Читать книгу The Self-Esteem Team's Guide to Sex, Drugs and WTFs?!! - Grace Barrett Natasha Devon & Nadia Mendoza - Страница 9
ОглавлениеNADZ
At the first school I ever taught in with The Self-Esteem Team, a Year 9 student came up to me after my lesson to say, ‘I don’t feel right,’ before bursting into tears. I just hugged her and tried to tell her that everything was going to be OK. While I can never know exactly how it feels to be in her shoes, I understand what it’s like to feel as though your skin doesn’t fit and that you are grotesquely abnormal from the rest of society.
But what the hell is normal anyway? And if we can’t answer that, how do we know what abnormal is? Let’s say that not feeling right is when you feel different from how you’ve been feeling in life up until that point. So that would mean that feeling abnormal doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. In fact, feeling abnormal is really normal because it happens to every human at some stage. You’d need to feel abnormal from time to time in order to be normal, which means we’re all really normal… this explanation sounds normal in my head but not so normal written down… The more I type ‘normal’, the more it sounds less normal. ARGH! Is it normal to write ‘normal’ so much in one normal paragraph?!! #normal
Epic brain fart.
Seriously though, you can only feel what you feel. Emotions aren’t by choice; in fact, they are the very opposite. Feelings stick to you with zero choice at all, whizzing around your brain at a million miles per hour. What is your choice is how you then deal with them, whether you allow them to consume you or whether you choose to conquer them. So when you feel like something is not right, that’s OK. It’s the steps you take after that count.
It feels horrible when someone asks ‘What’s wrong?’ when all you can think is ‘What’s right?’ Yet what you can do is learn how to manage your feelings by sowing seeds of confidence, instead of weeds of doubt, in your brain.
First, know that difficult emotions are a flaw in chemistry, not in character, so try not to beat yourself up. Second, you are not weird. Promise. Depression, self-doubt and insecurities all stem from feelings, which we all have (even people who seem secure). Third, it’s about programming the mind to realise you can, rather than believing you can’t.
TASH
When people say they don’t ‘feel right’, what they usually mean is, ‘Something’s wrong, but I don’t know what it is.’
You’d be surprised by how many people experience a kind of general ‘blah’ type feeling but can’t attribute it to anything specific. One of two things then happens:
1 They either try to make how they are feeling fit something – anything that’s happened recently (‘My friend’s budgie has early-onset diabetes and I’m just so cut up about it!’).
2 They convince themselves they don’t have the ‘right’ to ‘feel sorry for themselves’ and try to swallow down their emotions and soldier on.
Both of these tactics are diversionary – they stop you from getting to the root of the problem and mean that whatever it is that’s really bothering you will fester and grow.
If you feel insecure, or are behaving in ways you don’t recognise or like (like flying off the handle or sulking if you don’t get your own way), it means you have sunk into bad habits. Habits are powerful because they are so subtle; they creep up on us. We repeat negative patterns of thought or behaviour without really being aware that we’re doing it, then, before we know it, we ‘don’t feel right’ but we have no idea why.
There’s a couple of ways you can combat this. The first is to try to identify how the habit started. This is useful because, if you can cast your mind back to what was happening during the time you started to think or behave in negative ways, it’ll give you a massive hint as to what’s bugging you.
Human beings have ‘defence mechanisms’ built into us, which make it easier for us to cope with difficult situations while they are actually happening. So you can be going through something that should technically be difficult to deal with – like a bereavement or a break-up – and think ‘Hey! I’m dealing with this so well. Check me out being all mature and shit!’ but actually, your defence mechanisms have kicked in, meaning you’re having a sort of out-of-body experience. When this happens, we put all the toxic emotions we don’t want to deal with into a box at the back of our minds, to be reopened at a later date, when everything has settled down. So it can be weeks, months or even years later when those emotions re-emerge and it’s so unexpected that you’re left thinking, ‘What The Actual F?’
Equally, however, it could be nothing like as dramatic as that. And that’s also fine. You can’t help how you feel. So if your friend’s budgie having diabetes really and genuinely has affected you, it’s OK to feel sad. Go ahead and wail into a pillow.
This shouldn’t be confused with giving yourself permission to wallow in self-pity though. I had a friend who did that once and she made it really hard for her mates to be around her. She was seeing this bloke she really liked for about three months when he dumped her with no real explanation. Two years later she was still talking about it. Every time I saw her. And when I gently suggested that perhaps it was time to move on, she’d say, ‘Tash, I can’t help how I feeeeeel!’
Obviously, you want to avoid behaving in this dramatic manner if you can. The way to do that is to identify the emotion, give yourself some time to deal with it and then work out how you’re going to move forward.
Like Nadz said, you can’t control how you feel but you can control how you deal with it.
Over to Grace, who is going to talk tactics for pulling yourself out of the slump…
GRACE
Sometimes, looking back can be really useful. Working out the root cause of a problem is important. But if you’re in a negative place (‘OMG, I can’t connect to wifi – can the world just give me a break!?’), it’s possible that looking back will only result in a ride on the Brain-Worm of Doom. Yeah, that’s the pet name I give my neggy thoughts.
So instead, work forwards. Try focusing not on what the problem is but what the solution could be. Work out what feeling ‘right’ might be to you. I’m not saying you’ll be able to work that out in a matter of minutes, hours or even days but I do think it’s a more useful way of spending time than thinking ‘What’s wrong (with me, the world, my friends, my family…)?’ The list could be endless.
Imagine yourself feeling ‘right’ – or even let’s go so far as to say feeling happy *gasp*! Or remember the last time you felt that way. Got it? Good. Now picture it. Look at the scene: what’s around you? What are you doing? What does it sound like? Who are you with? Most importantly, what are the differences between the way your world actually looks and feels to the one you’re imagining? Scribble them down if you need to. Now, what can you do to make your world look and feel more like the one you’re imagining?
Sometimes, the most useful question to ask is: ‘What would I like to happen?’
It took me quite a while to answer that question for myself, back when I didn’t feel ‘right’. But once I realised that my ideal scene was really quite different to the one I was living, the feeling made complete sense. I still don’t get to spend every single day in my ‘perfect world’ but, in trying to make mine look more like the one I’d imagined, I normally tick a couple of its boxes each day.
These days, it’s much rarer that I don’t feel right. I still have wobbles (I think everyone does) but much less often – and when I do have one, I can now envisage a way to clamber out of that hole.
