today my therapist told me that sometimes negative feelings like guilt, anxiety, self loathing, etc are like the hiccups. they’re uncomfortable, we don’t like them, there’s no way to turn them off; they can even be incapacitating for a while. we don’t always know where they came from or when they’ll go away, so sometimes instead of focusing on why we feel a certain way we need to get better at recognizing its temporary nature, keeping perspective, and enduring discomfort. i feel like a lot of self-improvement rhetoric is about pinpointing specific causes for negative thoughts/behaviors so you can eradicate them, but people with chronic mental illness really need to work on allowing themselves to experience these feelings without going into a downward spiral.
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I’m a slut for sitting in comfortable silence while both of us do our own thing and occasionally show each other something dumb on our computers like that’s the good shit my dude.
the older I get, the more attractive stability becomes……………… i just want some god damn peace of mind and a non-stressful environment
Dark pink rose x flowercrystals on ig
not to sound like a soft bitch but i’m really in the mood to fall asleep in someone’s arms
i just want a kinder world than this
In 2019 we grow from sex positivity to sex responsibility, meaning we:
- call out shitty people who are just abusers and using kink/polyamory to mask it and stop supporting them
- recognize that sometimes hypersexuality can be a form a self-harm for some people
- keep kinks and fetishes in appropriate spaces and not bringing them out into general public spaces and thereby involving people in scenes they aren’t consenting to
- understand that some fetishes are inherently unhealthy and some illegal to actually engage in for good reason and ignoring that is irresponsible at best
I am an old sage…listen closely to my wisdom before my soul withers away…
Teach us, o wise one
you are not an anime character. your actions impact others and do not only exist in theory. nobody is required to stick around for your tragic backstory or to learn the reasons behind your actions. if you treat people like garbage, they are allowed to think of you as a jerk and nothing more. nobody is obligated to analyze you or think twice when you hurt them. similarly, you are not required to stick around to listen to other people’s reasons for treating you like trash. you can call them a jerk, cut them out of your life, and call it a day.
This is certainly not the only way to come up with affirmations, and if you find other affirmations that help you feel better, definitely use those, too!
- Get to a place where you feel calm and grounded. This might involve going to a physical location where you can work with minimal distractions, using some coping skills to bring your anxiety levels down, etc. Your goal is to get comfortable so you can focus on the exercise ahead.
- Identify the emotions that you struggle with. This is much easier if you have a record of your emotions in various situations, such as a diary or emotion log, but is possible too with a little introspection. Some examples: anxious, guilty, ashamed, worthless, angry, etc.
- Identify some instances when you feel those emotions. Example: “When I misspeak in class, I feel anxious, ashamed, angry at myself, and embarrassed,” “When I am talking to someone and they interrupt me, I feel angry, frustrated, brushed off.” “When someone criticizes me I feel hopeless, overwhelmed, and panicky.” There are no wrong answers here, so be as honest and as frank as you can with yourself — remember that your goal here is to understand.
- Take a self-care break. You may want to take a minute or two to make sure you’re feeling grounded, remind yourself that you are in a safe space, and use some coping skills as necessary. Recognize that your feelings, whatever they are, are valid, and take the time to process them. Go to the next step when you feel ready.
- Identify the underlying fears behind your emotions. Emotional pain —any kind of pain, really — helps us identify when we are under some kind of threat, or when we are in danger of not meeting certain needs. So what are your emotions telling you? Example, “When I misspeak in class, I am afraid that people will write me off as incompetent.” “When someone interrupts me, I worry that that means they don’t care about me.” “When someone criticizes me, I fear that they think I am useless.”
- Identify the assumptions at play. We process situations through certain assumptions, based on a zillion things: past experiences, watching others, fears, beliefs, etc. So what are you assuming in these situations? For example, “If I make a mistake, others will think I am incompetent.” “People interrupt other people because they don’t care about them/their feelings.” “Criticism indicates disdain and contempt.”
- Challenge those assumptions. Come up with counterarguments, like, “Rational people recognize that everyone makes mistakes.” “People interrupt others for many reasons (they’re in a hurry, they are used to being interrupted and don’t see it as rude, poor impulse control, excitement, they’re distracted, etc.) — it’s not necessarily to do with me.” “If someone criticizes me, it means they think I can improve.”
- Identify the needs behind your fears. Fear tells you that you need something, so the next step is to identify what it is you need. Example: “I need validation that I am competent.” “I need to know that others care about me.” “I need to feel worthwhile.”
- Think of healthy ways to fill those needs. If you can remind yourself that your needs ARE being or CAN be met, it lowers the stakes considerably and also empowers you to take real and effective action towards regaining true control of your emotions. Example: “I know I am competent because I have achieved x, y, and z,” “I am in the process of becoming fully competent; I am still learning.” or, “My friends and family have stuck around for a long time, they probably wouldn’t have unless they truly cared about me,” or, “I am worthwhile regardless of my mistakes; I am a work in progress.”
- Write these down where you can find them when you need ‘em.Keeping some in your wallet (à la this post), on your phone, in the bathroom/your bedroom, on your wall, as your background on a computer — the list is endless.
- Check in with yourself again. Feeling difficult emotions and dredging up stressful thoughts/fears/situations can be really draining even if it helps, too. You’ve taken a big step and you deserve a break, so practice some self-care (1, 2, 3), re-center yourself, and remember that you’ve made a lot of progress. Go you!
“Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing.
It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.
It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.
A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.
True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.
And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.
It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.
It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.
If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.
It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.
It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.
It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.”