The Path of Mental Stability - aka What I learned in 30 days.
When a journey starts with an emotionally invalidating home environment, with narcissism, psychotic or emotion neglectful parenting, it leads to very little self awareness or skills of how to cope with your emotions. The self destruction will begin young, often manifesting itself in taking dangerous personal risks, promiscuity, seeking inappropriate partners or becoming emotionally distant, while all along, the craving or deep desire for emotional validation mounts. The need for acceptance and unconditional love isn't a cliche, to an empathetic soul its needed for survival.
When a journey starts with an emotionally invalidating home environment, with narcissism, psychotic or emotion neglectful parenting, it leads to very little self awareness or skills of how to cope with your emotions. The self destruction will begin young, often manifesting itself in taking dangerous personal risks, promiscuity, seeking inappropriate partners or becoming emotionally distant, while all along, the craving or deep desire for emotional validation mounts. The need for acceptance and unconditional love isn't a cliche, to an empathetic soul its needed for survival.
Without acceptance a poor balance of mental health results in terrifying feelings around self worth and overwhelming destructive levels of self doubt. It also creates a self fulfilling prophecy to choose partners that do not have the ability to validate, connect or to even show love by their actions. Choosing the emotionally stunted or withdrawn, the narcissists or even worse. the psychopath because it feels recognizable and identifiable. There is a sick comfort in the pain. There is almost a need to choose them because part of your struggle is wanting to not crave the emotional stability and almost an admiration for their ability to apparently live a happy and fulfilling life with a totally void emotional intelligence or quotient. You are attracted by their strength, sometimes you envy their non emotional asshole-like behaviours and you sometimes even attempt to emulate them.
Since you are actually trying to be something you are not, there is an entire internal struggle that still seeks the emotional validation. This battle, often manifests itself in your personality being emotionally charged or becoming distraught extremely fast. An uncontrollable force drives you to express your emotions in a intense, overly dramatic, or destructive ways. Often it takes you longer time than most to calm down and often if the invalidating of your emotions continues, the rage can spiral out of control. Thus creating the never ending circle of the emotionally invalidating environment by literally terrifying or alienating the people around you from giving you exactly what you need.
Eventually the levy will break, causing the relationship to end... and if treatment is not sought or put in place, another relationship will fill the void. Cycling over and over. And over.
To break the cycle a new road must be taken, a road of self love and discovery, a road of acceptance of ones own emotions, a validation reached through ones own self worth instead of seeking it from others. This road is a terrifying, demanding, exhausting but an extremely rewarding journey.
Step 1. Begin a process of stopping your own destructive behaviours. Starting with "emotion regulation" which is the ability to accept, enhance or reduce emotions as needed. Accepting emotions means also accepting that emotions will change and to embrace those changes. We have to accept that any emotion is fleeting, from mere moments to hours, it is a relatively short-term condition; we will not always be feeling that emotions. This goes for every type of emotion, from fear to anxiety and happiness to sadness.
Step 2. Recognize that while emotions are fleeting, you can feed them to keep them alive longer with self talk. Of course negative self talk is going to keep the spiraling anger or fear alive, the same is true with happiness. Gratitude is the best way to feed the happy side.
Step 3. Allow yourself to fail. Move on from it having learned the lesson, but without focusing on the failure. Guilt and self loathing for failure will keep you in a failing cycle. Picking yourself up and dusting yourself off, accept the mistake, state clearly how you will avoid that mistake in the future and get right back on the right path.
Step 4. Take ownership of your journey and make time to love yourself. Decide to take healthy steps and make fulfilling decisions that feel right to your core being. While you are getting your own house in order make sure you have the right people in your life, from family, to friends and partners. If any of these people make you feel bad about who you are, how you live, or why you feel what you are feeling, then its time to pack your bags and move on. Now, not later, not maybe, not soon... but right now! You are worth it.
Step 5, Achieving mindfulness, live in the moment, stop regretting the past and stop worrying about the future. Control, experience and love the moment. Right now, this second. As emotions are fleeting, so is time. Do not waste another moment on hating yourself. You are more than enough and know that there are people that truly believe that.
I got this.
I am also starting this today.... just for fun. Smile.
I got this.
I am also starting this today.... just for fun. Smile.
