Making Difficult Emotions Even Harder to Cope With
Many of our emotional challenges are made more difficult by our unhealthy coping mechanisms. We can be very self-hating when it comes to how we handle our thoughts and feelings. We beat ourselves up for feeling sad or anxious. Instead of practicing forgiveness and compassion, we judge ourselves for our pain or guilt. In our minds, understanding and patience are reserved for other, better people. We don’t give ourselves the same love we give our loved ones. We’re reactive, impatient, and harsh with ourselves without realizing the damage we’re doing. Once we get sober, however, we can begin to reverse this trend. The more we recover, the more we understand the devastating impact of our inner dialogue. We begin to realize that we were part of the reason our challenging emotions were so hard to handle.
Resisting Our Emotions
When we aren’t self-loving, our coping mechanisms tend to be different forms of emotional resistance and self-rejection. We resist feeling our emotions because they leave us vulnerable. Our difficult emotions don’t make us unworthy, inadequate, or unlovable, but we struggle to see that truth. We tend to think of our sadness, fear, and shame as flaws in our personalities. With that perspective, we reject our emotions, believing that they make us weak. Since we reject ourselves, we expect other people to reject us, as well. It becomes impossible to see why they would love and accept us as we are. Suppression and avoidance are key strategies for us to resist our emotions. When we’re using our drugs of choice to numb ourselves, we’re practicing emotional resistance. All of these forms of resistance are in opposition to the self-love we need to recover from our addictions.
Adopting Self-Love as a Coping Skill
We choose self-loving ways of coping with our emotions when we choose to face our emotions. Self-love means allowing ourselves to feel emotions. When we accept ourselves and our feelings, we’re practicing self-love. When we accept our experience exactly as it is without trying to force it to be something different, we open the doorway to a peaceful life. Our difficult feelings are part of our unique experience. They’re not a reason to reject ourselves and feel unworthy. If we can learn these lessons, we can learn to be more self-loving. Allowing others to help us is another vital element of self-love. By opening ourselves up to the love and support being offered to us, we accept our own value. When we prioritize self-care, especially as it pertains to our emotions, we’re incorporating self-love into our daily routine. Over time, our challenging emotions become easier to handle. We’ve adopted self-love as one of our healing tools and emotional coping skills to help us move forward in our recovery.
Are you interested in learning more about self-love? Do you want to understand the root causes of your addiction? Turning off the negative self-talk is not as easy as flipping a switch. Fortunately, we’re ready to help you out. If you’re ready to take the first step on your journey to recovery, call The Guest House today!