Would you try to feel worse than you already do?
I ask this seemingly absurd question whenever a friend, a client, or even I am experiencing and feeling deep suffering. I ask this question to help increase understanding of attitudes about suffering.
Why the hell would I do that? It’s already bad enough! is a frequent, angry response. Inevitably, there is initial bewilderment and confusion. This is when I explain that my intention to help them and us all supports a capacity to observe our feelings. This importance of developing self-tolerance and self-acceptance helps them realize that they’re not putting themselves in a painful feeling on purpose.
Over time, this question can also serve as a long-term reminder that we aren’t intentionally making ourselves unhappy. When we ask, Would you try to feel worse than you already do? it slowly and steadily leads us to greater empathy, wisdom, self-acceptance, and self-compassion.
I know you’re not doing this on purpose.
I’m sorry you have to go through this.
This is really hard/This would be hard for anyone else too.
Statements like these are a sign of empathy and caring towards ourselves, making it easier to do whatever we need to do to make the situation we’re facing the best possible.
I encourage you to take a moment to pause and think about a current situation in your life where you could have cared for yourself like this. Really pause and let yourself think of the sentence that would’ve been the most self-caring and useful in the situation that you were facing.
In time, this practice will help you care more deeply and stop you from unwittingly injuring yourself through critical comments and judgments.
This might sound simple and easy, but most of us were raised quite differently. At best, we’ve only been taught to identify the feelings and what we’re going through first. Only after that might we develop a supportive dialogue with helpful guiding thoughts beyond the illusions our feelings currently make us believe.
However, when we recognize that challenging times and feelings often feel like they’ve put a spell on us. It’s counter-instinctual for almost all of us to find this kind of caring for ourselves.
Don’t underestimate the importance of this life-long work and its potential for improved quality of life. Through this creative and constructive inner communication, you’ll teach yourself how this ongoing inner dialogue helps you to organically and gradually lessen the stranglehold that distorted and irrational feelings like fear, anger, and anxiety have on you. In time, you will gradually disidentify from the feelings of fear and, most importantly, the harmful repetitive catastrophic thinking.
All this will inevitably expand your quality of life, and it can only be done by first facing your feelings and developing a caring and realistic thought process. It is hard to realize that the feelings aren’t the major source of suffering. Still, the follow-up thoughts significantly distort what you’re facing and can catapult you from fear to terror, anxiety to panic, and anger to rage.
Understanding how our thoughts impact our feelings and emotions, especially how they amplify them, can help us see what’s important. This is a life-long practice unless you are naturally balanced and keenly aware; most of us tend to make things harder for ourselves during challenging moments.
It’s a vital focus to see how our mind and the subsequent thoughts can be a negative emotion amplifier or a realistic reassurer.
The point isn’t to get over fear or even our thoughts of fear. The point is to realize we can’t change our feelings directly more often than not. However, we can learn to change our thoughts and focus them more on the reality we’re facing. The idea is to keep them focused on responding well in the present and not exaggerate the scary or anxious future scenarios.
This is a major journey to learning about ourselves and how to develop courage, wisdom, and self-compassion. There is no shame here, just the foresight to realize the immense impact our thinking has on how we feel about certain situations.
We can change our thoughts about our feelings, but we can rarely change the feelings ourselves. This is a golden key that can be applied not only to illness or fear of dying but also to anything that presents as scary to us.
We are all human and face a mortal existence. Our culture tends to deny this. This denial impacts many people, and likely you too, and our emotions and thoughts often overreact to or suppress reality in difficult times. We all need to do our best to have the courage to face reality in front of us and see that our minds can be our best friends or our worst enemies.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
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