In situations where you believe you will be treated badly look for an ally. Ideally that person will be someone who might be less easy for your abuser to do down. Someone who might be hard for that person to describe and denigrate in terms they would apply to you. If trouble happens, see if they can point it out. Then you can back them up if you like.
Try changing the signal you put out into the world. If you limit yourself, always making sure you take the minimum of what’s on offer, and this somehow makes you feel safe – take more. People who know you and worry about the way you restrict your life (maybe not friends who do things the same way as you) are unintentionally confirming the feeling you have that something unsafe is going on. Their anxiety suggests uncertainty or risk. Your predicted restrictive behaviour seems like the right one: the way to remain safe when there’s a threat around. Fear surrounds you.
If you ask for more then you might find those same people relax and give you more encouragement, or joy. At first this feels very weird and wrong. After a time, however, you may start to feel safe. The atmosphere around you corroborates this. There’s no threat.
Life is really not this simple. But it’s worth a try.
As I’ve written elsewhere, individualism is a particular problem. There has always been a group of people attached to anybody who calls themselves an individual: the artists who we admire, the leaders who we follow, or whoever. If you really want to succeed in your life; if you want to thrive, you must not overlook the social.
Frank O’Hara might never have published Lunch Poems if Lawrence Ferlinghetti hadn’t gone on asking him about lunch. Lou Reed’s Perfect Day was perhaps more Mick Ronson and David Bowie than Lou Reed. Donald Trump is a paean to everybody who has ever wanted to be an individual. And so on.
Dreams are very handy things. I often have a lot of them when I start thinking intensely about something. Don’t ignore them, don’t try to interpret them, just see where they take you as if they are a kind of a taxi. (more…)
I’m used to hearing people say: ‘the common denominator is me’. It’s often a relief to hear someone accept that they may be the source of a problem, that they realise they may be doing something a lot of the time which makes life hard for them — and for other people. But we don’t only exist like that. (more…)
Insight and information can help you avoid repeating past ways of feeling, thinking and acting. You need to protect your capacity to think with that information, rather than to remember it. Your capacity to think freely is what will keep you safe and doing life the way you want.
Here are three things that you can do three times each day which will help prevent your body from becoming overloaded by negative intensity… worries, resentments and so on … the kinds of thing that will leave you stuck. causes a loss, sometimes a radical loss, of momentum. These three things promote positive intensity: the joy of being able to feel relaxed and thoughtful, the pleasure of being in harmony with your life, and the ability to start and stop things when you need to.
Experiment with different amounts of time for the in-breath, pause and out-breath to see what suits you most for a situation. Box breathing is something you can always turn to discreetly
Stop being taken for a ride. Go and see films specifically to explore whether staying watching them or leaving is the best option. After you leave you need to be able to tell someone why you left. How long can you stay before you’re confident the film is not going to deliver what you need? You can experiment like this with any kind of experience, really. Always hold a place for your right to leave, work out how to do this in ways that feel right for you and others (ie storming out might not be the best option – quietly departing might be instead. Do you really want to make a point? What will the effect of that be on?
Buy a tuning fork or two and sound these close to your ear for an instant experience of being present in the world, connected to something outside of you that leaves you feel grounded in yourself.