Give yourself the permission to feel negative

You hate the way you look these days, but you are not allowed to feel that way. That is an example of the kind of self-manipulation we do, we feel that because someone who is  happy with the way they look is happier as a person, we should force ourselves into being happy with the way we look, rather than, actually… Ehrm… Accepting we hate the way we look and doing something about it.

The list is endless: I should want to be friends with that person. I should love my man more… I should feel excited about this. I should feel grateful.

No, you shouldn’t. If you don’t feel that way, that is not your authentic response to a situation, and just because other people are genuinely happy with something you’ve got, it does not mean you are a bad person, it means you are in the wrong (unsuitable) situation.

(Something that you might pick up on at this stage: “You keep saying that you should love your man this way…” The should that may slip out on occasion means the same as in this sentence: “If you are looking at a genuine Barbie doll, you should find the stamp Mattel on her back.” It doesn’t mean that the Barbie turns into an authentic Mattel doll if you write Mattel on her back yourself. Unfortunately, people do not come with labels like that: “This man belongs to so-and-so. So I have to come up with descriptions on when do you know you have met the person that belongs to you.)

Feeling is a response, not a skill to be learned

The way we feel for another person is an automatic response to the way they are. Also, the way we feel about a situation is an automatic response, not a skill, but we do treat it like it was a skill a lot. The trouble is, you can always deny and suppress an genuine emotion, but you cannot change it into something it isn’t. You won’t suddenly become happy about being fat, if your true ideal is a model figure, but you MAY fall in love with yourself the way you are, perhaps even as easily as accepting that you have the permission to really loathe the way you look now. Once you give yourself the permission to feel what you feel, you will sometimes notice that hey, I quite like myself this way, but I was too busy feeling crap about myself that I didn’t notice.

When you allow yourself to feel what you ACTUALLY FEEL, you enable yourself to take action on how you feel rather than pretending everything is fine the way it is, and telling yourself that you should simply settle for what you have now and quite dreaming about a better life. NOT a good attitude to have, people who tell you to be happy with what you’ve got are telling you to stop having dreams and settle for a mediocre life.

Identifying the true emotion and giving it space is DIFFICULT

Let me tell you this: To weed out patterns in thinking and figuring out what emotion is actually real is not easy. It is not easy at all, but it is worthwhile to pursue that awareness. Of course, there are no shoulds. If you are satisfied with what you’ve got, get off this website right now, because this website is written for unhappy people!

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