Great response Pippin, and this has been my experience as well. I needed that framing you just gave to even know how to answer this question.
I think it IS a lot of people. I am genX, raised by boomers. By and large that is. Generation who a large majority didn’t learn to deal with feelings as they were raised by the silent generation. I think I did better teaching our kids but no where near as good s they do with their kids. Emotional intelligence can be taught or modeled but many of us never experienced that.
Self awareness is the main obstacle we have and for ws who re often avoidant, sometimes we are already so full of shame and insecurity it’s difficult for us to want to take a look at ourselves for fear of what we might find.
This is why sometimes we have to spend some time healing before we can start tackling more. And deep down I think healing is a combination of learning to love ourselves and then moving on to changing the things that don’t serve us. But we often do not know that’s the order of operations and we flail longer as a result. Add to that even if we do know the goal is to learn to love ourselves, how does one even begin to do that? Sometimes it starts with having compassion with ourselves which in itself is a tall order.
Remind yourself when you know better you do better. Yes, we knew what we did was wrong but we didn’t know why it was so compelling.
My advice to the flailing is to start being mindful and intentional. Because when you do that often you will start making better decisions, and when you make better decisions you start feeling better about yourself. The momentum starts. The momentum stops as we are reminded of who we have been. That’s why it’s important to try and live more in the present. To focus on what we can control, and keep tending to what is currently happening. We can’t control our past or our future and when you remind yourself to let those things slip away things start to get more manageable.
Then, as things get more manageable you can start doing other things, because you are no longer paralyzed by the shame of the past. You have blonde recent history to point at that you are proud of and as the future becomes a question you start fortifying your confidence to handle it because you are now present and at the wheel rather than just going through the motions of your days.
It sounds like you have some pride in your progress but still want to criticize how long it’s taken. Guess what? It’s taken me 7 years of being mindful and sometimes I am still bad at what I preach. However, it doesn’t have to be perfect.
Progress over perfection.
But that presence starts morphing over time into a deep knowing of yourself. It’s no longer all bad or all good. That was my problem before, I focused on the bad. That critical voice in my head that has been there as long as I could remember no longer exists anywhere near as strong. Now I just say "okay I learned something, I will do it better next time. Everyone has to start somewhere."
It’s okay to let your understanding evolve. I think you can say "I used to think this, but I have spent a lot of time reflecting and I see this over here might have been a larger factor"
When you spend so much time bottling everything up, nothing ever gets deeply examined. We are unable to do that fully without writing our thoughts in a journal, or talking about them here, or talking live to someone we trust.
I think you did therapy? If not, perhaps these are things you could bring to therapy. A lot of therapy is just self examination. They aren’t fixing you, they are helping you become aware so that when you reach these little crossroads where it comes up you can actively make a difference choice. It also helps you realize that some of the narratives you tell yourself aren’t really true and we can choose a more helpful narrative.
