'My Hurt Feelings *Panic* Me!'

It's your punishing, neurotic thoughts, not your feelings, that send you into fight or flight mode. Daring to greet your feelings with enthusiasm will (slowly!) transform your life.

Le repos du guerrier (1967), Jane Graverol

Dear Polly,

When I was little, my mother liked to tell me, “if you don’t want to get your feelings hurt, don’t stick them out so far.” No additional hints on what that might look like or how to begin going about it.

I’m afraid I feel much the same about your advice to “admit that everything hurts your feelings.” Feelings are not an itch that you can concentrate on not scratching. For me, at least, they come from an amygdala that immediately flips into “fight or flight mode” in real time during social interactions, precisely when my forebrain is most frantically engaged in try to remember how to act like a normal human.

So, what does your advice mean? What is the first tiny step on the road to having the “whole world blossom around you”?

Fight or Flight

Dear FOF,

Admitting that everything hurts your feelings is the first tiny step to preventing you from entering fight or flight mode. It’s not about scratching or not scratching. It’s about saying to yourself, “I’m itchy.” Noticing the itch. Feeling it. Not fighting it.

First you experiment with saying, “Boy, am I itchy!” in situations where the stakes are low. No one is watching. You consider the possibility that you itch more than most. You experiment with saying, “I’m the itchiest person alive.” Does that feel terrible or does it help? Can you accept that you’re an itchy human? Can you live with it for short stretches, in private? Can you vow to be gentle with yourself in spite of your itchiness?

The alternative is to do what your mother told you: Hide your itch and never scratch. But in my opinion, taking this advice is the root source of your panic. The remedy to your panic isn’t HIDING EVEN MORE or VOWING MORE FERVENTLY NOT TO SCRATCH. The remedy is to show your itch to someone. The remedy is to have a long conversation with a therapist or a trusted friend in which you compare the kind of scratching that helps with the kind of scratching that makes you itch even more. The remedy is to admit that sometimes, everything — literally everything — itches, and scratching only makes it worse.

Scratching and feeling your feelings are not the same thing. Scratching is a perceived remedy, a way you think you might STOP the sensation of feeling. But sometimes the more you scratch, the more you itch. When you talk about your feelings, that can be a good kind of scratching. When you try to stop your itching by blaming yourself for itching in the first place, you will only make your itch worse.

But let’s abandon this metaphor and talk about real-world examples. About a year and a half ago, a friend of mine told me I talk too much. This was a little rude, honestly, but this friend can be like that, and it’s part of what I enjoy about her, too.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t well positioned to hear that I was bad at socializing. I had only moved to this side of the country two years earlier, so the vast majority of my friends in town were brand new friends. I didn’t savor feeling like all of my friends viewed me as someone who talked way too much, but that’s what I immediately decided. I decided that everyone agreed that I was annoying.

This made me neurotic. I walked around worried that I was Doing It All Wrong. Even though my friend and I talked it out and I recognized that she was saying merely that I run long sometimes, I still globalized this feedback and entered a paranoid state where I felt increasingly self-conscious.

I also felt defensive. I thought of older, failed friendships, and I thought, “See that also fell apart because you’re essentially terrible.” I started to speculate why various friends had dumped me. I started to see myself through jaundiced eyes. I started to wonder why anyone would ever want to be my friend.

My itch spread the more I scratched it with the WRONG KIND OF SCRATCHING, in other words. I was scratching like crazy — obsessively, neurotically — and my itch was getting more and more inflamed.

What was the remedy?

The remedy wasn’t to itch less. The itching was me feeling shame, feeling bad, feeling embarrassed by my essential nature as an exuberant, long-winded, itchy person with a lot to say. That was natural. And it was normal to itch a lot in response to my friend’s comment. It was regular to feel hurt and confused. It was even absolutely regular and expected that I should doubt myself under those circumstances.

Those hurt feelings were completely natural. I could feel that pain and recognize that the reality of being alive and being open and having friends with strong opinions who say what they mean is that you will hear things that make you feel shitty sometimes.

What was less natural or less useful and not a remedy at all was the NEUROTIC STORYTELLING I did in response to my pain. I speculated about how MOST PEOPLE probably feel about me. I lamented what FORMER FRIENDS who dumped me or ghosted me or told me I sucked MUST THINK OF ME NOW. And I entered a jumpy, flinching, defensive, anxious state around friends and strangers alike, sure that my NATURAL PERSONALITY was terrible and hard to be around.

All of the above overreactions were bad for me. I pulled out a series of intellectual puzzles that called for circular ruminating, speculation, and imagining worst-case scenarios of negative judgments circulating among people who hardly think of me at all at this point. I was telling such random and bad and punishing stories (DON’T STICK YOUR FEELINGS OUT SO FAR, YOUR DISGUSTING SLOB!) that I could hardly function.

After asking myself, “What am I fucking doing? Where did this come from?” a few million times, I finally figured out that I’d always reacted to feedback in this way, like I could PERFECT MYSELF LIKE A MACHINE. And you know what good it’s done me? Not very much good, honestly. It’s made me too much of a try-hard, a little insincere-sounding, and very neurotic.

In other words, my storytelling has been working against me for a long time. Because there was actually nothing at all to correct. Someone said I sometimes go on too long. All I had to do was say to myself, “I will try to notice that the next time it happens.” And that’s it. That would be good enough.

I didn’t need to change my whole personality to fix the problem – if there even was a problem, which is honestly up for debate and also hotly contested by my husband, who thinks the very talkative friend in question had a lot of gall to talk to ME about MY problem of talking too much. Personally, I think it was helpful advice from someone whose boldness and strong opinions I very much enjoy. I think I did need to make an adjustment.

More importantly, though, I needed to FEEL MY FEELINGS IN REAL TIME. That was the actual issue that my friend was pointing out. She was saying that sometimes when I felt a little neurotic in social situations, I start to detach from the people around me and lose myself in my own little broadcast. I was scratching too hard, was really what she meant.

And the fix for all of the above was to just fucking be who I am where I am and TRUST IT.

I just read this great, old story from 2022 about how Lena Dunham fell in love with her current husband. She basically describes him as the weirdest person she’s ever met. But my favorite quote from the story was this:

“I knew this relationship was different because at every stage, when there was something that could potentially deter him, he met it with total enthusiasm.”

Not every person in the world will have this experience of meeting a total weirdo and having that weirdo recognize the goodness and beauty in them. Not every friend will greet our odd quirks with total enthusiasm. It’s truly amazing when you find someone who sees your strangest traits and even your glaring weaknesses as charming and delightful.

But that’s not the point, to me. The real point is that it’s our job as humans to be that person for ourselves. That’s how we teach ourselves to be that person for someone else.

BEING THAT PERSON FOR SOMEONE ELSE IS THE BEST JOB IN THE WORLD!

I’m not saying it’s easy or that there aren’t ways that this approach can go astray or lead us off some pretty tall narcissistic cliffs. But listen. Everything everywhere can fuck you up in one way or another, when it’s taken to an extreme. I know from personal experience, from years and years and years of personal experience, that the more I simply resolve to greet my bizarre traits with total enthusiasm, the less I actually disappear into neurotic stories and inflammatory scratching and self-blame and defensiveness and social panic.

The more I simply proclaim myself itchy, the less I itch.

The more I scratch in good ways (exercise, breathing deeply, calling close friends to tell them how I feel, accepting who I am in my writing, making pottery, staring at the trees and cultivating gratitude for trees), the better I feel.

And the more I scratch in bad ways (speculating, imagining, defending myself inside my head, telling stories about what people think of me, plotting out new ways to please other people more), the more panicked and neurotic and detached from reality I become.

If you keep punishing yourself for being who you are, you will keep feeling worse. Your punishments and your neurotic storytelling are echoes of your mother’s harsh words. These things are detrimental at worst, and at best they have no value or meaning whatsoever. When I imagine what old friends who dumped me think of me now, I might as well be building a house just to blow it to smithereens. It is a meaningless activity.

A lot of stories are just a way we punish ourselves using our own brains.

It takes a long time to train yourself out of that habit of bad storytelling and bad scratching and constant unhappy itching. It takes a loooooong time. The best way to take a tiny step, in my opinion, is to say:

“I itch A LOT. But there are millions of itchy motherfuckers are out there who are just like me. So I will talk about it.”

Will I be exactly like this forever? Maybe. But maybe the itchiest among us are also the most interesting. I know they are to me. Maybe I will love the itchiest bitches in the world much more than I thought I could ever love anyone. Maybe I will start by loving myself for a change.

Easier said than done, I know. So keep saying it until you finally feel like doing it, too.

Polly

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