12-24-2012, 09:57 AM
Over the past few days I've been really careful not to suppress anything and kind of let it all work itself out. I realized that some of my anxiety was that fear of slipping up and "not doing it right" with regards to managing my emotions. I just realized I never really managed my emotions, I thought I did and I was so great at controlling everything. Being so critical about my emotional state was very taxing, and even more so I think there was a lot of guilt associated with expressing these emotions. This goes back to the idea of perfection. I wanted to be impervious to everything and I thought I could just wave it away. I became very disconnected from my emotions, and anytime a bad feeling leaked through I felt bad about myself.
And the other thing is I've learned that you can't just flip a switch in your brain and feel better. It's more like a dimmer switch and every day you change a little more until eventually it's all the way up and you are better. That's important for me to remember because it prevents me from blaming myself if I get stuck on a certain day. But hey, maybe that belief will change in time and I'll be able to just learn to flip that switch immediately. Anything is possible, but I'm not going to pressure myself to get there faster than I actually can.
Oh and one more thing. The more I focused on not being negative, the more my focus was on the negative. The interesting thing is when you stop caring so much about it, it tends to lose more of its power over you. It's not so much ignoring the problem, more like having the mentality of your mind working things out so long as you don't mess with the process. Basically learning to let go and to stop controlling so much. Something I was guilty of a lot was being overly controlling. Which I believe goes back to the perfectionist mentality.
All in all, I like how this sub is making me feel more liberated. If I could make an analogy it would be like prior to this I was attempting to paddle upstream. But now I kind of let it take me where it needs to go and from there go along with it. Just makes me think maybe finding a path in life is more about letting go and having the opportunities open up to you instead of being focused on one possibility and being blind to all the other things that could unfold.
And the other thing is I've learned that you can't just flip a switch in your brain and feel better. It's more like a dimmer switch and every day you change a little more until eventually it's all the way up and you are better. That's important for me to remember because it prevents me from blaming myself if I get stuck on a certain day. But hey, maybe that belief will change in time and I'll be able to just learn to flip that switch immediately. Anything is possible, but I'm not going to pressure myself to get there faster than I actually can.
Oh and one more thing. The more I focused on not being negative, the more my focus was on the negative. The interesting thing is when you stop caring so much about it, it tends to lose more of its power over you. It's not so much ignoring the problem, more like having the mentality of your mind working things out so long as you don't mess with the process. Basically learning to let go and to stop controlling so much. Something I was guilty of a lot was being overly controlling. Which I believe goes back to the perfectionist mentality.
All in all, I like how this sub is making me feel more liberated. If I could make an analogy it would be like prior to this I was attempting to paddle upstream. But now I kind of let it take me where it needs to go and from there go along with it. Just makes me think maybe finding a path in life is more about letting go and having the opportunities open up to you instead of being focused on one possibility and being blind to all the other things that could unfold.
