Love yourself tender. A book about self-appreciation and self-care. Ольга Примаченко

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СКАЧАТЬ in and out and come back to yourself as soon as you sense you are starting to feel worried about the “appropriateness” of your feelings. You are all right, your worries are on a par with the moment. You do not have to be ashamed of them and try to feel different.

      It's not scary to feel hate even once for your loved one – It's scary to not allow yourself to feel anything towards him except for love.

      Feelings are always about “now”, and not about character. If you are feeling angry, it does not say anything about the kind of person you are but it might say a lot about what is going on. Perhaps, someone is breaking into your personal boundaries or denigrating something dear to your heart. Or maybe you feel overworked and your body has switched into red-alert mode, perceiving everything within your sight as a threat.

      The same goes for fear. If you're afraid, it doesn't mean that you're a coward. Your feelings just overrule your thought process and you feel threatened before you can explain what is going on. There is a good saying for it: if something feels wrong, then it probably is.

      If you're hungry, exhausted, or tired, don't expect Buddha-like calmness from yourself when you come across mess that your children have made. Your anger won't be proof of your bad character, it will only be a signal that right now you are at a low point.

      Whenever we burden other people with hopes they cannot live up to, we face a conflict of expectations. A newborn has no idea that mommy needs some sleep. A husband cannot read his wife's mind and therefore cannot possibly know what she is keeping silent about. It is pointless to expect support and sympathy from a friend who is known for being critical. They all do what they do, not out of spite, but because they do not know better. It is not that they are bad, it just shows that something is wrong with our expectations (I would like to highlight that: expectations, not us).

      Now, it is quite different when you are being told how exactly you should feel, or when you are judged for your reaction to something. “How can you be happy to quit a job? You are supposed to feel worried like all normal people do!”

      I remember feeling a vivid rage, not grief as everyone expected (grief was present, but only as a backdrop) when my first husband and I started divorce proceedings. I don't think I would have felt that way had we “just” had different characters, or had our love vanished into thin air with the passing of time. I was enraged because I felt helpless watching something I treasured and had invested my time, efforts, and money into, methodically and inevitably collapse before my eyes.

      However, I am absolutely adamant not to feel something just because it is deemed an “inappropriate” or unwanted feeling. (– “I love you”. – “Thank you”. – “Well, that wasn't exactly the answer I was hoping for…” – “Thank you very much?”).[6]

      You are saying “I am hurt”, and someone tells you “Not, you're not…”.

      You are not hurt. You are not afraid. You are not feeling bad. You are not tired. It is all just your imagination, pull yourself together, get up. And you do pull yourself together once, twice, three times, four, five, eighteen times, forty-three. And that's when you start noticing how stoic and strong you've become, thick-skinned, almost armor-plated. And where something living and warm previously was, a cold emptiness now forms.

      And one day, you wind up hearing yourself saying to someone else: you're not hurt; you are not afraid. You neither believe nor measure anything against yourself; the benchmarks are low, and the lack of faith paltry, but that other person who approached you with their woes is left sad and lonely and burdened.

      I dislike it when someone asks “What happened”, and when they hear the answer, they ask: “Why are you so upset? It's not worth it!” Well, first of all, every person has a right to feel how they would like to feel towards what happened, simply because he or she knows best what can ease their pain. Secondly, that kind of response casts doubt on the person's ability to react appropriately to events, degrading them from a position of an adult with their own formed values system to the position of a child whose experiences are not enough to adequately judge what is going on. Thirdly, no one has a right to say “chill out” until they have walked in the other person's shoes. Only someone who has experienced a loss knows how hard it is to endure that. People do not grieve for fun.

      It was Melody Beattie who wrote in her famous book on co-dependence Codependent No More: “Stop abandoning ourselves, our needs, our wants, our feelings, our lives, and everything that comprises us. Make a commitment to always be there for ourselves. We can trust ourselves. We can handle and cope with the events, problems, and feelings life throws our way. We can trust our feelings and our judgments. We can solve our problems. We can learn to live with our unsolved problems, too. We must trust the people we are learning to depend upon ourselves.”[7]

      Quiet emotions

      Sometimes emotional detachment is not a sign of exhaustion or a conscious suppression of feelings, but rather an individual, inner characteristic. You shouldn't blame yourself for not being emotional and shouldn't try to force yourself to experience reality in a more vivid way. “Quality” of emotions does not depend on the way one expresses them and is not measured by how high you jump for joy or how many gallons of tears you shed.

      It is normal to love passionately and madly, it is also normal not to love that way.

      Tenderness to yourself means learning to value your own set of tools, instead of being jealous of someone else's. Someone else might have a magnifying-glass that allows him to notice something significant amongst the small things. Another might have an axe that allows him to chop away the unnecessary. A third person might have a tape rule for measuring everything he comes across, and a fourth person might be equipped with ink for blackening up the picture. It is normal if your own toolkit lacks an emotional amplifier. It is not a deficiency, but a peculiarity.

      For most of us, it's an extra credit question that allows us to feel negativity without doing anything about it, be it fixing ourselves or feeling ashamed. We're not afraid of feelings per se, but rather the risk of what we might do under their influence – badly thought through actions, razor-sharp words that might slip off our tongue. It's scary having to deal with the consequences later: spoiled relationships, lengthy disagreements, and the tattered reputation of a usually calm and friendly person.

      Many of us are afraid to feel sexually curious about another person when we're in a stable, monogamous relationship, as if it would be akin to adultery and acknowledge problems in relationships. This is not exactly right. The more often we force ourselves to suppress our spontaneous interest in somebody (“don't you dare to look!”, “don't even dare to admire!”, “don't you dare to admit you like what you're seeing!”), the more likely it is that a long-restrained pressure will cause an explosion and infidelity will happen for real. We could also lose our passion for things in general, including towards our long-term partner. (“– Let's go to a bar! – No more bars. – Let's go fishing! – No more fishing. – Any regret you got married? – No more regrets are allowed.”)[8]

      There are many decisions and concrete steps between sexual interest and cheating. It's ok to feel sexually aroused if that's all you take home.

      One cannot influence the kinds of feelings that are born inside. You cannot force yourself to fall out of love or stop being hurt from betrayal at will. The good news is: you always have powers to cope with any of your feelings.

      Not even one feeling can kill you because, if it could, they wouldn't exist in our nature at all.

      As Anne Lamott once wrote, “But you СКАЧАТЬ