeply know and accept ourselves the way we are, integrating those parts of us that remain hidden in the shadows of our subconscious mind.
My wish is that you can give yourself your presence, love and compassion every single day, with every single trigger and difficult emotion you experience. Loving and accepting ourselves unconditionally is the only way to create true loving and accepting relationships with others.
If you want to see more love in the world, start by loving yourself first and the world around you will change.
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