Love yourself tender. A book about self-appreciation and self-care

You bring him a little tenderness in the palm of your hands

Putting them together like a little boat;

He giggles and slaps your hands up from below;

No, it doesn't hurt, why would it, no,

Something like this will not impair;

And yet the tenderness is shattered beyond repair.

My needlecraft teacher at school was a big fan of Louise Hay[3] and instead of explaining to us how to make our rows of stitches straight, she would send us to the fitting-room one by one, to sit in front of the mirror and repeat one hundred times looking at yourself “I love myself”.

We were thirteen. We knew nothing of love and even less of ourselves. So, all the assurances that you just need to “love yourself” – and your belly fat along with pimples will magically disappear and boobs grow larger – seemed senseless and odd.

Many years would pass before I would start to understand at least a little about love. Before I would be able to rid this word of all the superficiality attached to it, of all literary clichés and other people's stories associated with it. Before I would discover what it is like to lose someone, stay all alone, or be the one to leave first. I would yet find out what it is like when your world begins to shrink and starts weighing you down and you begin to feel dead on the inside: how wonderful it is to have you all; what a pity that I don't need any of you.

Many more years would pass before I would begin to understand the concept of self-love, start accepting my own feelings and naming my fears; before I would start saying “I am afraid” when I was, instead of playing a tough-looking heroine with her knees trembling under the table.

Age really makes a lot of things easier

To be precise, it is experience that we accumulate as we age

We understand our parents better when we become parents ourselves and feel the burden of having to take care of our family, especially when the money runs short and a job is nowhere to be seen.

We understand that a child's worldview and the worldview of an adult are two completely different Universes. So, instead of getting stuck in the hurt caused by people from the past and viewing yourself as a victim, it would be more tender to yourself to just accept what never had a chance to happen, to shed tears over what you did not get, mourn what wasn't lived through, and finally close the door on trying to find all those why's. Memory can lie to us and skew the facts. You may keep a grudge against someone who had no intention of hurting you, because “they gave you everything they could, and what wasn't given – that was not available at all”.[4]

In my opinion, it is very important in every person's development, to cut the phrase “I feel so because…” to “I feel so. Period”, and to try to find as many ways as possible to support yourself in the here and now, in the conditions and with the person you live in right now.

Feelings are neither ugly nor wrong

Tenderness towards you begins by giving yourself permission to feel everything you feel, regardless of what other people think, and not breaking those feelings down into good and bad categories.

Elizabeth Gilbert once wrote on her Facebook page[5] that if we are feeling joy then it is truthful and real to us, same as our sadness, same as our love for somebody. No one will win if we try to convince ourselves that we're feeling something different. There is no better way to become whole than to live your own truth. By choosing less, we will be choosing something unfit for ourselves.

If you are feeling sadness then that's what it is for the moment, and there's no good in denying it.

You have a reason to feel the way you do: maybe something has upset you, maybe you have lost something (money, relationships, a possession, inspiration, your weekend plans, the love of your life), and you need to live through that loss, grieve and adapt to a change.

Grieving does not mean wearing black, inconsolably sobbing, and never leaving the room. To grieve means allowing yourself to acknowledge your loss. There's no way of knowing how long it will take you, but if you try to stop yourself from living through it, then it will definitely take longer than it otherwise would.

If this were the case, tenderness to yourself would mean reconciling yourself to walking around for some time with pockets full of sadness. It will pass when it can. It is okay, it won't kill you and for certain will not make you worse.

With that in mind, try not to lure yourself into “worrying for the sake of worrying” – in other words, panicking about whether we're all right just because we felt the “wrong reaction” to something: maybe we got jealous, glad of a friend's bad luck, upset or just sad and started whining – as is the current trend – rather than being proactive.

We are sad when we find ourselves unable to spread “positive vibes” the whole time. We are pained to admit that there are things that will always trigger us, which means that we will always react in the “wrong” way, not as we would wish to react, but rather coming from our personal well-being and whatever strength we have at that moment. Just so we're not reduced to tears on the spot.

This is a reality, so please breathe in and out and come back to yourself as soon as you sense you are starting to feel worried about the “appropriateness” of your feelings. You are all right, your worries are on a par with the moment. You do not have to be ashamed of them and try to feel different.

It's not scary to feel hate even once for your loved one – It's scary to not allow yourself to feel anything towards him except for love.

Feelings are always about “now”, and not about character. If you are feeling angry, it does not say anything about the kind of person you are but it might say a lot about what is going on. Perhaps, someone is breaking into your personal boundaries or denigrating something dear to your heart. Or maybe you feel overworked and your body has switched into red-alert mode, perceiving everything within your sight as a threat.

The same goes for fear. If you're afraid, it doesn't mean that you're a coward. Your feelings just overrule your thought process and you feel threatened before you can explain what is going on. There is a good saying for it: if something feels wrong, then it probably is.

If you're hungry, exhausted, or tired, don't expect Buddha-like calmness from yourself when you come across mess that your children have made. Your anger won't be proof of your bad character, it will only be a signal that right now you are at a low point.

Whenever we burden other people with hopes they cannot live up to, we face a conflict of expectations. A newborn has no idea that mommy needs some sleep. A husband cannot read his wife's mind and therefore cannot possibly know what she is keeping silent about. It is pointless to expect support and sympathy from a friend who is known for being critical. They all do what they do, not out of spite, but because they do not know better. It is not that they are bad, it just shows that something is wrong with our expectations (I would like to highlight that: expectations, not us).

Now, it is quite different when you are being told how exactly you should feel, or when you are judged for your reaction to something. “How can you be happy to quit a job? You are supposed to feel worried like all normal people do!”

I remember feeling a vivid rage, not grief as everyone expected (grief was present, but only as a backdrop) when my first husband and I started divorce proceedings. I don't think I would have felt that way had we “just” had different characters, or had our love vanished into thin air with the passing of time. I was enraged because I felt helpless watching something I treasured and had invested my time, efforts, and money into, methodically and inevitably collapse before my eyes.

However, I am absolutely adamant not to feel something just because it is deemed an “inappropriate” or unwanted feeling. (– “I love you”. – “Thank you”. – “Well, that wasn't exactly the answer I was hoping for…” – “Thank you very much?”).[6]

You are saying “I am hurt”, and someone tells you “Not, you're not…”.

You are not hurt. You are not afraid. You are not feeling bad. You are not tired. It is all just your imagination, pull yourself together, get up. And you do pull yourself together once, twice, three times, four, five, eighteen times, forty-three. And that's when you start noticing how stoic and strong you've become, thick-skinned, almost armor-plated. And where something living and warm previously was, a cold emptiness now forms.

And one day, you wind up hearing yourself saying to someone else: you're not hurt; you are not afraid. You neither believe nor measure anything against yourself; the benchmarks are low, and the lack of faith paltry, but that other person who approached you with their woes is left sad and lonely and burdened.

I dislike it when someone asks “What happened”, and when they hear the answer, they ask: “Why are you so upset? It's not worth it!” Well, first of all, every person has a right to feel how they would like to feel towards what happened, simply because he or she knows best what can ease their pain. Secondly, that kind of response casts doubt on the person's ability to react appropriately to events, degrading them from a position of an adult with their own formed values system to the position of a child whose experiences are not enough to adequately judge what is going on. Thirdly, no one has a right to say “chill out” until they have walked in the other person's shoes. Only someone who has experienced a loss knows how hard it is to endure that. People do not grieve for fun.

It was Melody Beattie who wrote in her famous book on co-dependence Codependent No More: “Stop abandoning ourselves, our needs, our wants, our feelings, our lives, and everything that comprises us. Make a commitment to always be there for ourselves. We can trust ourselves. We can handle and cope with the events, problems, and feelings life throws our way. We can trust our feelings and our judgments. We can solve our problems. We can learn to live with our unsolved problems, too. We must trust the people we are learning to depend upon ourselves.”[7]

Quiet emotions

Sometimes emotional detachment is not a sign of exhaustion or a conscious suppression of feelings, but rather an individual, inner characteristic. You shouldn't blame yourself for not being emotional and shouldn't try to force yourself to experience reality in a more vivid way. “Quality” of emotions does not depend on the way one expresses them and is not measured by how high you jump for joy or how many gallons of tears you shed.

It is normal to love passionately and madly, it is also normal not to love that way.

Tenderness to yourself means learning to value your own set of tools, instead of being jealous of someone else's. Someone else might have a magnifying-glass that allows him to notice something significant amongst the small things. Another might have an axe that allows him to chop away the unnecessary. A third person might have a tape rule for measuring everything he comes across, and a fourth person might be equipped with ink for blackening up the picture. It is normal if your own toolkit lacks an emotional amplifier. It is not a deficiency, but a peculiarity.

For most of us, it's an extra credit question that allows us to feel negativity without doing anything about it, be it fixing ourselves or feeling ashamed. We're not afraid of feelings per se, but rather the risk of what we might do under their influence – badly thought through actions, razor-sharp words that might slip off our tongue. It's scary having to deal with the consequences later: spoiled relationships, lengthy disagreements, and the tattered reputation of a usually calm and friendly person.

Many of us are afraid to feel sexually curious about another person when we're in a stable, monogamous relationship, as if it would be akin to adultery and acknowledge problems in relationships. This is not exactly right. The more often we force ourselves to suppress our spontaneous interest in somebody (“don't you dare to look!”, “don't even dare to admire!”, “don't you dare to admit you like what you're seeing!”), the more likely it is that a long-restrained pressure will cause an explosion and infidelity will happen for real. We could also lose our passion for things in general, including towards our long-term partner. (“– Let's go to a bar! – No more bars. – Let's go fishing! – No more fishing. – Any regret you got married? – No more regrets are allowed.”)[8]

There are many decisions and concrete steps between sexual interest and cheating. It's ok to feel sexually aroused if that's all you take home.

One cannot influence the kinds of feelings that are born inside. You cannot force yourself to fall out of love or stop being hurt from betrayal at will. The good news is: you always have powers to cope with any of your feelings.

Not even one feeling can kill you because, if it could, they wouldn't exist in our nature at all.

As Anne Lamott once wrote, “But you can't get to any of these truths by sitting in a field smiling beatifically, avoiding your anger and damage and grief. Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth. We don't have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not to go into. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in – then we will be able to speak in our own voice and stay in the present moment. And that moment is home.”[9]

Run, Breathe, Talk, Repeat

When you experience strong feelings, the most difficult part is remembering to breathe. When you feel adrenaline coursing through your body, you must continue breathing, consciously prevent yourself from freezing, and detach yourself from what is happening. In my experience, muscles remember numbness best, and it requires many hours of body-relaxation practices to soothe away those freezing effects that turn your body into a pillar of salt. (And on this topic, I am truly amazed by the Siberian salamander that lives in permafrost areas. This little, slow-moving newt can lie frozen in a cliff crack for decades (!), and when the sun shines on it again, it unthaws and gets back to its business, as if nothing ever happened. I envy that a bit.)