Telepathic Teddy Bear

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Shame is you making a guess: That if people saw you as you are, they'd back away from you. I've tested it a few times over my life. Said the embarrassing thing out loud and waited for the room to abandon me in some way. Mostly people just nodded, and a couple of them said me too. Every time you hide the thing, shame gets to be right without ever being given a chance to surprise you. - #shame #vulnerability #selfcompassion #belonging #emotionalhealth

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I do 4 questions, that's all it is: What are you feeling? What are you worried about? How are you helping me? What do you need? I get the answer intuitively. WRITE it out if you don’t want to get bogged down in murky thinking mode. Everything else on the self-care list is you doing something FOR yourself. This is you finding out what you need first. I skipped it for about two weeks while I was sick. Slept badly, waited to feel better and only got worse. Ten minutes of typing did more work than anything else I’d tried. Send this to someone who has been searching for a way out of something. So they know you see how hard they are working. #innerwork #selfcompassion #depression #selfcare #mentalhealth

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Passage from James Hollis’s Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life. — There's something you've been meaning to do for about a year. Every time you get close to it you feel sick, so you put it off. And the putting-off feels like relief for maybe an hour. Then it settles into something flatter. You stop wanting things as much. The days get easier and smaller. I know that that feeling. I lived in it for a long time and thought I was just being realistic. One thing needs saying before anyone takes this the wrong way. Hollis is not talking about the illness. Clinical depression is not a decision anybody makes and if that's what you're in, none of this is your fault and none of it is aimed at you. He's talking about the flatness that shows up right after we back away from something that mattered to us. The kind we build ourselves, one avoidance at a time. Choosing the other thing is never big. Nobody chooses it once and is done. You do the thing while you still feel sick, and you get a few hours of feeling awake before the fear comes back and you have to choose again. It doesn't get comfortable. It just starts being the life you chose instead of the one you settled for. — Send this to someone who has gone quiet lately. Not to push them. So they know you can tell the difference. #anxiety #jungianpsychology #shadowwork #innerwork #mentalhealth