Being a good friend to yourself

I’m trying. I’m trying to be a good friend to myself, to be a good listener and a loving, accepting presence when things get really hard. But the thing is, it’s hard to be that presence when things get really hard! When we are most in need of our own loving attention it often seems the hardest to be that presence because on some level we feel that we don’t deserve that love and acceptance.

We might feel that we are deserving of such attention when we are “being good”, when we are eating the “right” foods, thinking the “right” thoughts but when we are not, what happens to this loving friend? Does she turn into a critical, judgemental bully…?

I know that’s very often what happens with me!

But you know what? That critical, judgemental bully is also in need of love and aceptance, in fact, she needs it most of all. But she doesn’t ever get it does she?

We ignore her or tell her that she’s annoying, drown her out by giving in to addictions, obsessions, compulsions, tell her that the only reason we are suffering is because of her.

So here is the next layer: the one judging the critical, judgemental bully is also in need of love and acceptance…can you begin to guess what is happening here?

I’m starting to see it and what I’ve come to realise is that it is all to do with feeling safe, with staying as far away from vulnerability as we can. Because being vulnerable means we can get hurt and even though we know very well that we cannot go through life without getting hurt, these innocent parts of us have at some point in our lives decided we need protection from any kind of pain, no matter the cost and in extreme cases they will even disrtoy us in the process, for example when someone is addicted to heroin or any other harmful substance. The addiction numbs the original pain we felt thereby shielding us from that vulnerability but in the end, it makes us much more vulnerable because we end up far away from our true self, the only one who really knows how to handle the pain that comes with living. Of course, the shield doesn’t have to be something as extreme as an addiction to heroin, it can come in the form of any addiction: being addicted to the approval of others, over-thinking, over-eating, being addicted to your computer or phone, being addicted to stress, even something that seems to be good for the soul, like mindfulness or yoga, can be turned into a way of avoiding the original pain we felt when we were young.

It all comes from that original pain, whatever it was. Whether it was abuse, abandonment, violence, enmeshment or any other form of physical and/or emotional hurt. And because our parents probably also never learnt to trust that part of themselves that can handle pain, they couldn’t show us how to do that when pain showed up in our lives and we learnt by example that the only way to handle pain is to push it away, to deny it or cover it up or pretend it isn’t there. This mechanism can even hide in plain sight and wear the mask we call playing the victim. It can seem that the person who sees themselves as a victim is in touch with their pain, their emotions but in fact it is just another coping mechanism.

The mind is clever, the ego extremely creative in always finding new ways to skirt around the issue and our inner child never gives up trying to steer us back to that original pain because it longs to merge with us again and it knows that to do that we must feel this pain, we have to let that child speak and tell us all about what has hurt it so badly, even when it is us as grownups who have been causing its pain….which brings us to guilt.

Just as there is “the original pain” there is also “the original guilt” which I feel often stems from us feeling our parents pain but being unable to help them. This can make us feel that we failed somehow, that we didn’t try hard enough, that we must be a bad person because the people we loved were in pain and we didn’t help them. Of course, because we were children and couldn’t rationalise and because we were so intimately connected to our parents, we believed that their pain had something to do with us and it was our responsibility to heal them and then when we couldn’t heal them, we started feeling guilt. Also, very often our parents won’t be aware of their own guilt and might (therefore) project it onto us, adding to our feelings of guilt about not being able to heal their pain.
Later on in our adult lives, this guilt is a shapeshifter. It can come out in so many different ways I can’t even begin to name them…
For me, it often takes the shape of feeling like I am a bad person for not listening to my inner child, for abandoning her for all these years. Which is pretty ironic in a way, because the reason I “abandoned” her and took refuge up in my head, is because I wanted to protect her from all this pain!
For a long time I didn’t understand it when people said “Pain is a teacher” but I think now I am starting to get a feeling for what they mean. Pain or discomfort shows up in our life to teach us how strong we really are and that, even though we are extremely sensitive beings, we are built to handle life with all its adversities, difficult situations and losses. Just like reeds bending in the wind, we were made to weather any storm, just like the old martial art techniques teach us to move with our aggressor, just like water flowing around and over any obstacles , we can learn to move WITH life again like we did when we were young children. We can learn to dance with life and to maybe not take ourselves so seriously and at the same time acknowledge our feelings and bow to the one feeling it all because really, it takes courage!

Maybe being a good friend to yourself means acknowledging how much courage it takes to be who you are in this life, to appreciate how hard you try to become who you’re meant to be and to complement yourself on how sweet and caring you naturally are 🙂