Breaking the Silence: Part 1- Brainwashed by The Systems that Oppress Us into thinking Thin Privilige is Fake News

Disclaimer

I live, + have always lived, in a what society has deemed a "thin" + somewhat “conventionally attractive” body. Just to be clear, when I say “conventionally attractive” I don’t mean what I think is beautiful. I am talking about a body that is pretty close to society’s "Eurocentric Beauty Standards" However, I know I need to own the fact that I have not always recognized this.

NOTE: This is not therapy, nor should this be a substitute for therapy. This is merely for educational purposes with the intent of sharing information, education, and advocacy for this social justice issue that I am passionate about. 

Society's Way of Dealing with Uncomfortable Emotions

When we feel hurt, we must be gentle, kind, & compassionate with ourselves or so they say. Love heals pain.  So we are told to "pamper thyself!" OOF. How Invalidating is that? We are literally told that we ALL can all self soothe, no matter how unbearable life feels. Observe your surroundings using your 5X senses. Look, listen, & feel.... HAHA.  Welcome to modern day therapy & DBT practice known as "Mindfulness".

Follow along as I break down this crazy ideal & offer a tangible solution when self soothing seems like a foreign concept-unless it involves some form of self sabotage wrapped up in a pretty bow with the "oh so seductive promise" of fleeting relief.

What's Actually Going On When Emotions Get Heavy

My Personal Perspective

You see, when I feel physical or emotional discomfort, my first instinct is to literally say "byeeee" and flee from my body. First comes experiencing my body react to the discomfort. The subtle shift in breathing, the increased flutter of my heart rate from a constant to a rapid pounding, kind-of like 2011 EDM song right before the big drop. The inability to stay present within my body hits next, and all I desire is to escape, escape my body- what society has told me is my home, but it doesn't feel safe. My response is to break free and shed my skin, and I crave to be as far away from my body as possible. 

And then I feel an even more intense desire to avoid my current situation. Within seconds, I impulsively, have opted to abort the mission of remaining in my body, and have set out in a mad dash to escape. My mind is already lingering about five feet away from my physical body. 

Reality sets in quickly, and I feel stuck, trapped, unable to take action. I freeze, because without being a whole integrated person, I cannot move. In the past, I would numb out this incredibly excruciating experience that mind was forced to endure through food. 

My brain would make up plans for depriving my body. Because a deprived and malnourished brain, cannot function as well as its healthy counterparts. A starving brain, well let's be real, the catastrophizing & ruminating thoughts that plague my existence become dimmer. The brain goes into self preservation mode, and so the anxieties and physical sensations are still there, but they are muted. And for a fleeting moment, I can breathe. I can process. And I can simply be present. 

Sadly the relief is temporary. As it always is when you opt for instant gratification. While all of this occurred, my frightened and panicked sense of self would go dormant. 

These days, I recognize the faulty logic and pattern. Rather than encourage and support the escape, I know I must choose to return to my body. I need to gather all of my wisdom & strength. That is the only way.

We have to try to be mindful of our emotions. We must lean into the discomfort, embrace the emotion, no matter how intense, and we have to let the pain in, accept it, face it, so that it may pass. Because the secret we are ALL searching for, the cure from emotional suffering, and feeling better is by sitting in the emotional pain.

"The more you hide your feelings, the more they show. The more you deny your feelings, the more they grow" -Unknown. 

*(I forget that love heals pain)

When we feel emotion, especially fear and pain, we must be gentle, kind, and compassionate with ourselves.Easier said than done, I know. But the truth is Love has the potential to heal pain. 

I was always paralyzed with insecurity & fear, which left me in a constant state of self-criticism. But the crazy, twisted reality is, that we react negatively to our own negative emotions, aka making them obstacles to be overcome, eliminated, or defeated, we run into trouble.

Our reactions to our negative emotions, can transform what might just be a brief, passing sadness filled day, into a spiral of depression and persistent dissatisfaction & unhappiness in life.

Fact

No matter how hard we try to avoid negative emotions, they will stalk us. Following us to the ends of the earth. Difficult emotions, like shame, loneliness, fear, despair, confusion, sadness, and anger are a natural part of what it means to be human. It’s not possible to avoid negative feels.

Solution

We can learn how to deal with our emotions in a different way. By working on accepting our feels, and embracing them fully as they are, moment to moment. (without judgement or trying to fix change or alter them) For me, this has meant creating space in my life for all of the parts of experience, the ups and the downs.

Barriers to the Solution- Avoidance 

Unfortunately, in society, 99% of us have not been given the tools to deal with + tolerate our own FEELZ, let alone those of other people. For me, Not only do I want to avoid feeling pain at all costs, I also want to prevent the people I care about from feeling their pain.

Recently I found myself in a situation where I was confronted with a past loss, and although it has been two years since the loss, I found myself emotionally wrecked, as though it had just happened yesterday. In my sadness, I reached out to a few friends for comfort and was surprised at how difficult it was for them to tolerate my difficult emotions. In an effort to help, they wanted to battle the sadness and told me things like I was sitting in self-pity and feeling sorry for myself; that I needed to practice more gratitude in that moment.

Again, lemme be completely clear! They weren’t trying to be hurtful; quite the opposite actually, they were just trying to help me stop feeling sad. But stopping our emotions is like stopping the inevitable, we are merely prolonging our suffering and exacerbating the emotion.

Thankfully, I’ve done enough work on this path to know that that was not what I needed. In that moment, I simply needed to allow myself to feel sad. I knew the feeling wasn’t going to last forever and I had a choice, I could either drag it out by waging war on myself, or I could recognize that, for whatever reason, in that moment, I just felt sad.

Again, our reactions to our difficult emotions can transform what may have been just a brief, passing sadness (as was the case for me in this situation) into persistent dissatisfaction and unhappiness (literally almost two whole decades of my life).

Defining Self Compassion Without All The BS/ Fluff

By learning how to notice and observe how we are with our own pain, we can use that information, and practice responding with more kindness and understanding, instead of greeting difficult emotions with slammed door and fighting a futile battle with them, I wonder what would happen if we could get curious and open ourselves up to to being vulnerable and real. I wonder if this could lead to something big, maybe even genuine healing and a new experience, a new way of living; this is my definition of self-compassion.

If you’re anything like me, aka someone who is used to avoiding your emotions, having conversations in your head about all the things you could improve on (this is also known as having "high error detection") or find yourself rolling your eyes and beating yourself up mentally for feeling sad or lonely, if you hide from the world whenever you make a simple mistake, or if you endlessly obsess over how you could have prevented the mistake in the first place, self-compassion probably seems like this incomprehensible and maybe even terrifying concept. But here''s the thing. It is literally imperative that we embrace this idea if we aspire to live a real, authentic, and worth while life.

Here's the reality, whenever we fight against our feelings, regardless of what emotion it is we are avoiding or refusing to acknowledge, we end up feeling even more pain. Why? Because we get trapped in it.

Have you ever played with those dollar store toys? The finger traps. The cardboard/ paper like Chinese finger toys? They are literally mini handcuffs for your fingers. The more you struggle to break free, the tighter the toy gets around your poor little fingers. The harder you pull to break free, the more difficult it will be because now you have not only tightened the toy, but you now are stuck with the fact that your fingers may or may not lose circulation depending on how tight the toy is wrapped around your fingers. 

The only way to break free is do the exact opposite of fighting, we have to sit with that annoying finger trap long enough to calm down and get curious. We have to get curious about what is going on, asking questions like the following: "Why is the finger trap tightening when I pull my fingers in attempt to break free?" "What happens when I pull fingers apart?" "What is my natural instinct in this situation?" "What could I do differently?" "Are my emotions getting in the way of my ability to critically think through this puzzle?" Just like how our fingers get trapped in the finger handcuffs, feelings get stuck, frozen in time, and we get stuck in them. The more we fight them, the more difficult it is for us to get curious and understand their purpose and allow them to pass.

Difficult emotions can easily become destructive and break down our mind, body, and spirit. The happiness we so desperately crave and long for in relationships seems to elude us. Satisfaction of our relationships and achievement lies just beyond our reach. We drag ourselves along through the day, arguing with our physical aches and pains. The problem is not the negative emotion itself, but how we react to the emotion. When we fight against negative emotions they grow, we feed them, our fear and desperate need to rid ourselves of them, cause them to grow and stick around longer than they ever could on their own. 

Being able to sink into our bodies, to get curious about what we are feeling, and to observe whatever comes up without attachment, or judgement, or attempting to change the situation is powerful. It takes the power away from the negative emotion, and places it back in your arms. You now dictate the longevity of the emotion and the impact that it can have on you.

Emotions literally can last minutes approximately 7-13 minutes depending on the research you read. Without ruminating or attempting to change our emotional state, emotions have no power over us. But the problem is, our brains don't enjoy negative emotions, and society has brain washed us to believe that we have good and bad emotions and that there is only space in the world for good emotions. This is false. When we check the facts, all emotions are valid. All emotions serve a purpose. And all emotions are a gateway into our needs and boundaries or lack of them. If we can learn to view our emotions as insight into our life, and if we can learn to fully feel them, not just experience them in a brief second, and get uncomfortable and then attempt to stop or change the emotion, we might notice that the emotion loses intensity or passes sooner than if we had fought against it. 

Change comes naturally when we open ourselves to emotional pain with uncommon kindness. Instead of blaming, criticizing, and trying to fix ourselves when things go wrong or we feel bad, we can start with self-compassion. This simple, although definitely not easy, shift can make a tremendous difference in your life.

It’s important to remember that embracing your strengths and well-being does not mean ignoring your difficulties. We are measured by our ability to work through our hardships and insecurities, not avoid them.

We are all fighting some sort of battle, and when we accept this truth for ourselves, and others, it becomes a lot easier to say, “I’m struggling right now and that is okay.”

Not being okay all the time is perfectly okay.