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Self Help

NOTE: This is not medical nor psichiatrical advice. If you are in crisis, consult your doctor and/or call 911 for immediate professional help.

1. Focus on self-care. Whatever your difficult situation is, it will get better, but you have to make it safely to the other shore. Meanwhile, several times a day, remind yourself that you are a very lovable person, no matter how many people or circumstances may seem to say otherwise. Drink a lot of water and exercise or take a warm. Sweating will help eliminate residual toxines that otherwise would accumulate in your body while dealing with emotional hurt. If you can afford it, skip making dinner and take your family or a friend to a restaurant. It is thought that chicken soup and meals have a calming effect on nerves, while spicy foods may increase irritability. Keep your head up, and continue chasing your dreams as much as you can each day. Remember, the only way out of trouble is through it. You will reach the end of it stronger, and more experienced.

2. Build your support system. Find someone safe who can simply walk alongside and let you talk about the problem, gently steering you in the right direction. Ask a couple of safe people in your life to regularly tell you positive things they know about you, and to give you hugs. If you are in a dangerous situation, make sure you access all the appropriate authorities and community resources to keep safe.

3. Help yourself cry. Be honest with yourself, do not try to act as if you are tough and nothing can affect you. Despite what you may have heard before, crying is good and absolutely necessary whenever you are experiencing a feeling of futility in your life. It helps your lymbic system kick in and appropriately process your emotions and pain, moving you towards emotional freedom, maturity and health. It also helps you change in the right direction, which will greatly help towards finding a solution for your difficult situation.

4. Correct your expectations. At the root of most human dissapointments is a set af wrong expectations, both about self and others. Whenever you hit a dead end and feel hurting, look for the specific expectations that entrap you again and again, and discuss them with a safe, mature and reliable person. If you don't have such a person in your life, you may reach a safe person to talk to by calling a crisis line. Here is how expectations work: If you went to the park and saw a dog in a leash, would it make you angry? No, because dogs are supposed to be in leashes in public places. The same way, you shuld expect anxious leaders to control those under their authority, insecure people to bully those they perceive to be weaker, self-haters to reject those who love them, and disattached people to smile and feel no remorse while using or setting up whoever gets in their way. They are not necessarily mean or bad people, but they are very needy for the moment (if not needy for a life-time) and they have become very defensive and self-absorbed. Your disappointment, hurt and anger come when you expect a self-absorbed individual to act like a self-less, kind, giving, thankful and thoughtful person.

5. Understand the difference between who you are (your identity) and what you do (your behaviour). If you make mistakes, it does not mean you are bad or damaged, it only means that you are human and have limitations, like every other person that ever lived. Your identity is safe and undamaged, no matter how badly you could have behaved at some point. Do not adjust your behaviour to fit the picture of damaged identity others may mistakenly portray about you. On the contrary, adjust your behaviour to fit the best identity you can picture for yourself. And if you did something wrong, it is OK to feel guilty, because it makes you make amends and grow and overal helps you monitor your behaviour. Be cautious, though, do not mistake guilt (feeling bad about your inappropriate behaviour) with unhealthy shame (feeling helpless about your inappropriate behaviour because of believing that your identity is ireversebly flawed, damaged or bad).

6. Clarify your boundaries, and you will feel much better. People we care about may say hurtful things to us in stressful situations, although they regret it afterwards. If somebody called you names or attacked your image, that will not make you become it, in the same way calling your car a "horse" wouldn't make it become that. If someone close to you acted in rejectful or judgemental ways with you, remember that the cause and responsability for such behaviour is totally in their own hands, not yours. Also, if someone rejects your love, that doesn't make you or your feelings less valuable and honourable. You can never "make" people feel, think or act the way they do, it is always their own feeling, thinking or doing. On the other side, what they think, feel or say about you can never make you become that. You are the one actually taking their criticism in and letting it damage you.

7. Reclaim your power. As you work through a painful situation, remember that every single time you focus on blaming other people or circumstances for what happened, you are literally giving away your personal power, by locking yourself in a victim mindframe. Even if someone has done something bad to you, there is absolutely nothing you can do about their subsequent behaviour or responsability. You can not make them repair, appologise, or even acknowledge their responsibility for harming you. As long as you focus on their fault, and try to make them repair the harm. you also continue fueling your anger, hurt and helplessness. If, instead, you raise above the situation and can find something that you can do about it to ease your pain, you actually increase your personal power, you access more of your intellectual resources necessary to problemsolve, and you reduce all the negative emotional and physical reactions in your body. Any big hurt or concern shrinks when you build a plan that includes something appropriate that you can do about it. In other words, you are better off focusing on what you can do, no matter how the other person behaved or still does. You have full control over what you do, and anything you change in your life will force those around you to respond to that change. If you were victimized by another once, it may have been his/her fault. But the second time around it is most likely your fault, because you have focused on changing the other person, rather than reclaiming your power and changing things at your end.
   

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