It's absolutely heartbreaking how common this experience is, especially for women. I'm out of my 20s now, and looking back at how my friends and I were treated makes me incredibly sad. I didn't expect there to be so many people who are so comfortable mistreating others.
To be clear, 20 year old me would have screamed at *all* advice this perceptively judged because she had baby's first existential crisis to fuck out and was in no mood for self-awareness thanks.
“Who taught you that you were nothing?” The Man did. This is the perfect woman in a capitalist world. It makes her a perfect employee, too. When you say prehistoric you mean medieval times. It is important to patriarchy that women feel worthless without the love of a man, any man, even the worst man. And that means father, brother, uncle, priest, employer, etc. because when women value themselves it’s a threat to the status quo.
Sep 5, 2022·edited Sep 5, 2022Liked by Heather Havrilesky
Reading this was profound. I could have written this letter in college - I mean the details of the guy were different, but the feelings involved and the messages I got from him were exactly the same. I wish I could go back and give this response to my 19, 20, 21-year-old self. I've never fully been able to articulate what happened to me at that time in my life - but this was exactly it, everything you laid out so clearly here, Heather. I feel like reading this healed something in me just now.
I can relate to LW, and this experience can fall under one term: codependent (labels aren't always useful but for me they name the problem). My relationships imploded precisely because I'd erased myself so much to give other people what I thought they wanted that I ceased to be a person at all, and it's hard to respect (or engage with) someone who has no regard for herself. I read Demi Moore's memoir "Inside Out" recently, and from perusing the internet it seems to be a more common experience than I'd thought (I just assumed everyone, or 90% of people, had a sufficiently wonderful childhood).
For me, this lack of self-regard is pervasive - it affects every area of my life. My biggest fear is that, because it's such an insidious and slippery problem, I will fail to spot it in time (the way I didn't see it in my most recent relationship). I'm 26 now but I could be 60, 70, or 80 with the same model of what the world feels like. I've spent a decade in and out of therapy exploring what's going on, naming things, raising my awareness of patterns I carry out. I journaled, drew, read books, took walks, talked to people, spent brief stints in meditation, tried running, got my brain zapped, took a dozen different medications. I've been running to solve this since I was 16. I know more now than I did then, but it never ceases to surprise me that the aftereffects of childhood last so long - even in this letter. It makes me sad that sometimes we have to try so hard to love ourselves, a gift that we could have received with no strings attached.
Everyone’s different, but remember your prefrontal cortex only just finished developing at 26. I’m about to turn 30 and have finally turned a corner in the past couple years. For me it was helpful to spend most of my social time talking to the people in my life who make me feel safe and steady, even if that’s only one or two people. The goal is to change what feels normal to you - then you can spot an unhealthy dynamic a mile away.
29 year-old checking in—it appears more « feel the old repressed feelings that are driving you like a caged swarm of bees telling you to FLOOR IT » and less « let me use my thinking brain with words that fence feelings in so I don’t have to be inconvenient » is good
This is great advice. I have some friends who put up with really poor treatment - it was terrible to watch - and I wish I had had this to show them.
I'm curious about the other side of this. How does a person get so careless and cruel with other people? I cannot imagine ever telling someone that they're nothing, much less expecting them to still like me afterward.
The people that I know who have acted like this are predominately male and most of them don't seem to have any major trauma or mistreatment in their past. They may not be wonderful people in a general sense, but they do seem to treat their friends/family/coworkers better, so it's not like they're not capable of it. From my perspective, it seems like a horrible combination of entitlement, objectification, and misogyny. I would be interested if that perception is accurate or if there's something else going on.
It’s fascinating, isn’t it? What makes person treat others as if they were somehow lesser of a human?
My theory is that it’s all of those things (entitlement, objectification and misogyny) plus a simple fact that knocking others down a peg works.
Did you ever notice what many men do when they ‘negotiate’ at work? They start by telling the other person what they do wrong, they point out fundamental flaw in their thinking, preferably one that is close to the persons soft underbelly.
The amount of willy wagging out there is just staggering.
But the real problem is that this behaviour pattern works so it gets reinforced.
Sadly, women fall for this trick too. Being terrible problem solvers themselves, those men became adept at manipulating other, more capable members of society to solve the problems for them. It’s habitual. Sprinkle a dose of wonderful societal conditioning that girls are bombarded with (fawn, smooth things over, protect the relationships, don’t rock the boat, be a good girl or you won’t keep a man, you need a man for happily ever after..) et voila!
I don’t know about you but I’m pretty angry about it. I feel cheated, set up for failure and taken advantage of over and over. I look around me and usually see mothers in their late 30-ies and early 40-ies, how exhausted, overworked (literally and emotionally) unsupported, unheard and unhappy they are.
All while their partners take full advantage of free cleaner, cook, nanny, etc. at home - they pretend they’ve two left hands at home so they can focus on ‘provide and protect’ through work (oh he’s working sooooo hard! And then he’s soooo stressed from all this hard work he needs to train for a marathon). We might think we’re so above the stay at home mum trope but let me tell you - you will be very lucky to find a woman at work who didn’t feel that at some point in her career she didn’t have to sacrifice her work in order to pick up slack at home. Do men feel such obligation? Not at all. I won’t even go into how this pans out financially over the course of our lives, we all know it.
My point is - especially to those of you in your 20-ies reading - don’t fall for it. We need to break the mold that conditions us for self-abandonment and self-sacrifice as if it somehow was a price to pay for love and happy family.
I'm twice as old Ias LW and my soft, easygoing, vulnerable parts have become the parts I'm most proud of even though I didn't stick up for them enough when I was her age. She's ahead of the curve and I hope she'll go easy on herself.
“… the engulfing pain of self-abandonment, which you interpret as passion” - ah yes! I’ve been there so many times. How helpful to have it expressed this way.
I wonder though how does one distinguish this pretend passion from the real thing? And how does one stop avoiding men you think are too boring/don’t spark you enough (when they would be good for you!) without ending up in a wishy-washy relationship where you’d like more passion? How do you get healthy passion & not settle for someone you’re not in love with? I guess it starts from caring for yourself & your boundaries, but having (i hope) left behind the people who treat me badly, I’m not sure about how to get the good things. And I’m more than twice the LW’s age 😳
Maybe the key to this is somewhere in the perception of "boring" and "spark"? I used to tell my friend who always dated narcissistic guys that her sense of "attraction" had to be reconsidered, because she was *literally* attracted to narcissists. Narcissists gave her that spark! I know this is kind of tenuous ground, since women are told constantly not to trust their feelings... but it's turned out to be true in my experience. My partner of 7 years started out as a friend, a person I'd known for 2 years and had never given me any "spark." We started spending a ton of time together, I started getting some soft feelings that I was shocked by. He looked me right in the face and said "I like you. I want to be with you." And that's how he's always been---the opposite of wishy-washy, totally committed and present. He's not explosive, inconsistent, or dismissive of my needs---all qualities that are often mistaken for "exciting" or "passionate." Sometimes his total presence straight up makes me want to hide! Lol. Love like that can sometimes feel more terrifying than blissful. But I think it's the real thing.
Thanks for sharing this, I love hearing healthy, positive examples of how people got together with their (good, great!) partners. I’ve just found myself, yet again, caught at the beginning of an unhealthy dynamic and I think examples like this nudge me back in the right direction.
Best of luck to you!! To offer another happy story: the friend I mentioned who used to date narcissists took a break from dating for a few months, but met a new guy at the beginning of the summer. He's the first one she actually introduced to me (lol), I thought he was very cool. Early days still, but she said the difference between him and other guys was clear right away. :)
That’s great news :) Taking a break for a refresh sounds smart. I think I’ll say how I feel, good practice to be open and honest even if this isn’t the guy for me, and then act accordingly. Thanks for your stories!
(Not to say that there's no conflict, or to make it sound like he's some kind of perfect being, lol. He's not, and neither am I! But there's definitely a version of me who would find all this showing up SUPER boring compared to the fun and drama of a man who won't be clear or honest about how he feels for me, who is out of reach, who I can fantasize and wonder about all the time, etc.)
What struck me the most about this response is the challenge to be a bit more boring and dull in interactions with others. I relate to the writer’s impulse to reach out to friends about this guy and her misery. I still find myself doing these things decades past college with my pre-frontal cortex allegedly fully intact. Society often encourages us to reach out to loved ones for support (see: the majority of articles online written about experiencing emotional distress). I have found that reaching out is often an effective way to burn through people. Despite wanting to take your friends’ advice (and stop telling your friends about how much you want to leave this guy but can’t), letting go of the drama, being more boring, it feels a bit like death. I’m usually a rather calm, mild-mannered person, but there’s a part of me that relishes the struggle. The aching need to win by giving everything to a guy and becoming more nothing in the process, it’s a destructive force that makes me feel more alive. People have witnessed all of the drama that came with it and have left. Pushing down the feelings, distracting, isn’t the answer, though. That’s being boring with yourself when the task is to be a bit more boring with others. I guess art could be essential here. I could make some highly emotional art about the pain, art that is only for me. Strum on a guitar and howl. I wish for everyone a bit of space where they can make art, sometimes a bit loudly, just for themselves. Take a break from the status, the grades, and capture the feeling of this.
I notice the language here. "boring", for me, is just another word for "unlikeable". It's also not used anywhere in the response, which makes me wonder if your challenge is to find/make your calm everyday self just as interesting and valuable as the temperamental artist self.
I guess the one thing I don't understand is...what do you do once you've felt your feelings vs intellectualizing them. Heather often talks about mining them and building from them and it confuses me to no end. Mine them for patterns? Mine them for assumptions? Old beliefs? I've been working hard the past few years to do more feeling and less thinking, but it hasn't led me anywhere. Am I looking at it wrong?
This whole "feel your feelings!!" thing gets used in a million different ways online, I've found it confusing too. One book I've found particularly helpful is The Language of Emotions by Karla McLaren. It's not perfect, but it gives a lot of ways you can usefully interpret and channel emotions.
Personally, after a lot of work (and automatic writing), I got to a point where I was thinking and feeling freely at the same time, and could recognise it. I then realised that a lot of my thought processes were great for logical thinking, but actively blocked that kind of creative flow and got me stuck going in circles in my head. So for me it's now more about experimenting with different ways of thinking and processing, and building up a bit of a toolbox, as it were. It's all pretty abstract and arbitrary, but as an example, I was avoiding dreamlike visual thinking when it's actually the quickest way to check in with myself physically and process what I find.
Omg - if at ALL possible (but no presh!!!!! Literally appreciate this answer as a spark for me to look into my metacognitoon a bit more!!!) - would so appreciate hearing about this - “dreamlike visual thinking when it's actually the quickest way to check in with myself physically and process what I find” - I’m super struggling with whether it’s my dreamlike visual thinking keeping me stuck Eg because I’m attached to some sort of immediate future that seems realistic because it is within the laws of physics but my body & brain combo obviously aren’t into it/ able to pursue it at all - & so it’s been a bit heartbreaking because I want to be able to enjoy & be grounded by my visual dreaming - and it feels like it’s wrong to totally write it off but I just don’t know how to even rly think about it / let alone how to process how else I could use it. EG may I ask why you’d been avoiding it? And how it seems to ground you now? Xxxxx
I meant to answer this but it's a hard one! First of all, most of my thinking takes the form of a monologue or conversation with a third party i.e. it's very real world, language-based and grammatically correct. Fine for everyday purposes, but the effort of translating everything into concrete sentences is just an obfuscation sometimes, and I can actually feel (now) the subtle physical tension in my body when it's not working for me. Conversely I feel a certain level of relaxation/flow state when my thinking is going somewhere.
I avoided wildly abstract visual thinking partly because it was out of my comfort zone and partly because I didn't trust it would work. It gets easier each time I find something that actually helps me.
For example: I would never think of myself as into auras, but it's really useful for me to imagine the edge of my personal space as a colourful field during grounding exercises. The exact colour and texture is something I let surprise me, and my mind is consistent enough that I can get a read on my deeper emotional state, or at least pay attention to drastic changes.
Second example: I was getting nowhere thinking about my uncertainty in one area of life via my default monologue so I decided to visualise actual letters and words in front of me. I find this extremely hard to do and hadn't really tried this framing before. After a while I got a very clear image of a small, neatly sectioned booklet explaining myself to myself in second person. Not a particularly mystical vision! It was clearly based on my precious print copy of some technical standards I use for work, but it turned out to be a great IRL writing exercise that got me a long way.
So I hope that makes sense: it's a very experimental and playful process, which honestly feels a bit scary to apply to serious matters sometimes, so I expect I will be working on it for a long time. It's also not really related to my daydreams, but maybe that's going to change in future.
As always this resonates so much with me. Seeing the “prehistoric” reasons behind our actions is so liberating and allows us to have a truly meaningful relationship with ourselves and others.
Ken, it’s always so good to have your measured and kind-hearted insights in the comments section!
I could not agree more that LW’s tormentor is a simple creature (aren’t we all?), a product of societal conditioning and blissfully unaware how damaging the patterns of his behaviour are.
We women also have a role to play in this dynamic because we enable it. Why would one not repeat a trick, if it works?
I heard a wonderful phrase recently: we find a person whose teeth fit our wounds.
We can’t control the other person’s behaviour but there is power in owning our part and healing.
Anyone else's inner 20 year old screaming at this entire response like holy water just got thrown on them?
It's absolutely heartbreaking how common this experience is, especially for women. I'm out of my 20s now, and looking back at how my friends and I were treated makes me incredibly sad. I didn't expect there to be so many people who are so comfortable mistreating others.
Try inner 30 year old and on.
Yes! I was almost 60 before I started working on this!
To be clear, 20 year old me would have screamed at *all* advice this perceptively judged because she had baby's first existential crisis to fuck out and was in no mood for self-awareness thanks.
Totally!
“Who taught you that you were nothing?” The Man did. This is the perfect woman in a capitalist world. It makes her a perfect employee, too. When you say prehistoric you mean medieval times. It is important to patriarchy that women feel worthless without the love of a man, any man, even the worst man. And that means father, brother, uncle, priest, employer, etc. because when women value themselves it’s a threat to the status quo.
Fight for your life!
Silvia Federici fangirls unite 💫
Reading this was profound. I could have written this letter in college - I mean the details of the guy were different, but the feelings involved and the messages I got from him were exactly the same. I wish I could go back and give this response to my 19, 20, 21-year-old self. I've never fully been able to articulate what happened to me at that time in my life - but this was exactly it, everything you laid out so clearly here, Heather. I feel like reading this healed something in me just now.
I can relate to LW, and this experience can fall under one term: codependent (labels aren't always useful but for me they name the problem). My relationships imploded precisely because I'd erased myself so much to give other people what I thought they wanted that I ceased to be a person at all, and it's hard to respect (or engage with) someone who has no regard for herself. I read Demi Moore's memoir "Inside Out" recently, and from perusing the internet it seems to be a more common experience than I'd thought (I just assumed everyone, or 90% of people, had a sufficiently wonderful childhood).
For me, this lack of self-regard is pervasive - it affects every area of my life. My biggest fear is that, because it's such an insidious and slippery problem, I will fail to spot it in time (the way I didn't see it in my most recent relationship). I'm 26 now but I could be 60, 70, or 80 with the same model of what the world feels like. I've spent a decade in and out of therapy exploring what's going on, naming things, raising my awareness of patterns I carry out. I journaled, drew, read books, took walks, talked to people, spent brief stints in meditation, tried running, got my brain zapped, took a dozen different medications. I've been running to solve this since I was 16. I know more now than I did then, but it never ceases to surprise me that the aftereffects of childhood last so long - even in this letter. It makes me sad that sometimes we have to try so hard to love ourselves, a gift that we could have received with no strings attached.
Everyone’s different, but remember your prefrontal cortex only just finished developing at 26. I’m about to turn 30 and have finally turned a corner in the past couple years. For me it was helpful to spend most of my social time talking to the people in my life who make me feel safe and steady, even if that’s only one or two people. The goal is to change what feels normal to you - then you can spot an unhealthy dynamic a mile away.
29 year-old checking in—it appears more « feel the old repressed feelings that are driving you like a caged swarm of bees telling you to FLOOR IT » and less « let me use my thinking brain with words that fence feelings in so I don’t have to be inconvenient » is good
This is great advice. I have some friends who put up with really poor treatment - it was terrible to watch - and I wish I had had this to show them.
I'm curious about the other side of this. How does a person get so careless and cruel with other people? I cannot imagine ever telling someone that they're nothing, much less expecting them to still like me afterward.
The people that I know who have acted like this are predominately male and most of them don't seem to have any major trauma or mistreatment in their past. They may not be wonderful people in a general sense, but they do seem to treat their friends/family/coworkers better, so it's not like they're not capable of it. From my perspective, it seems like a horrible combination of entitlement, objectification, and misogyny. I would be interested if that perception is accurate or if there's something else going on.
It’s fascinating, isn’t it? What makes person treat others as if they were somehow lesser of a human?
My theory is that it’s all of those things (entitlement, objectification and misogyny) plus a simple fact that knocking others down a peg works.
Did you ever notice what many men do when they ‘negotiate’ at work? They start by telling the other person what they do wrong, they point out fundamental flaw in their thinking, preferably one that is close to the persons soft underbelly.
The amount of willy wagging out there is just staggering.
But the real problem is that this behaviour pattern works so it gets reinforced.
Sadly, women fall for this trick too. Being terrible problem solvers themselves, those men became adept at manipulating other, more capable members of society to solve the problems for them. It’s habitual. Sprinkle a dose of wonderful societal conditioning that girls are bombarded with (fawn, smooth things over, protect the relationships, don’t rock the boat, be a good girl or you won’t keep a man, you need a man for happily ever after..) et voila!
I don’t know about you but I’m pretty angry about it. I feel cheated, set up for failure and taken advantage of over and over. I look around me and usually see mothers in their late 30-ies and early 40-ies, how exhausted, overworked (literally and emotionally) unsupported, unheard and unhappy they are.
All while their partners take full advantage of free cleaner, cook, nanny, etc. at home - they pretend they’ve two left hands at home so they can focus on ‘provide and protect’ through work (oh he’s working sooooo hard! And then he’s soooo stressed from all this hard work he needs to train for a marathon). We might think we’re so above the stay at home mum trope but let me tell you - you will be very lucky to find a woman at work who didn’t feel that at some point in her career she didn’t have to sacrifice her work in order to pick up slack at home. Do men feel such obligation? Not at all. I won’t even go into how this pans out financially over the course of our lives, we all know it.
My point is - especially to those of you in your 20-ies reading - don’t fall for it. We need to break the mold that conditions us for self-abandonment and self-sacrifice as if it somehow was a price to pay for love and happy family.
It’s a lie.
YES!!! All of it!!!
"Self-abandonment is the only place where you’ll let yourself feel feelings." Reading this felt like the floor falling out from under me.
I'm twice as old Ias LW and my soft, easygoing, vulnerable parts have become the parts I'm most proud of even though I didn't stick up for them enough when I was her age. She's ahead of the curve and I hope she'll go easy on herself.
“… the engulfing pain of self-abandonment, which you interpret as passion” - ah yes! I’ve been there so many times. How helpful to have it expressed this way.
I wonder though how does one distinguish this pretend passion from the real thing? And how does one stop avoiding men you think are too boring/don’t spark you enough (when they would be good for you!) without ending up in a wishy-washy relationship where you’d like more passion? How do you get healthy passion & not settle for someone you’re not in love with? I guess it starts from caring for yourself & your boundaries, but having (i hope) left behind the people who treat me badly, I’m not sure about how to get the good things. And I’m more than twice the LW’s age 😳
Maybe the key to this is somewhere in the perception of "boring" and "spark"? I used to tell my friend who always dated narcissistic guys that her sense of "attraction" had to be reconsidered, because she was *literally* attracted to narcissists. Narcissists gave her that spark! I know this is kind of tenuous ground, since women are told constantly not to trust their feelings... but it's turned out to be true in my experience. My partner of 7 years started out as a friend, a person I'd known for 2 years and had never given me any "spark." We started spending a ton of time together, I started getting some soft feelings that I was shocked by. He looked me right in the face and said "I like you. I want to be with you." And that's how he's always been---the opposite of wishy-washy, totally committed and present. He's not explosive, inconsistent, or dismissive of my needs---all qualities that are often mistaken for "exciting" or "passionate." Sometimes his total presence straight up makes me want to hide! Lol. Love like that can sometimes feel more terrifying than blissful. But I think it's the real thing.
Thanks for sharing this, I love hearing healthy, positive examples of how people got together with their (good, great!) partners. I’ve just found myself, yet again, caught at the beginning of an unhealthy dynamic and I think examples like this nudge me back in the right direction.
Best of luck to you!! To offer another happy story: the friend I mentioned who used to date narcissists took a break from dating for a few months, but met a new guy at the beginning of the summer. He's the first one she actually introduced to me (lol), I thought he was very cool. Early days still, but she said the difference between him and other guys was clear right away. :)
That’s great news :) Taking a break for a refresh sounds smart. I think I’ll say how I feel, good practice to be open and honest even if this isn’t the guy for me, and then act accordingly. Thanks for your stories!
(Not to say that there's no conflict, or to make it sound like he's some kind of perfect being, lol. He's not, and neither am I! But there's definitely a version of me who would find all this showing up SUPER boring compared to the fun and drama of a man who won't be clear or honest about how he feels for me, who is out of reach, who I can fantasize and wonder about all the time, etc.)
Thanks for that answer - super helpful - yes I am attracted to narcissists!
What struck me the most about this response is the challenge to be a bit more boring and dull in interactions with others. I relate to the writer’s impulse to reach out to friends about this guy and her misery. I still find myself doing these things decades past college with my pre-frontal cortex allegedly fully intact. Society often encourages us to reach out to loved ones for support (see: the majority of articles online written about experiencing emotional distress). I have found that reaching out is often an effective way to burn through people. Despite wanting to take your friends’ advice (and stop telling your friends about how much you want to leave this guy but can’t), letting go of the drama, being more boring, it feels a bit like death. I’m usually a rather calm, mild-mannered person, but there’s a part of me that relishes the struggle. The aching need to win by giving everything to a guy and becoming more nothing in the process, it’s a destructive force that makes me feel more alive. People have witnessed all of the drama that came with it and have left. Pushing down the feelings, distracting, isn’t the answer, though. That’s being boring with yourself when the task is to be a bit more boring with others. I guess art could be essential here. I could make some highly emotional art about the pain, art that is only for me. Strum on a guitar and howl. I wish for everyone a bit of space where they can make art, sometimes a bit loudly, just for themselves. Take a break from the status, the grades, and capture the feeling of this.
I notice the language here. "boring", for me, is just another word for "unlikeable". It's also not used anywhere in the response, which makes me wonder if your challenge is to find/make your calm everyday self just as interesting and valuable as the temperamental artist self.
I guess the one thing I don't understand is...what do you do once you've felt your feelings vs intellectualizing them. Heather often talks about mining them and building from them and it confuses me to no end. Mine them for patterns? Mine them for assumptions? Old beliefs? I've been working hard the past few years to do more feeling and less thinking, but it hasn't led me anywhere. Am I looking at it wrong?
This whole "feel your feelings!!" thing gets used in a million different ways online, I've found it confusing too. One book I've found particularly helpful is The Language of Emotions by Karla McLaren. It's not perfect, but it gives a lot of ways you can usefully interpret and channel emotions.
Personally, after a lot of work (and automatic writing), I got to a point where I was thinking and feeling freely at the same time, and could recognise it. I then realised that a lot of my thought processes were great for logical thinking, but actively blocked that kind of creative flow and got me stuck going in circles in my head. So for me it's now more about experimenting with different ways of thinking and processing, and building up a bit of a toolbox, as it were. It's all pretty abstract and arbitrary, but as an example, I was avoiding dreamlike visual thinking when it's actually the quickest way to check in with myself physically and process what I find.
Omg - if at ALL possible (but no presh!!!!! Literally appreciate this answer as a spark for me to look into my metacognitoon a bit more!!!) - would so appreciate hearing about this - “dreamlike visual thinking when it's actually the quickest way to check in with myself physically and process what I find” - I’m super struggling with whether it’s my dreamlike visual thinking keeping me stuck Eg because I’m attached to some sort of immediate future that seems realistic because it is within the laws of physics but my body & brain combo obviously aren’t into it/ able to pursue it at all - & so it’s been a bit heartbreaking because I want to be able to enjoy & be grounded by my visual dreaming - and it feels like it’s wrong to totally write it off but I just don’t know how to even rly think about it / let alone how to process how else I could use it. EG may I ask why you’d been avoiding it? And how it seems to ground you now? Xxxxx
I meant to answer this but it's a hard one! First of all, most of my thinking takes the form of a monologue or conversation with a third party i.e. it's very real world, language-based and grammatically correct. Fine for everyday purposes, but the effort of translating everything into concrete sentences is just an obfuscation sometimes, and I can actually feel (now) the subtle physical tension in my body when it's not working for me. Conversely I feel a certain level of relaxation/flow state when my thinking is going somewhere.
I avoided wildly abstract visual thinking partly because it was out of my comfort zone and partly because I didn't trust it would work. It gets easier each time I find something that actually helps me.
For example: I would never think of myself as into auras, but it's really useful for me to imagine the edge of my personal space as a colourful field during grounding exercises. The exact colour and texture is something I let surprise me, and my mind is consistent enough that I can get a read on my deeper emotional state, or at least pay attention to drastic changes.
Second example: I was getting nowhere thinking about my uncertainty in one area of life via my default monologue so I decided to visualise actual letters and words in front of me. I find this extremely hard to do and hadn't really tried this framing before. After a while I got a very clear image of a small, neatly sectioned booklet explaining myself to myself in second person. Not a particularly mystical vision! It was clearly based on my precious print copy of some technical standards I use for work, but it turned out to be a great IRL writing exercise that got me a long way.
So I hope that makes sense: it's a very experimental and playful process, which honestly feels a bit scary to apply to serious matters sometimes, so I expect I will be working on it for a long time. It's also not really related to my daydreams, but maybe that's going to change in future.
As always this resonates so much with me. Seeing the “prehistoric” reasons behind our actions is so liberating and allows us to have a truly meaningful relationship with ourselves and others.
Thank you 😊
This is one of the best things I've ever read in my life. I really needed this. Thank you Heather :)
Ken, it’s always so good to have your measured and kind-hearted insights in the comments section!
I could not agree more that LW’s tormentor is a simple creature (aren’t we all?), a product of societal conditioning and blissfully unaware how damaging the patterns of his behaviour are.
We women also have a role to play in this dynamic because we enable it. Why would one not repeat a trick, if it works?
I heard a wonderful phrase recently: we find a person whose teeth fit our wounds.
We can’t control the other person’s behaviour but there is power in owning our part and healing.