Days 289-291: Approaching relationships through negativity

13-14 & 16082013

A friend told me about a notion he had made while dating a girl from a foreign country. He had noticed that it is in the Finnish mentality to look at being attracted to someone a negative thing: that when you notice you're attracted to someone, your reaction is “oh no” instead of “oh yes”. I realized that I had never really thought about this, and when I started looking back on my relationship history it seemed to explain a great deal of things. I don't know if this is exclusively a Finnish trait, but the overall negativity even in relationships certainly is a part of this cultural mindset.

For me having a romantic attraction towards another has always been a burden. Whenever something like that has come about it has felt like a great deal of trouble instead of being a reason for joy. When I look at my first crushes during my childhood and teen years there has always been this despair, a hopelessness, a knowledge that it would never amount to anything anyway because I'm not good enough for the other – and this disempowering way of thinking led me to never act upon my feelings.

There was also a horrifying fear of being “discovered”. I feared that if other kids or family members found out about my crush they would tease me about it. There is this specific “ooooooh” or “aaaaah” people would make when they found out, as if they discovered a juicy secret, as if they knew something super intimate about me and now understood what all of me was about – which they didn't, or that's what I wanted to believe. I didn't want anyone to know because then they would think they knew how I felt when they could not in fact know. I thought of my experience as something “special”, “unique” and “mine” - which in a sense was true – and did not see the value in sharing and cross-referencing things with others.

I still get this embarrassment of sorts, this feeling of being bare in front of others. It's kind of like I'm holding this steel mask of not being emotional at all, and when people hear of me doing something that is perceived to be emotionally charged, like being in a relationship or dating someone, it's like the mask falls off. I don't like it. I am used to being “the stable one” wherever I go and so expressing emotions/feelings is something that is somewhat limited for me. I rarely feel emotions, not always even on a daily basis, but how do I know how much exactly do I suppress? How do I know how much of my non-emotionality is pure blankness and how much of it is suppression?

I know I have picked up this ideal of being “the stable one” from my father, as well as the behavioral pattern of doing it at my own expense by suppressing what I feel. When I look at my parents, the ones who gave me the relationship model I started to follow, I do remember them being openly affectionate towards each other, if not a bit shy about it. There were older siblings who were in their teens when I was a child, and I remember seeing them all embarrassed about their relationships, angry and ashamed when my parents teased them about it – perhaps this is where I picked this up, because my older siblings were a huge role model for me, both consciously and subconsciously.

This is a topic that is (again) on the surface as I have recently met a person with whom I am in a process of building a long-distance relationship. Just writing these words here is difficult for me even though I know that not many people read my blog (voicing things to myself is the most difficult step I guess), and when I think of talking to people about it I notice this nervousness rising immediately. I realize that this is because I have adopted a negative attitude towards the whole concept of two people gravitating towards each other – a filter of shame, worst-case scenarios and negative expectations caused by a poor self-esteem. I'm not saying I should jump to the other extreme and go crazy with excitement, joy and over-confidence (which some people actually do, which is news to me!) but to allow myself the enjoyment of the situation.

So: on to self-forgive, so that I may find it comfortable sharing this experience with other people.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself as a child to feel ashamed of being attracted to another person because I have feared that people would question the target of my feelings – in other words, think less of the person I am attracted to and thus think less of me as well.

• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself as a child to fear telling my friends/family who I was attracted to because then they would see more of me as well.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself as a child to fear sharing my attractions with others because on some level I understood that within the process of becoming attracted to someone I become in touch with the sides of me which have been hidden – sides of me that have been “secret” because I have not known how to be self-intimate – and that in my choice of who to be attracted to I expose the hidden side of myself.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself as a child to fear admitting that I was attracted to H because all the other girls were attracted to him as well and I saw myself to have no chance within that competition.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself as a child to fear admitting that I was attracted to H because attraction was a new feeling to me and I had no idea what it was and how to deal with it, and because I did not know how to express an uncertain experience and to seek for answers from others.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself as a child to fear admitting that I was attracted to T because he wasn't “good-looking” in the usual way, as I was afraid other kids would tease me for liking someone “ugly” and think less of me as well – that other kids would not understand why I liked this person and instead assume him to be “less” and me to be “less”.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself as a child to fear admitting that I was attracted to T because I believed he did not like me back and I did not want to take the risk of getting rejected, not that I would have known what to do with another person anyway even if he would like me back.
  • I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself as a child to fear expressing my attraction because I had no idea what would happen as a result; I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself as a child to fear doing things the outcome of which I could not foretell or, in other words, control.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself as a child to fear that I will be defined by who others believe my target of attraction to be and who they believe me to be in relation to that image of him.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear that people will assume me to be something I am not.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself, when and as others have discovered I am attracted to someone, to distance the whole affair from myself and try and avoid the intimacy of sharing something so personal with others.

• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to hold myself back from sharing the early stages of a relationship with others because I have wanted to avoid exposing myself in such a sensitive state, rather sharing the news only when a relationship has stabilized and when I can pretend to be all cool about it.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to perceive and believe that my experience of attraction was something “unique” because it felt so overwhelming, not realizing that everyone else experiences basically same thing as the same patterns of thought and behavior create the same experiences.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that even though my feelings were overwhelming in my subjective experience, other people too have had these overwhelming subjective experiences and that the subjectiveness of something is not an indicator of its uniqueness.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel embarrassed when people have found out I am attracted to someone, feeling as if they were looking at something private and wanting them to “not look at me” or to “look away”.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to resist exposing myself to others as I have not fully exposed myself to myself.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to perceive relationships, attraction and sexuality through negativity, thus denying myself the enjoyment of embracing the situation.

• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel guilty for having enjoyment in my life through relationships.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel undeserving of enjoyment through relationships.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to react to being attracted to someone by conjuring up worst-case scenarios, summoning a fear that I will screw things up, that the other will not like me, that things would get complicated and troublesome, that my attraction won't stay hidden, that the other one will abuse me, that the relationship will advance too quickly, that I would have to be tied to a relationship – thus pulling back from the interaction with the other, interacting from behind a defensive personality and being careful not to expose myself until I feel “safe enough” to lower my defenses – which may in fact never happen with a person, or may take a lot of time.

• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself, when and as I have been in relationships during my life, to not question my defensiveness and fearfulness and thus put a strain on every relationship (also some friendships) by not being “myself” (defenseless) until enough time has passed, if at all.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself, when and as a relationship has ended or been in conflict, to blame others for “not having patience” with me, not realizing that I am responsible for being in such a state that requires patience from others.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize I am harming myself by holding onto my fearfulness and that it is unacceptable that I keep on living as a “porcupine” that requires others to approach me in a certain way for me to feel safe.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear showing others that I experience emotions and feelings because it would require me to be honest with myself.

• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear being honest with myself about my emotions and feelings because I have perceived and believed emotions and feelings to be a weakness.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to idolize the model of “stability” that I saw in my father and want to become like him, not seeing, realizing and understanding the damage he did to himself as he played out “stability” through self-suppression, and thus doing the same damage onto myself unquestioned.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe and perceive that in order to be stable one should have no emotions/feelings.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that stability is to embrace my emotions/feelings as an indicator of who I am and to direct who I am according to how I see best – not to accept and allow my emotions/feelings to direct me; stability is when I am in the wheel and emotions/feelings are riding along.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that stability is to see myself as a whole, embrace myself as a whole and direct myself as a whole – emotions/feelings included.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear admitting to an attraction because I have believed and perceived that attraction makes me “weak” or “less”.

When and as I go into resistance to share the fact that I am involved with or attracted to someone, feeling that inwards pull in my chest as if my physical body was trying to collapse into itself to hide itself from the eyes of others – I stop, I breathe and I realize that this resistance is a sign that I have not fully embraced what is going on and that I am not standing within and as myself in self-honesty. I realize that it is not other people I am trying to keep away from me but myself. I breathe and I release the tension from my physical body and I fix my posture so that I am open, relaxed and balanced. I ask myself: what am I hiding? What am I ashamed of? What do I not want to be seen? And I bring the answer back to myself as I see, realize and understand that I am in fact hiding from myself and not from others. I release the point through self-forgiveness (written, spoken or experienced) and I push through my resistance to share myself with others by speaking through words that best describe my experience.

I commit myself to with myself go through what is going on in this relationship in spoken and written word so that through absolute self-honesty, self-certainty and self-integrity I may stand within and as my decision to be in a relationship and share my decisions with others.

I commit myself to observe and investigate how approaching relationships through the negative polarity manifests in me.

--

Another aspect of this point surfaced. In communication with the person I am in a relationship with I noticed in myself a fearfulness, carefulness, behind actions that were necessary – but not necessary to be done through fear. I realized I am scared of losing this relationship and that I am acting through that fear, trying to make sure that I am doing everything possible to maintain the relationship now that for the first time in my life I have some understanding of how to actually do that and NOT mess things up from the start. I regret all the mistakes I have made in my previous relationships and now try to make sure I make no more mistakes, that I would finally “succeed” - and this idea of “success” indicates that there is a relationship ideal I am reaching for, some kind of a goal that I believe to be possible to get to.

I will continue with this point in later writings.

Days 276-277: Self-suppression

22-23072013

I have mastered the suppression of my own emotions to such an extent that I become blind to them. There's been something bottling up in me for a while now, and when this experience was triggered in me today once more I realized that there is something way wrong, that I am headed towards a falling point like a car directed towards the edge of a cliff. I realized that I need to stop and face myself, because I knew that if I kept on going I would end up bringing about my own destruction. The problem was, I had no idea what I was experiencing.

I knew I had to be alone to reach the required level of self-intimacy, so I shut myself in the guestroom I'm sleeping in, turned the lights off, wrapped myself in blankets and hugged a hot water bottle. Here I started to ask myself questions. The problem was, my answers would always digress. I would start blaming others and forgetting that I too had responsibility to carry; I would see clues and hints were there weren't any; I would go through different scenarios in my mind as if they were already happening and forget that all of them were possible only through my interpretation of my perception – which is not the equivalent of truth. After following these traces in my mind for a while I realized that I was on the wrong track, that I was making no progress but only making things worse. So I returned to the most prominent experience I had had and started putting it into words. What exactly did I experience? What was my reaction? What was the trigger? Why did I experience this? And underneath this I found the core fear, the worst-case scenario I had been fearful to voice, and when I put it into words and found a way to express it I broke into tears because I was finally in touch with myself again, I was being honest with myself, I knew who I was. But it required a tool of expression, language, and the mental tools to get through the layers of shit I had been piling up.

When I was sitting there crying wrapped in blankets, wearing oversized garments and holding a hot water bottle I thought that I must look like a child and I felt ashamed. I was ashamed for feeling the things I felt. I thought that I should be more than that. I was comparing myself to other people whom I perceived to be much more “adult” than myself because apparently they don't get insecure like this and their lives are all fine and stable. I thought that my problems are like children's problems, ridiculous and immature. And so I realized that a key element in my emotion suppression is shame: for some reason I have learned that emotions/feelings should not be shared, maybe because they should not exist in the first place, maybe because expressing them leaves me vulnerable. I noticed this exact pattern with positive feelings just a couple of days ago when a child I had gotten to know was expressing his affection towards me and I hesitated in responding even though I wanted to. I thought of it as an expression of weakness. Luckily the child did not see it that way, and in his actions I saw that it was in fact a strength, because him expressing his feelings was an act of self-honesty. I intend to learn of his example.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel ashamed of my emotions and feelings.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel ashamed of my inner experiences.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to suppress my feelings, emotions and other inner experiences because I have wanted to hide them and not admit that they exist.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to pretend that my emotions and feelings don't exist when I suppress them - and I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe my own deception.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to see emotions and feelings as a weakness.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe and perceive that experiencing feelings/emotions reduces my worth – makes me a less of a person.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that even though emotions and feelings are a sign of mind patterns I have not transcended yet, they are an inevitable part of the process and cannot be bypassed no matter how much I would like to “be there already” - which may or may not be a state of transcendence that is ever achievable in this life (I won't know until I die).

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to perceive and believe emotions/feelings to be a sign of weakness instead of realizing that they are a manifestation of who I am within that moment, and that to express who I am is to live as self-honesty.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to react to emotions/feelings with fear as I remember the mind pattern [emotion/feeling = negative] - and I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to respond to my reaction by suppressing these emotions/feelings because I fear that letting them out would only have negative consequences.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe and perceive that expressing myself will result in negative consequences for me.

--

I know that this has begun somewhere early in my childhood. I have been an introvert child for as long as anyone can remember: I have asked my parents and siblings about this, and according to them I have always “kept to myself”, which everyone thought to be normal because of the belief that some people “just are born” introverts and some extroverts. I realize that this is a pattern I have picked up from my parents, different aspects from both of them, and integrated their issues into a manifestation of insecurity. I have lived as the crystallization of my parents' issues.

--

[Here I did detailed SF on my parents in private, which I will continue with and expand on.]

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not see, realize nor understand that every action of self-suppression that I commit supports this pattern of suppressing my emotions/feelings, and that thus in order to overcome the issue with emotional expression I need to tackle every single moment of self-suppression – which means that the process ahead is going to be demanding and thus require my full attention. (No half-assing!)

I commit myself to from now onwards focus on the point of self-suppression in my writings and lived process in order to map out and comprehend how it manifests in different ways and different situations.

I commit myself to for now focus on the point of self-suppression – which directly affects all of my social relations - as my biggest challenge at the moment is to get the social aspect of my life into a balanced state where I could actually utilize relations with others to support and assist me instead of using them to abuse myself and others.

I commit myself to open up the father and mother insecurity patterns with self-forgiveness in private and to share in public whatever I can, if anything at all.

When and as I see myself reacting to an emotion / a feeling with fear and suppression – with the physical sensation as if I am closing the mouth of a bottle (head area) and pushing the emotional energy down towards my solar plexus – I stop, I breathe and I realize that I am rejecting myself and refusing to look at who I am, and that the emotion/feeling that was trying to surface was an expression of who I truly am within that moment. I realize I am doing this out of FEAR. I remind myself that emotions/feelings are in fact not a negative thing and that it is better for me to express them so that I am at least honest with myself. I realize that the expression of emotions/feelings can be utilized for self-reflection as when I express myself I have a chance to observe myself and learn of myself. I realize that whatever emotion/feeling I express I am able to forgive myself and that I should thus not be afraid to express any emotion/feeling. I stabilize myself in breath and I utilize breath to release the tension and suppression from my physical body. I look at myself in self-honesty by asking questions in order to figure out what emotion/feeling/experience I was suppressing and why I was afraid to express it. I structure my experience into self-forgiveness statements either in speech or writing and continue with it until the experience dissolves.

Day 249: Fear of exposing myself through singing

02-032013

Singing at my father's wedding in 2011.

Today I faced an interesting fear. I was spending my day on a nice, calm residential area and had no plans but to sit around reading and writing and maybe connecting with people if I got the chance to. I ended up sitting next to the local subway station and while I was watching the people flow by I realized that this would be a perfect spot and a perfect moment for street performing, which I had planned on doing during my trip if I got the chance and if I started to run out of money. I had thought about doing this a couple times before, but I had always had an excuse not to, but this time I had all the practical elements in order and so there were no excuses left not to do it.

Once the idea got to me I noticed that at first I was already about to do it – like, “alright, this would be suitable now, I'll do it”, just seeing the practicality and acting upon it - but then I was stopped by a paralyzing fear. It was not a verbalized thought that stopped me, but a feeling, something that made my heart beat really fast and hard. I am not sure what the initial starting point was for my nervousness to arise.

So I little by little physically moved myself into a position where all I had left to do was to lay down my money cup and start singing. This is where I got stuck for about a half an hour. I asked myself: What do I fear? Who am I right now? And I moved through many layers of self-awareness, where I admitted to my fears and demons and saw myself for who I was within my fears and my motivation. Eventually when I had already gone through all this I noticed that I was simply looping, repeating the same thought patterns over and over again, and I realized that all that was left to do was to actually move myself. I told myself: “I am not leaving here until I do this.” I tried to move my hand to lay down the cup but I stopped myself mid-way. I tried again with the exact same result. I then decided to move myself completely, got up from the bench, moved around a bit standing up, up and down, laid my cup down and just pushed through the resistance and started to sing – and from that moment on it was easy, things went smoothly, I enjoyed myself, others seemed to enjoy me and I/we had a lot of fun. So I had to actually change my position entirely: the sitting position I had been stuck in for a half an hour was a manifestation of my fear and hesitation and it was necessary to move myself out of it to shake off the fear.

A fucking insanely difficult threshold to cross, especially concerning by background in performance arts, but I did it! And I can actually see that from now on doing the same thing will be easier because I have already proven to myself that my fears were invalid.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear that my singing is not as good that I believe it to be and that I will embarrass myself by singing in public without a band to back me up.

• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to give authority to the experience of embarrassment by losing my stance and separating myself from myself with self-judgement when and as I have perceived and believed others to judge me.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that embarrassment is an experience I create in my mind based on guesswork, interpretations and a distorted self-image and that this experience is in no way whatsoever based on reality.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe and perceive that my voice and singing alone is not enough to count as a performance, and I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to use this belief as an excuse not to sing on the streets alone.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that I wish to have a band or other singers to back me up because when I am alone I will not be just a performance but I will be exposing myself in public.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear exposing myself to others in public through my singing as self-expression as I have not faced and embraced myself within and as that act of self-expression.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to separate myself from my self-expression by not standing within and as myself when and as I sing in the presence of others.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe and perceive that there is a standard I need to reach to be accepted by others.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that once I accept and embrace myself I will show myself to others in self-honesty, which enables others to accept me as well as I grant them access to my real self.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear scenarios where others would show their disapproval of my self-expression, because I have learned to fear this in my childhood where my peers bullied me because of how I expressed myself.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that my fear of the judgement of others is based on a childhood misconception that I am defined by the opinions of others, and that this fear is thus not valid as I now see, realize and understand that the opinions of others are manifestations of who they are, not of who I am.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to doubt my ability to sing as I have perceived and believed this ability to be defined by technical skills alone, not realizing that the ability to sing is also composed of self-expression which has nothing to do with physical technique – and I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not give myself credit for both the technical and expressive ability that I do in fact have when and as I sing without fear.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to use my lack of education in singing techniques as an excuse not to perform and as evidence for my perception that my skills are less than they actually are.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to limit and suppress my self-expression with a distorted self-image and with excuses that put the blame for this on others.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to want to sing from the starting point of impressing others with my skills, not singing to express myself but to present an image of myself.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that my fear of singing alone in public is not about facing others but about facing myself.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not enjoy myself when and as I sing by considering what others might want to hear me sing, not realizing that I cannot possibly know this and that the “best guess” is just to sing what I enjoy singing as that is the most self-honest approach.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear singing because I am then fully exposed.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear making mistakes when I sing because I want to maintain a self-image of flawlessness, reacting to all mistakes by “pulling back” from my self-expression and from then on “playing it safe” - not realizing that everyone makes mistakes and that they can be utilized for learning, growth and expansion of skill.

I commit myself to embrace moments of making mistakes when singing as moments of humanity – in other words, I commit myself to embrace my flaws as moments of learning by checking what led me to that particular mistake and what could be done differently.

I commit myself to utilize upcoming opportunities to perform in public and to embrace those moments as self-expression and communication.

When and as I face the fear of singing in public – I stop, I breathe and I remind myself that I can rely on myself to be here for me and with me. I realize that my fear of others is based on the misconception that other people are not like me and cannot/will not sympathize with me. I realize that I am here to express myself to and communicate with others through the tool of singing. I breathe and stabilize myself and align myself with all of my physical existence. I then proceed to push through the threshold of fear by letting my voice flow from me in full strength within and as the realization that the threshold is actually imaginary as I will remain HERE just the same before and after crossing it, and that the threshold will get smaller each and every time I cross it.

I commit myself to sing in the presence of others from the starting point of self-expression as I see, realize and understand that this is the only way my singing will be self-honest communication with others and not an ego show.

I commit myself to investigate the experience of embarrassment by stopping and breathing when and as I experience embarrassment and/or fear the experience of embarrassment, thus becoming aware of it and not accepting and allowing these moments to slip by.