Toxic Striving, page 12
Describe the full sensory experience: sights, sounds, smells, textures, flavors, shapes, colors, and anything else that made it enjoyable for you.
When you pay attention, you might discover a million little things that light you up, a mosaic of fulfilling moments and activities that bring you bits of satisfaction. A delicious meal, singing along to a catchy new song on the radio, putting on your favorite cozy sweatshirt, or sharing a funny meme can all fill you up on any given day. Start a list in your journal, and commit to documenting one small moment of pleasure each day.
Satisfaction and pleasure often depend on context. Sometimes, you find something fulfilling because of its novelty or variety. Maybe your satisfaction comes from doing something you’ve been craving or looking forward to for a while. Maybe you’re satisfied by an element of surprise, when something turns out different than what you expected. Maybe you’re satisfied because you were present with all of the sensory elements of the experience—you really relished it and let yourself enjoy it. There’s no universal formula for a satisfying experience, and what satisfies you one day may not hit the spot another day. If you tune in and pay attention though, you can figure out what might do it for you in any given moment.
In wellness and hustle cultures, there’s not a lot of space to relish fulfilling experiences. Satisfaction is hypothetical. It’s held up as the reward for achieving everything on your to-do list, but you’re never actually encouraged to relish it. According to hustle culture, if you were to truly seek pleasure, you’d be hedonistic, indulgent, or frivolous. But pleasure does not have to come at the expense of our other priorities. In fact, making room for pleasure in your life can fill your tank, allowing you more energy to put toward whatever else is important to you.
You’re on this planet for only a limited amount of time. If you have a clear sense of your values, you likely know what type of life you want to lead while you’re here. Where does enjoyment or pleasure factor into your life’s goals? Maybe you want to leave this world better off than you found it, or create a legacy for generations to come. Maybe you care about creating a certain type of environment for your family or loved ones, or making your mark on your professional field. These are wonderful pursuits, and they don’t have to come at the expense of satisfaction. Humans are capable of caring about multiple things at once! Every day, no matter how busy you are, you encounter opportunities to experience satisfaction. Commit to doing one thing today for no other reason than because it fills you up.
When you consider your life through the lens of fullness and satisfaction, you can make space for any number of things that matter to you. Instead of having to single-mindedly fixate on being productive, you can explore what it means to be a whole person, with a full life that includes what mindfulness teacher Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn (2013) often refers to as “the full catastrophe.” You can make space for the ups and downs, laughter and tears, joy and pain, wins and losses that make life meaningful. It might seem counterintuitive to think about pain and unpleasant experiences as part of a fulfilling and rewarding life, but they are actually crucial pieces of the puzzle. We cannot know happiness without sadness. If there is no context for an emotion, it has no shape.
In the next chapter, we will explore how your emotional world can enhance your life and deepen the meaning you find in each day. Emotions—even the ones you dislike the most—aren’t so intolerable once you know how to interpret them and move through them effectively. It’s all about learning to speak their language and open yourself up to the messages they bring.
Chapter 9.
Your Emotions Carry Messages
When I think back to elementary school, a single refrain jumps out in my mind: “We never have to worry about Paula!” This line was uttered by my parents, teachers, babysitters, and basically every adult who’d been tasked with the apparently very easy job of caring for me. That sentence made me glow with pride. It became my private mission to get people to repeat it as often as possible. Nobody had to worry about me! I was so well-behaved, so quiet, so agreeable. Everyone knew I would always follow the rules, and I didn’t need too much attention or take up too many resources. I was an easy child, and it was clear that being easy was what was desired of me.
Adults seemed to conflate having needs with being needy, which I read as code for less lovable. I saw their looks of exasperation whenever another child threw a tantrum, and knew that if they ever looked that way at me, I would simply die of shame. Not having to worry about me was a compliment, which meant that if I required care, it was a negative thing. Meanwhile, below the surface I was desperate to be soothed and nurtured. Even a responsible, agreeable child has needs, but I had swallowed the belief that having needs was unacceptable. I deeply craved attention, but I had no idea how to get it without losing my status as “easy.” So I became an expert in pretending my needs didn’t exist, and drowned in guilt anytime the mask slipped.
As a teen and young adult, I suppressed my emotions until they forced their way out through panic attacks and bouts of depression. I developed an on-and-off eating disorder. Instead of communicating directly when I was hurting, I acted out through binge drinking and obsessive exercising. Perhaps on a subconscious level, I hoped someone would notice and care. Yet like many people, I believed that denial of my feelings and desires was the only way to get through life. I found partners who confirmed this belief, who were drawn to me because they wanted someone low maintenance. Eventually they would get fed up when, spoiler alert, I would show signs of having preferences. By adulthood, I had become an expert in self-silencing—the process of repeatedly suppressing thoughts, feelings, or needs and holding back from expressing them to others.
Self-silencing is usually an attempt to preserve a relationship, protect yourself, or please and placate others. It often develops as a survival strategy. You learn that it’s best for your physical and/or emotional well-being to deny what you feel and appease the world around you. These tendencies can start in childhood or adolescence, and are most common for those socialized as female. While self-silencing might protect you from rejection or discomfort in the short run, over time it can make you sicker. Studies show that self-silencing behaviors are correlated with higher rates of depression, anxiety, body dissatisfaction, disordered eating, and chronic illness (Jack and Dill 1992; Maji and Dixit 2019; Shouse and Nilsson 2011).
If you’ve ever felt the relief of venting, or crying tears you’ve been holding back, picture the toxic effect of doing the opposite and holding it in, over and over. It’s not just about the harm of suppressing emotions, it’s also about the harm of not getting the validation and soothing that comes from another person receiving your emotions with warmth. We all not only deserve but deep down need this opportunity to be witnessed. This is one of the most powerful elements of psychotherapy—it’s a place where you’re completely free to express your emotions and have them met with unconditional acceptance. My own foray into therapy taught me this. Being witnessed in such a healing way was so moving that it led me to change my career path and become a psychologist myself!
Understanding Your Emotional World
If you relate to the experience of self-silencing, take a moment to reflect on your early emotional education. These questions can help you understand how you came to hide or avoid certain emotions. Feel free to jot down takeaways in your journal.
Which emotions were met with positivity or warmth by your parents or caregivers? (If it was different for each parent, indicate that too).
Which emotions were expressed the most freely in your home growing up?
Were the rules different for different family members? For example, was it acceptable for one person to express anger or sadness, but other family members weren’t allowed to show these feelings?
How did the adults in your life respond when you felt happy? Sad? Angry? When you felt things were unfair?
When you were in a good mood, what was the response?
When you were cranky or in a bad mood, what was the response?
How did you ask for attention or care when you were craving it? How did the people in your life respond to those requests?
In your closest friendships of childhood, which emotions did you feel safe to express?
In romantic relationships or dating, do you try to control the other person’s perception of your emotions? How do you want them to perceive you?
Why is this perception important to you?
You may attempt to control your emotions not only to accommodate others but also because you just don’t like them. In ACT, we call efforts to try to control our inner worlds experiential avoidance and experiential control. We use experiential avoidance when we try to prevent or get rid of unwanted thoughts, feelings, or sensations, and we use experiential control when we try to cling to or prolong pleasant thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Our desire to control what we think and feel can even motivate us to act in ways that end up hurting ourselves or others.
For example, imagine your boss asks you to stay late to finish a task, and when you comply, he showers you with praise. That gives you a warm, pleasant feeling. Before you know it, you’re chasing that warm glow at all costs, taking on extra work and behaving like a doormat. Or imagine that your partner breaks up with you unexpectedly. You feel the painful sting of rejection, decide you never want to feel that sting again, and develop a pattern of pulling away from potential partners at the first sign of intimacy.
The more you try to control what you feel, the more elusive your desired feelings become, and the more you suffer consequences. You end up focusing so much on feeling good or not feeling bad that you miss out on opportunities that make life worthwhile, like standing up for what you believe in, maintaining work/life balance, or fostering connections with loved ones. Or, if you’re like me, you become so afraid of being seen as “too much” that you silence yourself at any indication that someone is annoyed or upset with you. These efforts can become a full-time job, consuming all of your energy and leaving you too depleted to pursue the things that feel meaningful to you.
This is why it’s so freeing to make peace with your emotions—especially the painful ones. Whether you like it or not, being alive involves some degree of pain that is unavoidable. You fall and break your arm, and it hurts. You get dumped, and it hurts. A loved one passes away, and it hurts. There’s no way for these things to not hurt. In that regard, pain is a natural, unavoidable experience that comes with being human.
We can unintentionally make that natural pain worse for ourselves through suffering. We create suffering by fighting against our pain, getting caught up in thoughts about how it’s not fair, looking for someone or something to blame, or beating ourselves up for experiencing pain. We create suffering by stewing over feelings of anger, resentment, frustration, impatience, or hopelessness. We create suffering by searching for ways to “solve” pain through avoidance or control efforts: numbing out through drinking, drugs, binge eating, or purging; seeking control through restricting, overexercising, ignoring or distorting reality, or any number of other strategies that may temporarily distract or numb us, but ultimately lead to greater suffering.
Recall from chapter 6 that the antidote to this inner struggle is to give yourself unconditional permission to feel. Practicing acceptance of unwanted emotions will free you from the fight against them. Acceptance is tricky because many people interpret it to mean you have to like what you’re feeling. But accepting the feeling of fear that arises in your body when you get up to give a presentation doesn’t mean you like that feeling or that you want it to be there. It just means you’re allowing it to exist. The alternative would be to get upset about the fact that you’re feeling that way (which may make the feeling more intense), or to opt out of speaking opportunities to avoid the fear (which would mean giving up something meaningful).
Accepting what you cannot control is an intelligent choice, because it frees up your energy and resources to go toward the things you can control. The pain and difficulties of everyday life won’t disappear, but you’ll have a different (and likely less exhausting) relationship with life’s hardships. You’ll be better equipped to act in ways that match your values, so that you can feel proud of yourself looking back on your day, even if you went through some difficult feelings. In fact, while this isn’t the goal of acceptance, it can also take the intensity away from those tough emotions. You might still feel sad, scared, lonely, or helpless sometimes, but those same feelings might be just a smidge less bothersome, because you’re not fighting them, and because you know they’re temporary. As I often remind my clients, feelings don’t need fixing; they just need time.
Moving Through Tough Emotions
Next time you’re having an intense emotion, try using this activity to approach it with acceptance and curiosity; you can follow along here or download the steps at http://www.newharbinger.com/54063.
Scan your body from head to toe. Notice any areas of sensation, and describe them. Which parts of your body have sensation? What is the sensation like—is it big, small, heavy, light, tight, loose, sharp, stabbing, throbbing, aching, tingling, numb, hot, cold? Are there edges to the sensation? Is there a shape, color, image, noise, texture, or flavor?
Do the sensations change when you start to describe them? Do they move around to other parts of your body, become more intense or less intense, or go away?
Now, try to self-regulate by using one of these strategies:
Take five or six slow, deep breaths. Inhale deeply and fill your belly. Then exhale slowly and steadily.
Wiggle your toes. Press your feet into the ground below you. Straighten your spine, and roll your shoulders a few times.
Find a scented candle and inhale, noticing the smell.
Put on scented lotion or dab essential oils on your wrists, and notice the scent.
Hold an ice cube and feel the sensation of coldness in your hand.
Pick a color, then scan your surroundings and notice everything around you that contains that color.
Splash water on your face, then dab it dry with a towel.
Which regulation strategy did you try? What happened to the emotions as you used that strategy?
Remember, your goal is not to make the emotions or sensations go away. They will eventually go away on their own. Your job is just to pay attention and notice what’s happening, and whether these strategies make it a bit easier to tolerate the emotion while it’s happening.
Don’t Kill the Messenger
Most of us don’t receive the best emotional education growing up. By the time we reach adulthood, we might have some emotional awareness, but it often needs to be fine-tuned. It’s like going from basic conversational skills in a foreign language to becoming fluent. In fact, you can think of emotions as a sort of language, communicating various messages to you. Being able to discern what you’re feeling, and what might be underneath those feelings, is incredibly useful.
I first learned this idea of treating inner signals as messengers from mindfulness teacher Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn. His approach, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), involves helping people change their relationship with pain by accepting it. MBSR helps the pain feel less intense and upsetting, even if the pain itself doesn’t go away. In Full Catastrophe Living (2013), Dr. Kabat-Zinn explains that pain, and your feelings about it, are often bringing you messages. He writes, “In the old days, if a king didn’t like the message he was given, he would sometimes have the messenger killed. This is tantamount to suppressing your symptoms or your feelings because they are unwanted.” When you ignore or deny your pain, you may think you’re moving toward relief. However, the message that the pain was trying to bring to you doesn’t disappear. Killing the messenger it only makes the message more garbled and harder to understand.
Meanwhile, if you pay attention without judgment, you can recognize the message. Physical pain often has clear messages: the pain of a sprained ankle reminds you not to bear weight on it while it heals. The discomfort of a head cold reminds you to drink fluids and get extra rest while your body fights the illness. Emotional signals can be tougher to interpret. What does the pain of heartbreak communicate? Perhaps its message is in what that relationship meant to you, or how deeply you want to love another person in the future. The pain of grief can bring you the message of how much you miss the person who is gone, and remind you not to take loved ones for granted. The pain of feeling dismissed by a friend can bring you the message that some boundary setting is in order.
Similarly, pleasant and enjoyable emotions can also bring useful information. Feelings of love can help bond you to your partner or child and remind you to invest in your attachment to them. Feeling moved as you watch a happy couple share their wedding vows, or feeling happiness as your new puppy licks your face can keep you grounded in the present, reminding you to witness all of life’s richness. When you make space for the full spectrum of your emotions without trying to control them, you can open up to the valuable sources of information they bring.
There are certainly times when an emotion can bring with it a distorted message. Thanks to conditioning, our emotional reactions aren’t always pure indications of something that matters to us. Guilt is one of these often distorted emotions that many toxic strivers struggle to interpret. If you were taught by your family, community, or society that you should be a certain way, you might feel guilty when you deviate from that standard. Because I was conditioned to accommodate others even when it hurt me, I didn’t learn to communicate assertively until adulthood. As a result, I still experience guilt as an immediate internal response to asserting myself. When I tell someone not to yell at me, or decline an invitation because I’m socially tapped out, I often feel a pang of guilt, as if I did something wrong. Deep down I know I’m allowed to protect my well-being, but I still have remnants of that old fear that if I don’t succumb to others’ wishes, I’ll be deemed unlovable.
