One of the biggest barriers to more love and possibilities in our lives is how much, how often and how deeply we “numb out” when life and our relationships overwhelm us and get to be too much.
Most people don’t realize it but we ALL have countless strategies for dealing with what we label “good” or “bad” in our lives.
We can get sucked into believing thoughts about how life should or shouldn’t be, how “they” should or shouldn’t be and what needs to happen in order to be OK.
So in order to free ourselves from the pain we associate with the reality of life…
We eat, we drink, we pop something to make us feel calmer (or more alive)…
-We gossip
-We get angry
-We get busy
-We get pushy
-We give in
-We withhold
-We start a fight
-We retreat
-We watch Tik ToK or Facebook videos
-We shop
-And a million other things to (in some cases) feel better and (in other cases) to not feel at all.
We’ll do anything to make ourselves feel better, feel more alive, move loved, more confident, more whatever.
If you want to see how your particular defense mechanisms for feeling “good” and avoiding feeling “bad” play out…
Just take a quick look at your own life, especially when something upsetting happens.
What do you do to calm yourself and avoid feeling?
So the question is…
Why would you want to feel anyway?
Can’t you just bypass all that feeling stuff and go straight to what would make you happier and feel better?
It’s because feelings are the indicators of what’s going on inside of us and the thoughts we’re making real.
And if we avoid it, we push those feelings down and they always come out later in ways we don’t want and can damage our relationships.
For instance…
Valerie invited Rob over for what she hoped with be a nice romantic evening with him.
The whole evening went sideways quick and she was ready to kick him out when he told her that looking at her giant aquarium with dozens of tropical fish in it that she loved …
Was like looking at a blank TV screen.
She was totally offended and couldn’t believe he would say anything so unkind.
A short while later, Rob left and in order to ease her pain and disappointment of what she had hoped would happen that evening…
Valerie ate every single one of the CBD cookies she had on hand to make herself feel better.
It did while she was eating them but then she fell into a funk that precipitated an argument when her sister called later that evening to find out how her date had gone.
She didn’t want to argue with her sister but she had been holding in her anger at Rob’s comment and it just came out without her being aware.
When we numb out and don’t acknowledge how we really feel, even to ourselves…
We get stuck in ways we don’t even realize and we can’t let in love.
We can’t see beyond our beliefs and expectations that something else might be true.
We can’t see possibilities.
In Valerie’s case, if she opened to seeing beyond her story that he hated her fish instead of not acknowledging it, she could become curious as to what he meant when he said her aquarium was like looking at a blank TV screen.
Instead of numbing out and eating her CBD cookies, she could have asked him a simple question–“Tell me more about that”
The stories we make up and make real can create the numbness and pain we feel but they don’t have to.
