Taking Responsibility vs. Hating

I have found one highly negative pattern within myself: Every time I failed in any kind of way, I would use this very failure to fuel my self-hate. Why would anyone do that? It seemingly makes no sense. Seemingly.

Humans can get used to almost anything. Including hating ourselves. And humans also do not particularly like change. So once we have gotten used to hating ourselves, we do not want to stop hating ourselves anymore. So we start finding reasons to hate ourselves and we end up in a negative cycle.

The important thing here is that we act as if we wanted the reason for hate to vanish but not actually taking any steps towards it. While this may seem very hypocritical it is actually not something we consciously do. And even if we know we have that problem, it may be almost impossible, to get rid of it, because to do so, we need to catch this negative behavior in the moment.

This ties in with general negativity. If we are able to eliminate negativity from our lives, we also get rid of our self-hate. So how can we catch this behavior? It is important to acknowledge our flaws, but it is not an excuse to go down the road of self-hate. We need to acknowledge our flaws, in order to improve. This is work. I am sorry. But the only sensible thing to do, when we catch ourselves talking to ourselves negatively and pointing out everything we did wrong, is to figure out ways to make it better next time. Sometimes our minds are too clouded by self-hatred, then it makes sense to write this down. This is productive and it gives us a better chance of breaking the cycle of negativity.

Here are some other things I like to keep in mind to break negativity:

Watching what I say. (I talk to myself a lot.) Especially watch out for whining and complaining. These are often just ways to give voice to negativity, without changing anything for the better. The goal is to become a more positive person, so yes, we need to acknowledge the things going wrong, but if we cannot change it, there is no point to get emotionally invested in it, since it will only drain our energy and make us more negative. This especially applies to talking about other people. If it is not something nice or at least very interesting we want to say, it would be wise to refrain from saying anything at all. Complaining, whining and bad-mouthing other people does not only make us more negative, but it also makes us a lot less pleasant to be around. Of course sometimes we just need to vent. It is perfectly human. But remember: there is ALWAYS something we could vent about. And it is one of the easiest negative traits to catch and correct.

Don’t seek out distraction when I feel crappy. This sounds a little counter-intuitive. But hear me out: I am not talking about taking a break or finishing the day off with a little bit of a nice TV series. I am talking about spending hours in front of the TV procrastinating. This can have all sorts of causes. My favorite ones are “I am tired” and “I am feeling nauseous”. The problem is: After I have wasted a few hours I will feel just as tired and in addition to that I will also not have done anything productive and that will have me feel even worse than where I was at the beginning.

Focus on improvement. This one is probably the most trivial one. But it is very important to remember that it is okay not only make small steps into the right direction. I once tried to talk myself down because I was sore after a workout, because it meant, that I was weak, even if that was true, me being sore was a sign I was on the right path. It is normal to have setbacks, but then it makes much more sense to focus on the long way we have come than on “how far we’ve fallen”. The first has a better chance at getting us up on our feet again.

Monitor what I think. This is very similar to watching what I say, just a lot more subtle. It is about training ourselves to be mindful of our thoughts and to alternate negative thoughts with something more nice and positive.

Take care of my physical self: Sleep, Exercise, Hydrate! This is pretty self-explanatory. It is all about feeling good in our bodies. If we feel good, it is easier to focus on how good we feel, than on how life is unfair and not worth being lived. It is also about being kind to ourselves and taking care of ourselves. Because that is inherently positive. It is consciously taking action to shower our bodies in positivity and that is a perfect first step to more positivity.

This list is not complete, there are countless other little things, that have us become more positive. And in the end it is a very individual journey, but for me breaking out of negativity was long overdue and these tips come straight out of my personal journal. I know that negativity is the one thing that if I do not get rid of, I don’t even have a single shot a happiness.

Rationality AND Emotion

It is very obvious that we have two sides: Our hearts and our heads. And we all know that sometimes they contradict each other. Sometimes we know that something is right even though it feels wrong or the other way around. Both rationality and emotion are incredibly beautiful powers. And both can help us live a better life, be a better person and be happier, or make us miserable and feel like we have nothing left to live for. But how do we handle them, when they contradict each other? How can we handle them at all and how can we use them to our advantage.

The first step to a healthy balance between rationality and emotion is understanding, that both are important and both exist in their own right. Banishing either from our lives will lead to imbalance and pain. We need to acknowledge our emotion. We need to understand how we feel. We live in a world, where we are either over-focused on rationality or over-focused on “feeling good”. The problem with the first is obvious: If we never focus on emotion, we are emotionally immature, meaning, we have no idea what we feel and how to handle it. Focusing too much on “feeling good” is problematic, because it does not allow for pain and anger and their negative siblings and we cannot deal with something that we do not acknowledge.

Everything we experience we need to handle on an emotional and a rational level. Imagine, we had a fight with our best friend. The rational level to deal with that is to understand where our friend was coming from and to admit the points where we were wrong ourselves. But that is not it: It is natural and good that a fight with our friend will trigger some emotion. Sadness, anger, pain. We need to realize that we do feel them and handle them. Maybe we need to talk or journal about them, maybe we want to deal with our anger by working out, or cry. However most obviously it would not be wise, to just deal with the fight emotionally and never talk to our friend about it. And never rationally dissolve it.

Sometimes we feel emotions that seem out of place. And that is alright as well. We can try to make sense of our emotion, but sometimes, there is no real reason for why we feel a certain way, but that is no reason to push the emotion aside and not allow us to feel it. Emotions are beautiful. Being able to express them and show them is not a sign of weakness or a sign that we have no self-control. It is a sign, that we are human. It is a sign that we know ourselves. And frankly once we learn how we can deal with our emotion, it becomes a super power. Because it is how we truly end and argument.

But we do not only feel negative emotion. The interesting thing is: when we learn to handle our sadness and anger we also become happier. Because we learn to recognize not only our negative emotion. We learn to recognize when we are happy. And when we enjoy ourselves, and consequently we learn to understand what got us into a positive state and we learn to repeat that. And when we have dealt with the negativity there is room for happiness inside us.

But it is not all about emotion. There are emotions, that are very persistent and difficult to deal with. We do our best, but we simply cannot handle them. A good example is guilt about past actions. We cannot change what happened and we feel bad about it. And the more we focus on it, the worse we feel. This is one of the points in time, where we need to understand that we cannot handle it emotionally anymore, but we have to be rational and let it go. Move on and maybe come back to it at some point and try to deal with it then. A similar situation is, when we fall in love even though we may be married. Feeling attracted to someone is not something we can control. It is an emotion. It is nothing we have to feel guilty about, but pushing that kind of emotion aside will allow us, to keep living a happy life with our husband.

Just because something is the right thing to do does not mean, it is easy on our emotion. And it is alright to feel that emotion, as long as we do not make a mistake because we based our decision purely on emotion. There is a healthy balance between doing what we have to and doing what we feel like. But it is good to know what we feel like. It does not mean, we have to act upon it. And sometimes acting on an emotion is a good thing. For instance when you feel like telling a team mate, that you enjoyed working with him. That will lift up both you and the team mate, so why would you not say something.

It is important, to control how we act on our emotion, because we may cause harm. But it is just as important to not suppress all emotion. If I feel like crying at the movies, I should. The worst thing that could happen is that I end up with ruined make up. Yes, we will need to do our jobs, even if we don’t feel like it, but maybe we can get ourselves into a bubble bath afterwards.

It is important to tend to our rational side and do the things our head tells us we need to do. Because if we do not do them, we will feel bad about ourselves and this will affect our emotions as well. But it is just as important to take care of our emotion. And it starts with acknowledging them, and then we get to figure out, what helps us feel better. Different emotions will call for different measures and it is journey to find out how to deal with which emotion and when to push an emotion aside for a bit.

Being Toxic

When we slide into depression or simply feel like we have a depressed mood there is one thing that can happen so easily. We become toxic. We start dragging everyone around us down with us. Because we share our misery. And sometimes we need to be allowed to feel as sad as we want to. And it is so important that we are not alone in those hours. Because when we are it is when we get the worst ideas.

But while sharing our negative thoughts can be necessary we also know of the negative impact those thoughts can have on the people around us. We do know that our suffering becomes the pain of the people we love. We become toxic. And we are caught in a dilemma. On one hand we need nothing more than company and someone being there, comforting us. But on the other hand we know that we will share our negativity. So locking ourselves up in our rooms is wrong because it will prevent us from getting better and seeking company will make the toxins spread.

The next issue is, that we know how toxic we are. We know that we are not fun to be around. We know we are putting a damper on the mood, wherever we go. And we hate it. We hate being sad. It is not like we choose to be sad. We do not want to hurt those we love. This is why being negative around people we love will make us even more negative. Because we hate ourselves for hurting the people close to us.

Some may say: “Trust the people around you, to be able to protect themselves.” And I am a huge advocate of this. But at the same time: What if they protect themselves from us and we loose them forever just because we had a depressive phase? What if we do a lot of damage, before the other person notices that he/she needs to protect him-/herself?

So how can we interact with people? How can we talk about the things that really go on in our heads? How can we know if someone is strong enough to handle it? Honestly I do not know if we can ever be sure. And I think the best way is to work on getting rid of the negativity. I know this is so much easier to write, than to do. But for a first step I think we should all try to share our happiness and our positivity at least as much as we share our sadness. And the other really good step is to get away from ourselves. To ask people about how they are. To practice caring about how other people feel. Even if it is just to get ourselves away from the misery we experience.

And this way we can seek comfort with other people if we are not at our best, because we aren’t always negative. And we are not the only thing we care about. The question really is: Whether or not our bad moods will ruin a relationship. And the simple answer is: Only if the sadness is what defines the relationship. And it is the very same with us in general. Negativity is a normal part of life. No one can be happy non-stop. Negativity will only ruin us, if it defines us. We are only toxic to others, when we are nothing but sad.

The vision of who we shall be

I got lucky enough to know that my fear had a deadline. To know that at some point I would have an answer. And I got lucky enough to get the answer I had been hoping for and not the answer I had been so afraid of.

But now what? When we are lucky enough to get the chance to leave our fear behind. What do we do next? When our entire life had been evolving around that fear. (It does not have to be fear. It can really be anything you have been evolving around and now stopped.) How can we move on?

I think there are two crucial parts: One is looking back and figuring out what went wrong. And what went well. This is important, but I think it is quite self-explanatory. It allows us to deal with the emotions and not bury them inside us. But we do not want to live in the past. We shall not be devoured by regret. (In fact this could be the topic for a whole separate blog post.)

The other part is looking into the future. And sometimes, when we have been so caught up in something we need to actively create a vision of ourselves. But why would that be helpful? A vision allows us to measure our actions by. If something makes us more like the person we are in that vision, it is a productive action. But why do we need that?

Because we need a direction. Until this point we have been evolving around whatever it is we are leaving behind. Now it is time to evolve around something positive. Around the person we want to be. In my vision I never say: “I am not a self-harmer.” I say things like: “I am a strong, independent woman.” Such a positive vision, a vision of what we want to be rather than what we do not want to be, is very powerful, because it motivates us to go on. And it gives us somewhere to go. Somewhere we want to go. And every time we are able to take a step towards our vision, we will be able to love ourselves a bit more. Because we did something that made us better.

In the self-harm and self-hate context this is so important. Because we tend to be trapped in all that negativity. And I know I could not even have written this post last week. I think us hating ourselves… as sad as it is: It is part of who we are. And yes, we do have to fight it. But we cannot fight negativity with more negativity. We cannot fight the fact that we hate ourselves, by hating that we hate. That’s… recursive. So instead we need to find something about us, that we can love. And that is why we need a vision: because we want to be like the vision. And every time we get a little closer to who we want to be, we are allowed to be proud of ourselves. Love ourselves a bit more. Trust ourselves a bit more. Experience that we are actually not as much of a failure as we always like to make ourselves believe. And that I call taking control of our lives. Actively fueling our self-confidence instead of letting negativity destroy us.

But how can we create a vision? What inspires such a vision? There are many sources for that: People we admire. Ideologies. Quotes. And more mundane: Books, movies, series, music, pictures. I usually work with 4 categories:

Me and university
Me and my hobbies
Me and myself
Me and others

In each of these categories I determine what is important to me. I write it down and that is how my vision is born. Then I take one or two points in each category and figure out a way to actively improve that point. I make a plan. And most importantly: I try to ask myself on a regular basis: “Is this how the person in my vision would act?” or “Is this bringing me closer to the person I want to be?”. This is not entirely about accounting for the progress we make in becoming the vision, it is mostly about remembering that positive vision. Getting into the mindset of that vision. Because we can so easily forget, what we want to fight for. So reminding ourselves of it is always a good idea.

-Positivity- Why even bother?

When we are in tough spot and we feel like the world is ending there are always those people who are going to tell you to “stay positive” and all you want to do is punch those people in the face. Because they really have no idea what they are talking about, do they? I have a counter-question for you: Does it matter if they understand? Isn’t all that should matter, whether they are right or not?

Why should we try to stay positive? I have quite a simple answer for you: Because it is easy to fall into self-loathing. And when we fall into that pit, getting out is hard. So hard, that our recovery process will become an immense challenge. This is why I think, that we should try to focus on the positive at least once a day. And while positivity may not directly contribute to our getting better, negativity will do the exact opposite: make us worse. And if we do not “try to stay positive” for positivities sake then at least we do it to not fall into negativity.

In my eyes this is, why we should try to put positivity into this world. In thoughts and actions. It is not only that the people around us will thank us for it, but also, we ourselves, will benefit from it. I am not saying we need to have a big smile on every second of the day. I do not say that we may not feel our pain. I just say, we should not forget that there is something else than our pain.