Give Yourself Grace
I’m the type of person who will blame myself for anything bad that happens to me. It’s terribly exhausting and not cute at all. Do you realize how much energy that takes? For example, if I’m in a work Zoom meeting where I say something and no one responds, a voice in my head goes, What the fuck Tyler. Just shut the fuck up next time. And then I beat myself up about it for the rest of the day. A package gets stolen, and I blame myself for not tracking the delivery. So, you can imagine what a really bad day is like for me. If everything is going wrong, I start bullying myself so hard to the point where I’m stressed out, high-strung, scared, and barely functioning. NOT. CUTE.
So, this one is for me and everyone else who takes self-criticism to the extreme. We gotta stop. Forreal. I’ve gotten better at it, but some days are better than others. I decided to write this out to hold myself accountable. Additionally, this behavior has dangerous implications– some of which I’ve already experienced myself. For example, what if I’m in a situation where I’m alone with a man and he’s making me uncomfortable? My brain is going to instantly start thinking about why it’s my fault I’m so uncomfortable. From thinking I shouldn’t have let myself be alone with him to gaslighting myself out of feeling uncomfortable in the first place, it’s a recipe for dissociation and disaster.
Let’s start with the root of the problem. The nervous system has three well-known responses when we’re in perceived danger: fight, flight, or freeze. However, what y’all don’t know (and what I just found out recently) is that there is a fourth response: fawn. This response involves “fawning” over other people. It puts other people’s needs/emotions before ours. And whewwwwww do I be FAWNING. It’s a learned trauma response. At some point during my childhood, I figured out that it was easier for me to be a people-pleaser than to listen to my own wants/needs and assert them. And now here we are, in adulthood, struggling. Blaming myself for everything because I barely know where to begin with trusting myself, feeling my own feelings, or anything of that nature. But you know what? It is OKAY. Because we’re gonna get through this. That’s honestly the only option. I’m not tryna live the rest of my life putting other people’s needs before mine. I’m tired of it. I’m done. I’ve learned everything I was meant to learn in that life lesson and it’s time to wrap it up for good.
This is where the concept of giving yourself grace comes in. Giving yourself grace is not only about giving yourself a pass for when you fuck up, but it is also about reframing the way you speak to yourself. It’s one thing to hold yourself accountable– it’s another to talk to yourself like you’re absolutely worthless. I once read a quote that said to speak to yourself the way you would speak to one of your friends. This is especially important when you’re going through something emotionally taxing or just not feeling your best in general. Unfortunately, those days are the ones when we tend to bully ourselves the most. It truly is a practice that involves a lot of massaging, trial and error, and starting over. You can’t beat yourself up for YEARS and think your brain is going rewire itself to speak nicely overnight. It’s a muscle that has to be stretched and flexed. One small practice that has helped me is speaking to myself in the mirror. For some reason, if I’m sad and I can visually see how sad I am, it pretty much forces me to be nicer to myself. Kind of like when you see a sad friend and you just want to do anything to make them smile. Going off of this, I think it’s crucial to befriend yourself in general. It goes beyond just saying kind words and affirmations to yourself. It means rooting into your body, honoring it, and getting to know its cues.
Rooting into your body ties into feeling your authentic feelings, because your emotions are stored in the body (especially in the hips). I actually cannot stress this enough as someone who went through an extremely low point in my life about a year ago just because I didn’t want to accept my feelings for what they were. I was so disconnected from my body. It wasn’t until I started working out consistently (after a very long time) that I started to work through my buried grief. I will also say that connecting with your body looks different for everyone. It doesn’t have to be working out, per se. It can be massages. It can be stretching. It can be a bath. Really, anything that just forces you to be fully present in your body. My personal favorite is cold showers. They are truly awful in the best way possible.
And when I say feel your feelings, I don’t just mean acknowledging you feel sadness/pain/grief and then instantly doing anything you can think of to feel happy again. No no no. We don’t do toxic positivity over here no more baby. You can’t cry, eat, exercise, work, sex, sleep, smoke, or even therapy it away. You have to sit down with that pain. Sit down with that grief. Spend time with it. Ask it what it needs. Oftentimes, these emotions were buried so deep for so long that you won’t be able to figure out what they’re really trying to express to you at first.
Giving yourself grace also looks like being patient with yourself. You don’t have all of the answers all the time– no one does. From what I’ve learned, pain is simply a part of the human experience. Rightfully so, because how would you be able to feel joy without knowing what pain is? Cue my favorite quote of all time: “What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness? You only truly, deeply appreciate and are grateful for something when you compare and contrast it to something worse.”- John Steinbeck.
All we can do is take it day by day, breath by breath, movement to movement. Giving yourself grace doesn’t mean you won’t ever feel bad again. But, through patience and gentleness, maybe the process of working through any pain will be a little bit easier. A little bit shorter. A lot less like life or death and a lot more like befriending the pain. Emotions are just like you and me. They want to be seen, heard, and expressed. Whether that be through movement, art, writing, or screaming at the top of your lungs, remember to give them plenty of space to be exactly what they are and take on whatever shape they deem true.
