thehappymessproject

[thehappymessproject]

100/100 - 5 steps to make the most out of our life

I started this essay months ago... Writing about it made me frustrated and sad : by taking stock of my thoughts ont the topic, it was all too clear that I had lost my way on several of them. It was the perfect time to write about it for many reasons, but also the worst for many different reasons.

So I followed my own principles, and let it sit, while exploring them one by one, reclaiming them. Real deep growth means getting back to beginner’s state over and over. Overdoing it is part of the process too. So are feeling lost, afraid, doubting ourselves and the process while trying to trust it. All of it and more. Change (and life itself) is a big mess.

Here are some signs that you may not use your time in a way that is satisfying to you (one is enough, especially if intense and persistant) :

Sleep issues (including fine quality of sleep but constant fatigue)

Reduced functional time : someone fine can function for 10 hours on average before being really tired. Anxiety or depression and other disorders can reduce this to 1 hour in severe cases.

Frequent/permanent bursts of sadness or fear (especially if ‘unexplained’).

Feeling like time tends to fly by ‘too quickly’, even if it can seem way too slow as well sometimes.

Feeling like it’s impossible to do what really matters to you because you don’t have enough time or energy.

I was checking 3 out of those boxes, and in an intense way until a few weeks back. I realised that I had slipped into this territory again, the one of being caught in so many vicious cycles that it feels like it may never stop and I may never have time to do what’s important to me. So I went back to basics and made sure I would embody these words, not just aspire to them. 

Here are the steps I am following to reset and ease back slowly the way I spend my daily time.

Pausing and listening

Stillness and reflection are absolutely key in this process. 

Without them in our life, everything feels way too blurry to take on real deep change, or even to understand what we are experiencing. And trying to change the way we use our time is definitely real deep change. 

To learn how to pause, we need to start from what we consider as a pause. Meditation is one of the surest, fastest and strongest way to learn stillness and to connect to ourselves. But many people have even difficulty to stay a few moments doing nothing in silence. For them, meditation is simply too hard right now.

This specific difficulty is in itself a symptom of deep underlying emotional struggle. It shows us also how much we struggle to accept ourselves the way we are. But be sure of one thing : we can all find our way back to stillness and delight in our own company, which is our deep natural state... As long as we start from where we are at. 

When stillness isn’t available to us yet as a safe practice, we can already benefit from simply slowing down. Doing activities that make us feel almost still, or at least calmer helps greatly. 

Taking breaks without getting our phones out. Taking a deep breath from the belly and slowly letting it out through the mouth. Practicing staying silent with people, just enjoying each other’s company or even just being bored together. Walking and letting our thoughts wonder. Listening to music while daydreaming. Stopping for a few instants once in a while during our commute to simply observe the world going on without us… There are many ways to progress back towards that childlike and very wise ability of staying in the moment. 

(check this essay for more ideas on how to train your mindful muscles)

Daring

To live the most out of our life, we will need to change regularly, either to adapt to the environment we choose, adapt to life itself or simply to follow out deeply human need to evolve. Change is the only real constant we’ll ever face. 

That change (especially when it’s deep) will always requires that we get out of our comfort zone, which will always have that scary vibe that accompanies vulnerability. When we change, we take risks, and real risks are scary : we need courage to take them on.  

We will need to find out what we really want, which can be scary enough as it is. We will need to explore what it is by doing all sorts of new unsettling things. We will need to learn how to listen to ourselves more and better. We will need to fail miserably every so often (the bigger the goal, the more frequent the failure involved). We will need to face how little we know about ourselves and how paradoxical we really are. We will need to embrace the awkward messes that we are. How much we suck, we are wrong, imperfect, incompetent, uncomfortable, scared, intimidated, self-limiting we can be… 

Change is a journey that can be as great, liberating and empowering as it is humbling, unsettling and subtile. One big happy mess when it’s taken on fulll speed. 

More on the courage to change and be who we really are in this essay.

A little bit of everything

If I had to choose just one word to characterise deep change, it would be balance. No life lived in any kind of extreme is sustainable or even really appreciated on the long term, most of us know that deep down... 

But humans are also really bad at finding balance, even more in our fast paced world. Instead, we tend to have some sort(s) of cycles, going round and round between being too self-indulgent and too harsh on ourselves. 

We often call them “being reasonable” and “letting ourselves live”, but rarely truly do any of both in the end. There is something very disheartening in living stuck in those cycles. 

Life stuck in cycles doesn’t feel at all like we can have an impact on our destiny, like what we do actually matter in the grand scheme of things. We feel stuck and discouraged. Often bitter too. 

That is why there is something so liberating in finding ways to balance everything that is important to us. Even if it will never be achieved as a goal : even if we do find some sort of balance, life changes, circumstances change, WE change no matter what we do. So balance has to be found over and over, the way our courage or what we think we know about ourselves does. 

I’ve met so many people betting their life on something big in their future, ready to sacrifice things they know are important (like time with our loved ones, their passion, their sleep…) for things they think they really need first in order to be happy (generally money, status, diplomas…). I have yet to meet someone who really “won” that kind of bet. 

What I’ve met a lot, are people who lost their dreams, their will to live or simply lost themselves in that game. They will need more, always. They will keep procrastinating what they deem as really important in their heart, until something breaks. Their bodies, their soul, their spirit… Or simply until they die.

How many cautionary tales and tragic anecdotes do we hear about those people who were waiting for their retirement or these other big things (money, status, power, diploma...) to ‘really live’ (be it travel, make art, spend quality time together…) until they actually got retired and couldn’t do any of it, because they were too sick, physically shattered, depressed to have lost all that was their daily life, or tragically lost their spouse? Or, they got the job, money and status they just don’t have more time, jut more responsibilities? Young adults who will have spent their lives between mental health issues and studying before tragically passing in an accident? 

It might sound morbid, but like many people who have faced death in a very intimate way, I use my mortality as an incentive for being brave and go after what truly matters to me.

Don’t get me wrong though, there is nothing wrong about making sacrifices for our bigger goals. We will always have to sacrifice things to get what we deeply want. 

I’m just saying, don’t forget to also live : paint on the week end, write that book on stolen minutes, learn/practice that craft 10mn of practice at the time, go on dates with people you love and create actual memories with them, take time to breathe and look around you, to connect with nature, to dance and listen to music, to read good books and taste great food... 

Learn to know yourself and the world around you. Switch your phone off and use your senses to live your life. One meaningful moment at the time. LIVE!

You can have more of the life you really want, right now. Allow yourself to make a bit of it happen. 

And if you already do that, and know deep down that you really love what you already have and wouldn’t change a thing, but still feel like life is passing by : make bigger bets.��

Decide that you will save money for that thing you really want to do someday, NOW, give that thing a deadline. Take some risks. Evening classes. Online classes : thanks to the Internet, we can learn everything we want NOW. Look for things you might want to explore, start where you are, and bet on yourself. 

Start making your dreams happen bit by bit. One step at the time, we will make the hard things happen. Don’t wait for the perfect time to do what matters. STEAL the time, it’s yours anyway. DARE!

More on balance on this essay.

Make room for play

I don’t know you, but I’ve been raised with the idea that play is for children and immature adults. And I always hated it. 

Play was such a privileged time of my childhood. Its scarcity as I got older really made me very sad and slowly infused bitterness. The day I watched the TED talk on the power of play was very joyful and dare I say, life-altering.

Humans are wired to play until they die. When we don’t play, our brains work less efficiently, we are more prone to depression, anxiety and all sorts of things that make life MUCH harder than it already is. 

Play is like putting on happy glasses : everything is slightly lighter and easier when we play, even the hardest things. 

After a few years making room for play in my life and learning more about it, it takes me very little time to diagnose a lack of play in someone’s life : they simply lack “colours”. Even when they are joyful and lively by nature, there’s a sadness in their eyes and voice, in their words. 

I can hear their inner child calling for help. Some kind of soft “There must be more to life, that can’t be all there is to it, can it?”. Yes, there is more to it. 

Play is some of that “it”. We all need it in several forms. Humour by itself isn’t enough. Entertainment either. We need to enter some kind of games, to be active in that process, find engaging activities that bring us joy to share with people close to us. 

Video games, board games, rough and tumble play… alone or with company : pick your favourites, and don’t be afraid to experiment with the ones you don’t know well. You might find a new love hidden there. 

There is no way around play, we all need some : it reminds us of our aliveness. So : what are you playing at lately?

(Find an essay on play here)

Honour pleasure

Another thing that is often missing in our lives. We hear so often in many different ways that we need to be productive. That our duties and our ability to own up to them define how well we “got it together”. And boy, do we want badly to get it together…

How many of us feel ruled by our to-do lists and duties? 

Here’s one little secret about to-do lists : we will always have more things to do than we have time, they should be directions, not orders. They are certainly not the boss of you!

If we focus on doing everything more than on choosing what things we want to prioritise, life tends to feel a lot like a permanent run, feeling late and overwhelmed. 

If we focus only on minimising the to do lists to diminish stress, we always end up cutting out things that are in reality more important than the ones we actually do. 

Do not focus on the to do lists. Focus on balance instead. And never forget that pleasure must be a part of that balance. 

Pleasure doesn’t need to cost anything, use huge chunks of time or anything really. Pleasure is about perceived luxury : things that make life fuller, more worth living. 

 It can be as simple as getting up 10mn earlier so we can really take our time drinking our coffee in the morning, changing your commute to walk in that area you enjoy, taking 10mn everyday to walk with someone you love (even in complete silence), switch technology off so we can really enjoy that meal, that break, that moment; taking time to dance recklessly, calling someone you love and didn’t hear from in a long time… 

Pleasure is about not taking life for granted, making sure we are not just machines working, taking care of logistics, and surviving. 

What are tiny things you can do often that would bring you pleasure? What things do you love but don’t do as often as you like? What makes your days special? 

So here it is. 

I am lacking words to describe how much working on those tiny but big things more seriously has been helpful for the past couple of months (and the past decade) to come back to myself. I finished my 100 days project exhausted, overwhelmed, sad for it to end and a bit lost. 

Even if I still had really hard and stressful days, and I’m currently in the middle of some of the biggest and deepest change I experienced in years, I’m putting an end to this essay that much more centered and calm. 

Life doesn’t have to be different (not even less stressful or painful) for you to be able to enjoy it more. All those things are small and big at the same time. Making sure we check on them and incorporate them can make our experience of life much richer and more satisfying, even if we don’t enhance anything else. No matter how life has to be stressful or hard, those are tiny things in our control that makes it easier to manage. 

So... What does this essay inspire you to try?

[thehappymessproject]

My mum and an old teacher of mine think I have ADD and went through the DSM5 and I showed all the symptoms (not the hyperactive symptoms, just the ones about inattention and that stuff), but I don't feel like I have anything bad enough to be a mental disorder. I've been noticing symptoms a lot more since I looked them up, I don't know if it's psychosomatic or if I'm just paying more attention to them? Is it possible that the DSM5 can be wrong?

[thehappymessproject]

how old are you ?x

Hi there! I'm 34.

[thehappymessproject]

96-98/100 - Boundaries and the delicate art of disappointing people

For a very long time, I used to teach my patients how to assert their needs, set their boundaries and communicate their grievances and didn’t understand why that specific process seemed to be so hard to grasp for so many of them. 

I had to learn about smaller parts about the human mind and heart to finally get what was stopping them (and myself, to a certain extent) : our need to be (seen as) good and nice, for social approval was stronger than our self-love in those moments. 

By avoiding to disappoint people too much, we end up losing our sense of self and therefore boundaries.  

Here are a few steps to a healthier direction.

It all starts with our need to be loved.

Everybody wants to be loved

We all do. Not necessarily by everyone, but at least a couple of other humans. 

It is in our genetic code and ingrained all over our body to love and collaborate : humans are one of those species which need to socialise in order to survive. It’s written in our DNA that rejection is bad thing. 

But our modern culture got us all twisted thinking that means we always have to be nice. That’s not kind at all (for no one) : that’s performative kindness. 

The truth is : someone who is constantly nice with everyone builds up vicious feelings of resentment, passive agression and (self-)hate. We need to be kind when it really matters to us, not because we want to be seen as nice or not mean. 

And sometimes (often), the person we really need to be kind towards is ourselves. When we lack the self-compassion to get out of painful situations, or the self-kindness to be ready to make time and space for good things to us, we can’t really be that nice. We just don’t know how or what it is. 

Since we never experienced that kindness, we can’t give it to others. It needs to starts within to truly feel like ours. Our love for others is bound by the limits of our love to ourselves. 

That means that sometimes, we need to put ourselves first to be really kind. And sometimes, it will not be well received, especially by people that have benefitting of our lack of boundaries. 

Just because someone is really upset by the boundaries we want to set, it doesn’t mean that we did anything wrong by setting them. 

This here might be the single most important thing to learn first. When we we heal, we have to learn how to set boundaries. It will be messy to do so, and uncomfortable, and awkward, and imperfect, and sometimes even bloody (hopefully not literally). 

Some people will absolutely reacts badly. 

But here’s another key :

We are not responsible for others’ emotional states

Others’ reaction are THEIR reaction. Yes, we can influence the way they feel, and yes, we need to take them into account, but if we do it to our expense constantly, we will always be unhappy about our interactions. 

In order to be in authentic relationships, we need to face uncomfortable and painful feelings. We need to be willing to our goofy, clumsy, weird, awkward self. But that’s not all of it.

We need to accept that others will sometimes suffer from our behaviour and words. We all do terrible things to people we love, hopefully most of them are done unknowingly. 

We will disappoint people, wether we are super careful, or completely careless about it. People get disappointed when they have expectations that are unmet, and all of us do have expectations at some point or another. 

Just because you disappointed someone doesn’t mean you are responsible for the emotions that disappointment brought along. You are responsible for : your actions, your choices (not choosing and not doing anything is a choice), your words. 

It is never your job to make people change the way they feel, you don’t have that kind of power, no one does. 

Here are the three steps I share with patients about owning up to our mistakes.  “You have got 3 jobs when you do something bad if you care about what you did or the person you hurt” :  - acknowledging what we did and its consequences (without making excuses)  - apologizing (here is an essay about giving better apologies) - repairing what we can (if we can’t, making sure we don’t reiterate)

People getting upset after something we did is a consequence of our actions, one we are accountable for, and also one we can’t repair right away. When someone is hurt, what done is done. You can’t undo it. 

You have to let them digest what happened, assess how they feel about it and decide what they want to communicate about. Let them be. 

It is also their experience. We need to let them deal with that disappointment on their own terms, ideally after our apologies, definitely without us harassing them for their forgiveness in order to feel less guilty. Give them some space.

Most importantly : take care of your own guilt by yourself. Ask yourself what you learnt from this that can be useful in the future. What you want to avoid and/or repeat. What you could have done differently.  

Because, you know what?

We are not in control of their emotions either

Another key principle. Both concepts come from being ashamed, uncomfortable or fearful, and feeling the need to change the situation in order to change the feelings involved. 

When we are so ashamed that we try to change how others feel, we actually tend to make it worse. We will over do it, manipulate them, deny, not listen, be passively (or actively) agressive, lie, use cheap tricks, intellectualise... 

More importantly : we will disconnect from them. No relational issue can be resolved when there is a disconnect. Ever. 

If someone’s disappointment makes them react very intensely, understand that no rational conversation can take place. If the intensity is too great, we need to stop the interaction if we want to limit the damages. 

“I need a break, this is too intense for me right now. But I really want to work this out with you. Can we talk about it when we both feel calmer?” is one of the most compassionate and helpful things one can say when an interaction escalates to a level of high intensity. 

Also, don’t forget : others’ emotions tell us a lot about their experience, not about who we are. Not one of my patients or friends in the process of emotional growth didn’t have to disappoint quite a bunch of people on the journey, even if rarely on purpose. 

When our heart grows, our needs, wants and tolerance will always change. Our relationships will naturally change over time because of it, and if we are brave enough to voice our new wants and needs, others will absolutely react to this. 

When we set new boundaries in old relationships, it is absolutely normal, and even a good sign to upset people around us : we are disrupting the statu quo, the way it was. 

A lot of people don’t want things around them to change, it doesn’t feel safe, they don’t feel in control anymore. So when we change they will often make moves telling us to “change back!”. 

Those reactions don’t mean we shouldn’t have changed, they are just saying “I am uncomfortable with the way things change” and asking “Are you really serious about that?”. If we are serious, we need to show them that we are by asserting our ground and accepting the discomfort going with it. It is scary, but it is so worth it. 

Live and let live

So here we are. 

Basically most relational issues will have two sorts of roots “I’m not allowing myself to be and express who I am enough” or “I am trying desperately to control others, their feelings and/or the outcome and it doesn’t work”. 

Both are almost the same : when we allow ourselves to be who we really are and to voice our truth, we don’t feel the need to control or to judge. The more we focus on being our fuller self, the more we naturally let others be theirs in our relationships too (if they want to). 

Sometimes being ourselves is accepting we don’t enjoy people around us anymore, and we need to decide if we want to engage less in those relationships, experimenting with other ways of interacting, or just end them. 

Sometimes, it’s more about accepting we don’t have the power to change things besides the little things actually in our control, like how we react to what we feel, the words we choose to use or what we prioritize in a crisis. 

It is going to be a bigger shift to navigate if we tend to blame others for what we feel. If we are a pursuer (see this essay to see the different kinds of ways of dealing with stress in a relationship), it is going to feel so much like we have to resolve that problem in this relationship to go on with our life. 

My advice : stop yourself at any sign of emergency in your relationships. A feeling of emergency is so often about our coping mechanisms and not actual danger. Except if there’s an immediate physical danger of one of the parties involved, nothing is that urgent. 

I used to find an issue in one of my important relationships anytime I would feel in intense distress. Like many of us, I would take all my energy to “think” (read : ruminate) about it and by doing so avoiding what I really wanted to do... 

And kept procrastinating everything that really mattered to me because it would took so much of my time and energy.

When I started to instead shift from “OMG this relationship is too painful I need to resolve this now” to “Ah, this old feeling of feeling abandoned and lonely. How can I take better care of myself right now?”, something magical happened. I became freer and freer, and could finally step out of the drama step by step.

Sometimes my coping mechanisms would bring me to feel like this about several relationships at the time, which felt like an even bigger and more urgent issue. Then, focusing on myself would be even more fulfilling. 

I taught myself and many others this precious statement “This is your time and energy. You feel down, so it is your job to use them for you rather than for others right now. If it’s still an issue when you feel better, then you know it’s a real issue and not a just defensive reaction”. 

It’s harder to repeat it to ourselves when really stressed out, but again, each time we do, we feel stronger, freer and more grounded (rather than more bitter, helpless and frustrated). Those 3 emotions are the first signs of our heart getting bigger and stronger. Even if we also also feel lonely and scared, as anyone willing to stretch out of their comfort zone will tend to. 

So go ahead, go disappoint people for the right reasons for once : you’ll feel less and less disappointed in yourself :) 

Speak soon,  Love,  L. 

[thehappymessproject]

93-95/100 - A few steps toward better apologies

Apologies used to be a nightmare for me as a child or teen. And still very hard as a young adult.  Apologising would mean being the wrong one, the mean one, the bad one. And the one who lost any right to even express themselves for being all those things.

Even the idea of apologising would shower me with shame. I’m a recovering people-pleaser and helping people is a big part of my purpose. That means the effect I have on people is very important to me and that when things go badly, my first coping mechanism would be to find out what I did wrong. 

When I grew up, an adult never apologised to me, even having wronged me knowingly. Not one, ever. But I was coerced into apologising numerous times. I’ve noticed how common that is. I’ve also sensed how surprised my young (and even older) patients are when I apologise to them the exact same way I would to an adult.

If you’ve been in a similar environment or was raised in a similar way, you know exactly how apologies can become painful to express growing up. But even if you weren’t, very few people are really great at apologising. Mostly because they feel too shameful to practice and therefore don’t know what a good apology is. I didn’t either until fairly recently. 

Two authors were the most helpful when it comes to teaching me how to apologise : Brene Brown with her work on shame and vulnerability, and the woman she used to read as a teen, Harriet Lerner, relationships expert. 

Here’s what I learnt from them and would have loved to hear as a child, and be reminded over and over later on : 

Apologies need to be intentional 

You don’t have to apologise. Ever. It is a personal choice.  If someone want to force you to apologise, it is emotional manipulation and know that you don’t have to. You absolutely can have a “Die mad about it” approach to it if that’s what is more important to you. 

But you have to accept that if you do something wrong, or that hurts someone, and don’t recognise it, you will be damaging your relationship with them, and their trust toward you. It’s ok if you don’t care, just be honest with yourself about that if you want less drama. 

If you can’t bring yourself to sincerely apologise, work on acknowledging that your pride is more important than the damaged relationship. It’s human, and sometimes, we don’t even understand what we did and can’t find the strength to do so honestly. But trying to helps determine our real priorities.

You may have to accept some consequences too. No one can force you to own up to your actions, but they dont have either to put up with your lack of care for said relationship. You might benefit from wandering too what you want from relationships you don’t care enough about to want to repair too. 

What apologies are really about 

A lot of people think apologies are about power. That’s when things go sour. Apologies are about love, respect and kindness.  Being in relationships means we will mess up and sometimes, we will hurt people we love the most. 

Each time we hurt someone we are in a relationship with, we damage that relationship. So it happens, but should be as rare as possible, and need to be repaired for the relationship to be sustainable. Apologies are a very important part of those repairs. 

Equally importantly, apologising teaches us that we are allowed to mess up. How good it feels to own up our mistakes (cultivating integrity), and allow ourselves to be imperfect (cultivating acceptance). There is so much ordinary courage in that practice, and it is necessary for any relationships to work well that we learn how to give them. 

Apologies shouldn’t be about controlling the other or the situation

You absolutely can try to control others and situations, you’re just not likely to get the results you are expecting. So when we apologise just so the other calm down, shut up, or do what we want, it tends to backfire, sooner or later, one way or another. 

That means we can make amends to people we hurt, but have to accept they may not be ready or willing to forgive us. Maybe for them the relationship is damaged beyond repair, and we have to respect that. We all have different tolerance thresholds.

That means that apologies are not about our redemption and feeling better, neither are they about making the other shut up or the uncomfortable situation stop, even if it can feel indeed better to make amends when we acted badly. Sometimes we apologise and it changes nothing, or we can even feel worse in some cases. 

That also means that fake apologies mostly make things worse...

Apologies should be honest and kind

We need to be sincere and acknowledge the wrong we did in order to perform true apologies. 

It is about the hurt we provoked. That we need to acknowledge. And repair. 

You’ve been warned. Use apologies to restore your faith in being good and right or manipulate at your own risks. And be prepared for some backlash if you do and they know better. 

It takes a lot of courage to apologise sincerely with the main purpose of restoring a relationship we care about. 

And it doesn’t mean that we believe everything is our fault : relationships are like dances, each partner influences the other. No situation is ever 100% the responsibility of only one of them. What it means is that we are mature enough to recognise we didn’t do perfectly or plain messed up. 

If we can only acknowledge and own up to 2%, well, let’s own them, and focus our apology on them. It doesn’t matter to find a culprit to blame to resolve a situation. 

It matters that the relationship is precious enough for us to be brave and own up to our shitty behaviour, or just a behaviour we deemed as innocent but ended up hurting someone we care about. 

Apologies are not excuses, neither are they just words

If you want to give apologies and make your best so they can be received, stay away from excuses. I am sure you have very good explications for why it happened, just keep them for another conversation. 

A lot of hurt that happens in relationships are misunderstandings interpreted as meanness or a lack of care. The truth is, most of us are doing their very best, and hate to realise we hurt someone we care about. 

If that’s you, make sure that’s not the center of your conversation. That way, if you really care about them, you will make sure you do the least additional damages possible by respecting how they feel.

Finally : just know that it is never too late for apologies. Some of my most meaningful apologies (for both the giver and the receiver) happened years, even decades later. Giving them felt incredibly grounding and receiving them helped greatly with healing. 

Apologies aren’t just words, they are supposed to be an act of love. Act like they are. If you apologised sincerely, you also made a commitment to the other person to pay attention and not to reiterate your original fault. Apologising profusely and then doing it again is a big breach of trust, respect and love. Don’t throw around words you don’t mean. 

Speak soon,  Love,  L. 

[thehappymessproject]

92/100 - On exploring our darkest corners

- On perfectionism and self-sabotage

Last week, I had the worst session I ever had with a patient. I always struggled with perfectionism. I was also raised to keep work as a very high priority. That means that I spent a lot of time over the years trying to be the best possible therapist, even after realising I couldn’t, that no one could. It also implies that having a big crisis at work can provoke huge melt downs. 

Last year, I started this therapy focused on trauma and attachments wounds. Since then, I’m having those very intense moments sometimes, where something very hard happens, and I react in a very old and new way at the same time. 

The old : I react with a lot of emotional intensity, like I used to years ago, before my first therapy. When I look at it from closer, I’m not just reacting about what happened, I am also reacting to a lot of similar events in my life. Parts of me, of my identity, break down. I am suddenly filled with doubt about many many things. 

The new : First, I can feel really quickly that it’s not just about the one that triggered my emotional response, and calming down. The pieces that break down are much smaller, and don’t stay broken for long anymore. A calm voice replaces the resenting panicky voice running the melt-downs. The quiet confident voice is making the doubts slowly subside. 

I am a bit thrown by that mix between familiarity and newness. Familiarity brings us comfort, even when it feels bad : we know how it feels, and often even how it will go. Newness is exciting and full of possibility, but also the root of uncertainty. Unless we were lucky enough to be wound-free as a child, emotional uncertainty can get scary, and often leaves us feeling vulnerable and fragile. 

A few years ago (the last time I had such a crisis at work), I would have been devastated for weeks. I would have completely doubted my ability to be a good therapist, bordering on having difficulty to see how I am even a good person. Having such an awful encounter with a patient I appreciate a lot would have meant that I am clueless about what is good for my patients. Which would have surely slipped towards the belief that I am clueless about everything.

Here’s the first thing : by wanting so badly to be perfect and doing things perfectly, we always close ourselves to the ability to actually see our flaws and all the ways we are far from perfect. We also close our hearts from seeing how we hurt the people we love the most. We cannot change anything we refuse to see. 

Brene Brown did an incredible job studying shame, and busted forever the idea that perfectionism has anything to do with pursuing excellence. Perfectionism is about avoiding shame at all cost. We get so obsessed by being good and right, that we end up doing a lot of bad things, and be really wrong : we’re just not able to see it. 

Learning how to see how flawed we are is one of the most precious skill we can ever develop. We all feel at some point dumb, clumsy, awkward, incompetent, needy, weird... If we can’t see all that and still love ourselves, we won’t be able to change in the ways we want, to connect deeply with others, to truly love. 

A team of Harvard researchers studied something they called Immunity to change. When we operate in ways that aren’t good for us, it is generally assumed that it is because of a lack of awareness, knowledge or skills. What their method is showing to us is that in fact, we are feeding a certain pattern. 

Here is the second thing : when we resist doing certain things or changing in a certain way that would be good for us on the long run, it is helping us going toward a certain goal. This unconscious goal that we don’t really know we have, but that is more precious for us than what we would accomplish by doing otherwise right now. 

This secret goal is often related to identity : “If I do that, it will mean I’m weak/bad/wrong/out of control/rejected...”. It is generally about avoiding feeling bad in some way. These parts of ourselves want to protect us. They love us in their own sabotaging way, but they are well intentioned. We need to see them for what they are to live at peace. 

I could have found a million reasons why my patient reacted so strongly and ended up very hurt, to blame her for what happened. I could ignore my guilt and the shame of not being perfect by directing them at her, finding all flaws in her and her reactions. There always are some. 

Instead, I’ve spent a good amount of that past week reflecting over how I felt, what I didn’t like in my own reaction and behaviour, and what I was considering as problematic or not aligned with my values. I got upset, I cried, I journaled, took really good care of myself to heal the wounds. I spent most time looking at my shadow right in the eye. 

Looking at our flaws can be an evil tool of self-persecution, or the magical tool of our emotional freedom. We can choose. We can cultivate the latter to transform the former into an asset. 

By making it all about me, since it is MY experience of it, and I know hers will have to be different, I allow myself to question what I did, without questioning who I am. To see that we were both trying our best, and couldn’t come up to a more comfortable ground, without attributing fault. I can feel that blaming, as seductive as it can be, will also bring me nowhere useful. 

Seeing our flaws and darkness for what they are and not for the fantasy we wish they really were liberates us from repeating the same mistakes and patterns. 

By facing what we are the most afraid of, we always discover we made it bigger in our head. We can finally see the cheap tricks our mind is playing. And learn how to free ourselves from them. 

We can do hard things. 

We can look where it is scary to look inside of us. 

We deserve to be able to look at ourselves with love, and pride. 

We can free ourselves.

Speak soon, 

Love, 

L.

[thehappymessproject]

88-90/100 - The way(s) we sabotage our relationships and how to avoid more pitfalls

First, know that you are the opposite of alone in this boat : you are sharing a very human tendency with a lot if not most of us. I’ve spoken so many times here about our emotionally illiterate world, letting most of us struggling personally and with others. 

There are way more people struggling with relationships than people having secure healthy relationships, no matter what they seem like or even often believe. 

Wether we are conscious of it or not, it is quite common to sabotage our relationships in some way or another. Even if it feels so counter-intuitive.

Why on Earth do we do this?

No, you’re not a horrible person. No, you’re not a masochist. No, you’re not socially stunted. You’re just human, and was raised and influenced by other humans. 

As I described in the essay on why we fall for people making us miserable, we develop very early our way of interacting with people. A lot of things are involved. 

Bowlby and Ainsworth revolutionised psychology by developing their theory on attachment, stating that we develop our attachment style during the first year and a half of life. It will influence our relationships whole life (especially without intervention such as therapy). 

Jeffrey Young describes 18 toxic beliefs about us, the world and others that we develop when our needs are not all met as young children, most of us developed a few of them, with relative intensity and invasiveness. They develop early and all influence our relationships and other aspects of our life too.

The truth is that there are many many reasons why we do it, and they are not that important for you to understand in depth. 

It can’t hurt to look more into it, hence my giving references to check out above, but it doesn’t need to be a priority. 

A more important question would be for example :

How do we do it?

Under high stress, we all use coping mechanisms. In our relationships, we can develop 5 different profiles. It is common to use a mix of several of them to deal with those high moments of stress.

Here are the types of mechanisms as described by Harriet Lerner :  * Underfunctioners were often labelled as the problematic/sick/irresponsible one... Some areas of their life just can’t seem to get organised. Under stress, they let others take over by becoming less competent. They tend to develop physical or emotional symptoms when stress hits at work or in the family. It’s hard for them to show their competent side to others. 

* Overfunctioners think they know what’s best for themselves, and others, and will advise, rescue and taker over when it gets hard. They often worry about others’ problems, avoiding their own, and therefore have difficulties staying out of people’s problems and letting them struggle. They are often seen as always reliable or having it together and tend to struggle to show their vulnerable underfunctioning side, especially to those they deem as having problems. 

* Blamers respond to stress with fighting and emotional intensity and use a lot of energy trying to change people who don’t want to change. They see others as their sole/main obstacle to change, and therefore try to make others responsible for their own feelings and actions. By doing so, they have fights which relieve the tension, but maintain old patterns. 

* Pursuers give a high value to talking things out and expressing their feelings and think others should do the same. When stress hits, the seek out more togetherness in their relationships, therefore taking it personally if others want to spend time alone or away of the relationship. When an important person seeks distance, they first pursue harder, before coldly withdrawing. They may label themselves as too demanding or dependent in their relationships and tend to criticise their partner as someone who can’t handle feelings or tolerate closeness.

* Distancers seek emotional or physical space under stress. They consider themselves as self reliant and struggle to seek help and show their needy, vulnerable, dependent side. They are often labelled as emotionally unavailable, unable to deal with feelings or withholding from significant others. They tend to relieve anxiety by focusing on work projects. They open up more freely when not pushed or pursued but may prefer to walk out of a relationship getting too intense rather than hang in and work it out. 

Which mechanisms do you use? Big chances are that this is the way you sabotage your relationships unknowingly. Observe yourself, see what is natural to you as a reaction to high stress, and how the people around respond to this. 

All of those are very human, but also can be problematic when they get too rigid, and when they happen too frequently : emotional intensity will always make them more rigid. A lot of emotional intensity makes any relationship harder to maintain on both sides since intensity creates intensity.

That means that if you tend to be a distancer and feel like you have to more and more stay away to make the relationship okay, or if you are more of a pursuer and feel exhausted to try desperately to connect to someone pulling away, an overfunctioner feeling drained and like they manage the relationship alone... it is a sign your relationship is hard for you, and work is needed to seek out a change in the dynamic or the relationship itself. 

A few steps towards easier relationships

We need to accept first that our way to manage anxiety is not that flexible. We have to deal with it, and realise that others most likely won’t change in that way. We should stay away of relationships where radical change is necessary to keep it sustainable for ourselves : don’t stay for a fantasy of what it will be like once it’s different. 

That means that when we are in a relationship that makes us suffer and rely a lot on those mechanisms, we need to take responsibility for our own happiness and ask ourselves what do we want. It is dangerous for our mental health to maintain relationships that we are unhappy into, for reasons other than : because we deeply appreciate that person, and feel that they know and love us for who we are (and vice versa). 

If we want the relationship to work differently, first, we should ask ourselves, always, “What is in my actual control? How am I contributing to the situation?”. We get something out of this unsatisfying relationship we are maintaining. What can we do differently that would respect more how we feel?

If we tried everything in our power and ended up in the same place, we can always express ourselves and try to be as vulnerable, non blaming and talking about our problem in a relationship (not the other’s lack of something or incompetency) : we are the one suffering and wanting things to change. We are the only one able to ask for what we need.

If the other can’t listen, won’t acknowledge our hurt, doesn’t want anything or don’t seem able to change, we may ask ourselves “How important is that person to me? How important is to me the ability to be myself in the relationship? Do I want to stay in a relationship that works that way?”, and decide wether or not we want to check out, if the price to pay is too expensive. 

We should stay away from any relationship making us feel like sh*t often, it should be a very rare occurence. Otherwise, this is another big sign a relationship is not for us. You may find other red and orange signs (and green ones indicating healthy relationships) in that list I wrote a few weeks back. 

Remember this : it is very okay to have expectations, we absolutely need them to have standards. Fight for people you love and feel loved by, not to be loved. 

Accept that many people won’t be able to stay in our life. Some will, and the more we listen to ourselves, the better those relationships will feel. But most won’t, and it’s not about them, or us, but about how we work (or not) together. It is no one fault to have incompatibilities but it is up to us to decide wether or not we want to deal with their consequences or not. 

If you feel like you are not enough in a relationship, look more for people who feel more secure, safe and love you just as you are. If you are feeling like you are too much, be more yourself, and only keep the people who will do you the same honour in return and appreciate you (and you them).  Those feelings are signs your relationships lack authenticity. Give yourself and your loved ones a fighting chance by showing up just as you are, you will find your people. 

Speak soon,  Love,  L. 

[thehappymessproject]

91/100 - For the really bad days, with love II

Hello wonderful human, 

I am really sorry that you are feeling bad right now. I want you to know that you are not alone in this. A lot of us are suffering with you, right now, everywhere in the world. I am too writing those words. Pain is universal, we are never really alone in its experience. 

It’s okay, you will get through this. If it feels really bad, just take it 10 minutes, 1 minute or even 10 seconds at a time if necessary. You know you can go through the next 10 seconds. Or more, you know what you are up to right now. 

If you are reading this, you are already taking care of yourself. Keep going, you’re doing great. You’ll find here my emotional first aid kit. 

Help your body first

Everything starts here, inside. Take 1-10 deep belly breaths. Stop a little when you’re full and when you’re empty, until it feels natural to take air in or out. Let your nervous system calm down, the breathing helps a lot with that. You can lie down too, it’s harder to be anxious, overwhelmed or angry being laid down. Try to focus on how each breath is different, unique if it helps. How the air feels cold coming in, and hot coming out. 

If it feels ok to do so, try putting both of your hands on the middle of your chest, one on top of each other. Let yourself feel the warmth that you are creating by yourself. Observe what is happening inside of your body, take your mind’s eye and ‘look’, feel it in your body. How would you describe it? Does it move? Or is it static? What shape is it? Colour? 

It’s okay, go ahead, I’ll wait for you here. 

Use the power of suggestion and self-love to your advantage 

When you find something(s) to go observe, and ask yourself the questions, above, take the time to forgive them to be here. You can say out loud or whispering to the feeling(s) “Forgiven”. If English is not your first language, you can try it in your native language, it might resonate better. Repeat like a mantra “Forgiven, forgiven, forgiven...” until it feels okay to let it be. It might alleviate your pain, but that is only a bonus. So if so, enjoy the relief :) If not, let it be as much as you can if you want to help yourself. It’s okay to feel bad, parts of yourself are telling you something. We are just taking the time to listen.

Take the time to do it now, it’s a matter of instant. I’ll be here when you come back.

Let it out...to yourself for now

Take a pen or anything you want/have to write. This works better by hand but if it’s really difficult for you, typing will work too. Music can help focus some. White noise or nature sounds (rain, forest, waves...) can give others better results. Take a timer out and set it at 10mn, if you are up to it, make it 20 or even 30, they will be worth it. Put your phone on plane mode, you deserve your full attention, that time is yours. 

And write the shit out of it. Let everything out, but try to focus on you, not others or the situations. How do you feel? What is calling your attention inside of you right now? Again, observe yourself. 

Listen to your feeling mind, not your thinking mind. It’s more than okay to start with “This is stupid. I really don’t want to write right now. I don’t know what to write” if that’s what’s on your mind, just keep going and let it flow. 

Resistance is bound to be present in any uncomfortable situation, let it be, just don’t listen to it. Come back to your task. 

Your Little one inside needs your attention and help right now. Pour the content of your brain out on paper. It will help sorting out what is happening inside of you right now. You can restart the timer or let it flow as long as you want if after 10mn you are not satisfied. You decide.

Do something that matters to you

It will depend on how much energy you have, but if you can spend at least ten minutes doing something you really want to do and that will be good for you in the long term, you will reconnect with yourself and heal a little bit. That is why I am writing this today. For the first time ever during that challenge, I won’t finish what I was writing before starting another essay, because I needed to write this one. 

Why stay put? Why not listen to the mind and the urge to act?

My mind is craving all sorts of things that would numb the pain, or make me feel better, that is why I know I need to find ways to let the pain be, and live anyway. Our minds are rarely our best friends in those moments, we are way more likely to have a monkey mind moment. 

My living partner offered that we talk it out earlier when he saw me struggling, I thanked him and told him I needed to first focus on myself before talking would be helpful. Now that I took all those steps to gain clarity and calm first, I feel way more up to anything, talking or else. 

I will now be able to spend time with him without using him to vent, which would tire us both. Talking after we tend to ourselves is a privileged moment and usually bring way more relief and connection, lifting up pressure and expectations.

But I know I also need to take it slow right now, so I’ll make sure the rest of my evening is filled with calmer and nourishing activities for me. Things that bring me joy, that I find fun and/or that will bring up connection with others. 

I will ask for and make happen moments of shared silent contact : hugs, cuddling, hands holding, walking together. 

I will be very careful to listen to what I really need and want and take responsibility for it, the Little one needs me to.

All those little things will help me take good care of myself when things get hard and painful, and they might help you too. 

It is very scary to stay with ourselves to deal with pain, but it is also the most wonderful gift we can give to ourselves when hurt. Anything else, as comfortable and soothing as it can be, will also distance us from ourselves. And it’s very normal to not want to suffer, but it’s also disconnecting from ourselves one moment at a time, therefore should be avoided as much as possible. 

“The first For the really bad days, with love” is filled with ideas of soothing things to do. Don’t hesitate to go there to give yourself some more love or to find what you can do if all those seem impossible right now. 

Speak soon, Love,  L. 

[thehappymessproject]

88/100 - On love, passion and lust

I love making puzzles, I always had. The understanding of relationships (of all kinds) has been a big reason for me to want to study psychology. And although I have never found an author or expert explaining comprehensively how they work, I certainly put together a big puzzle over the years on how we interact with each other, made up from the work of a few of those experts together. 

I won’t try to pretend I’ve figured them all out : relationships are complicated, no matter where you stand and look at them. But my puzzle has certainly changed my life completely, and changed quite a few lives in the process of making and using it in my work. 

It’s easier to start off with Helen Fisher’s work. She discovered that the human brain operates under three different systems when it comes to love : sex, romantic love and attachment. 

Our sex drive is about scratching an itch, and could be about anyone. Our romantic drive is more focused on one person that we deem as very special. This is the system that brings up all the obsessive thinking, the “I’d die for them”, possessiveness, loss of a sense of self, the craving of the other... Our attachment is about security and trust. It is a more quiet, fulfilling feeling of love for someone we know as they are and deeply appreciate, and vice-versa.

It is important to get here that romantic love is an addiction, because it’s generally the one that gets us into trouble, as introduced in my essay on why we fall for people that we are miserable with. It activates the same parts of the brain that lights up when we use cocaine, that’s how powerful it is. 

Now, I have explained in that earlier essay how depending on our past, we can tend to have those deep craving feelings with people poorly fitting with us. 

Susan Anderson, in her incredible work on abandonment has one advice about this addiction to abandonment (how we get crazy over people who let us down) : focusing on the people we like, who don’t get us in that crazy state of infatuation, and give them our presence and attention, while accepting but not following the voice in our head aching for something more exciting. 

When we hit that point in therapy, the most usual question coming up is basically : “Do I really have to give up the fireworks and settle for the pale glowing candle?”

My answer to this would be a lukewarm yes and no. 

Romantic love and deep attachment are quite different. For someone used to romantic attachement only (all of us who didn’t have a secure attachment to their parents), I know how exciting and deep romantic attachment feels. I know how anything in comparison feels quite dull. I’ve experienced it and heard it over and over in my office.

But let’s sit with those feelings for a while : this is also exhausting, and absolutely not sustainable by itself. If we get really crazy over someone, it is very hard to look at the relationship with perspective. But passion implies passionate consuming feelings that there is never enough of the other, we always need more. 

We don’t sleep well, we don’t work with focus, we barely think about anything else. We aren’t sure if the other really like us or not, our stomach is making that roller coaster thing. We’re almost manic when it’s going well, and deeply depressed when it’s not. Can you see the theme of “too much” coming up here? 

Passion on the long term is basically like eating more and more of your favourite meal everyday until we can’t even look or think about it. I can guarantee you : it won’t stay your favourite meal that long if you do. 

BUT, when we pretend that passion is totally over-rated and “settle” for someone who feels easy and safe, well... Have you ever finished a very long book or movie just to finish it even if you didn’t connect to it, hoping desperately that it will get better? It’s a lot of work for very little reward... So let’s dig up more.

The Gottmans are a wonderful couple working on love and relationships. Their work on trust is a big part of my puzzle too. In their referential, attachment is by far the most important component of a longterm successful relationship. 

They discovered (through their many many studies over the past decades) that any relationship that wants to last needs to be based on an authentic and deep friendship. This is THE main ingredient.

However, these successful relationships also need a “Fire and romance” department. The big fireworks are too much and exhausting to handle on the long run. But settling for someone who is basically a friend we don’t find repulsive is not the answer either. Humans are wired for balance.

What we can do is looking for someone we actually fall for, makes our heart pound and our hands sweaty in those delicious early hours of love while not taking it too far. There is a need for actual chemistry here. 

But the biggest thing about them must be that they are actual friendship material, that if we didn’t feel that physical attraction, we would actually enjoy their company a lot in a non sexual way. We also need to be able to tolerate their biggest flaws, so look for them. Lasting love is not only built what we love about people. 

While we do that, we should be very wary of the people really driving us to that crazy state, remembering that anyone stretching our limits so far can’t be good for us. Completely losing ourselves in a relationship in never good, for anyone. Those should be avoided for our mental health sake. 

And finally : romance and trust are both something that we cultivate too, not only something we feel. We’ll talk soon about how to make our relationships more enjoyable and romantic in more details. 

Feeling deeply and safely attached to someone is a wonderful human experience, one of the most important ones even. We shouldn’t diminish its importance just because it is not that exciting puppy love, especially if we never experienced it. 

Secure love is not a weakly glowing candle : safe love is more like a steady bonfire. Once we experienced it, most of us find the fireworks mostly exhausting, and see it for the scam that it is : very high risks, very little rewards in the end. 

If we are seriously working on our ability to love in that deep wonderful way, we have nothing to fear : it will be way more than enough to keep us interested, especially since it will definitely involve some passion. 

Speak soon,  Love, L. 

[thehappymessproject]

86-87/100 - 5 questions that help me learn from the past and make the future better

So many of us hate going back to their past, often feeling too judgemental, ashamed, sad, bored or anxious when they do. So many others dwell into the past and their nostalgia, grief, and blame so much that they feel stuck. For some of us, it seems more like a ping pong between the two, none of it feeling helpful. 

As often, a balance between two tendencies is always far better for us than any extreme here. 

I wrote the other day about making endings meaningful and what I planned on doing for the end of my challenge. Since then, I reread 20 of my essays in a couple of sittings, as promised to myself. 

To make my journeys to the past more meaningful, I use a few questions, usually the same ones. I like having this container, because it helps to not only do what I would do automatically, or because it’s comfortable. I want to get the most out of my past, so I need to do it in a braver way. 

What do I feel when going back? 

All of it. Not just the good stuff, or just the bad stuff. Definitely not working on what I think about, which is a trap here, a gateway drug to rumination. If we know how we feel, and put words on it, we can use the information at the heart of the emotions. 

I am getting all sorts of feelings from doing this. 

It’s endearing to read me struggle, I can see my inner writer shy but fierce, empowered by this brave move and excited by the newness of the challenge. It’s also awkward, I feel clumsy. 

My perfectionism doesn’t enjoy at all spotting all the ways I made mistakes, or wrote too heavily. Sometimes I get bored, and feel ashamed that my own writing bores me, certain that it can only be even more dull to others. 

I’m surprised by how much I subtly progressed. I could not know that without going back. So I also feel grateful. 

I’m touched and delighted by the joy and playfulness that show through most texts.

What am I learning or remembering about myself by going back? 

When we go back to the past (through our art, journaling, anything that is a piece of our life back then), we have the opportunity to look more at the big picture and our process. We see ourselves from another point of view, a little bit as if we were a different person, with more experience and wisdom.

I realise often that way (and here) that am stronger than I feel now. 

In those earlier essays, there is also a willingness to open myself up coming from the pain I am feeling. A tenderness I often avoid otherwise. I let myself be needier and show more of my fragility when I am really struggling. When I do, a softer, more loving and trustful side of me takes the lead. 

The post that had the most engagement is one of the most vulnerable ones and was written on the worst day for me emotionally. That was (and still is) a big surprise. 

I really love both story telling and educating. I enjoy more my writing when both are woven in the same essay. I also love having a few formats (like my letters to my inner child or my lists) to play with. 

What would I love to change?

What we would like the most to change is often what we love the least as is. This is important information, don’t dismiss it. By transforming it into what we would like to change makes it more actionable. We need to feel hopeful and empowered to not get sucked into self-deprecation or hate.

Here for me, it’s more about my writing style, heavier at the beginning of the challenge, messier too. A bit too precocious to my taste. I don’t love when either the story telling or the educating is too present. I’d like to keep it more balanced.

I don’t enjoy the way my writing feels too constricted sometimes, I can feel how I am not talking up as much space as I’d like to. I’d like to keep it more loose.

My message is sometimes not very clear. I remember that I struggled with that when I give up journaling temporarily. When I do, my mind always gets more foggy and tangled up. I’m happy about the reminder, especially when journaling was getting a bit difficult again lately.

What would I love to keep cultivating?

This is in general what we love the most about what we see or what we loved the most at the time and miss in the present. Also crucial information about the things that make us happy. We need to repeat the goodness in order to create a more fulfilling life.

I really love the softness and tenderness of Sad me. I love the relationship we created and that I allow now when she is more in need and we force to take our time, honour our pace. I want more of that and will pay more attention to it, especially in the better parts, when it doesn’t feel as necessary. 

The playfulness of my writing is good companion to that softness. I miss it lately. “Coincidentally”, there’s less playfulness in my life right now. I have paid more attention to it very recently and can already feel the difference, just by allowing myself to be playful with words, or by painting  anything I want.

I can also read and feel how the newness lets me freer than I feel right now, when I am under the impression of repeating myself already. 

It reminds me of my painting process : when I allow myself to go back to old work and redo a piece I loved a long time ago, I am always delighted by the surprise of how there’s no such thing as a true repeat. How a self-remake can truly beautify a piece in a new way. 

And it’s also my favourite way to help me be braver and take my painting skills to the next level by being easier to tackle than something I have never done before. I think I am also going to translate that to writing in some way. 

What did this bring to my life that is important or precious to me?

My favourite take-away from that challenge so far is how much I love writing everyday about things that matter to me. I wasn’t sure that I had it in me to be honest. I never wrote with that much commitment, even if I dreamt about it. This is a huge deal for me. It is the start of me really taking my writing seriously. I know now that I want to keep it that way, and that I can make it happen.

For the first time ever, I am allowing myself to make a lot of things, and share them with the world, without taking millions of classes to teach me how to do it right. It was fascinating to still feel that I am progressing every time I sit down and write. It might not be obvious to everyone reading me, but I can feel it inside. 

Being a good student was an important part of my identity for a long time. That requires a lot of learning from the masters. Doing this my way, and choosing how I would do it was extraordinarily encouraging. I can wait to see what is forward from there. Especially since I am starting to take a few classes now, to work with my writing on enhancing it (rather than allowing it). 

Finally, I am beyond happy to discover that I don’t have to choose between painting and writing. I love both very much. I could feel before that I couldn’t be fulfilled creatively without writing. But during the challenge, I discovered as well that writing a lot, even things I love, without painting, made me sad and my writing constricted, to controlled. I am delighted to realise both are perfectly complementary companions.  

By asking ourselves those questions regularly about many things (relationships, jobs, projects...), especially when they end, we can make sure to make them more special and meaningful. We can help ourselves make better choices, more informed and aligned with our core values in the future. We can learn to not repeat the past when it’s hurtful, and to repeat some of it when it’s helpful. 

I hope this will help anyone passing by who needs some nurturing and help going through a painful ending.

Speak soon,  Love,  L. 

[thehappymessproject]

85/100 - A few steps towards healthier relationships

Yesterday, we talked about why so many of us tend to fall really hard for people that we tend to have painful relationships with. Our past shaped our way of conceptualising relationships.

That means that when we choose people that way, we don’t really know how to choose them in a way that would be good for us, our intuition seems ‘broken’. We feel betrayed by our own self.

I am going to say first : nothing is wrong with you if you can’t choose things that are good for you. It only means you are human. And that you are facing a choice if you want to change that : between doing more of what you know, or learning how to do it differently.

The first rule

The rule we all keep forgetting when it’s really the most important one is : we can’t control people. We can’t change them, we can’t fix them, we can’t save them. Heck we can’t even really help them.

Most toxic relationships work on the assumptions that : - The other could be different in a controllable way. Reality : People could always be different, but it will never be in a really controllable way. Change has a life of its own. - If only they would change we could have a better (read : perfect) relationship with them. Reality : If the relationship has to be different to be working in a way that makes us happy, it means it’s not working as it actually is. - They will change at some point if only we love them/wait for them/do it for them enough. Reality : No one has enough control on someone else’s life to make them change the way WE want. Others will change on their terms only, that’s all one could (and should) ever do.

It is very important to realise we can’t control people because a lot of toxic relationships are about waiting for it to change. With time, maturity, love or voluntary change. When really we should ask ourselves “Could I be happy in this relationship if nothing would change at all in the next months/years?”

If the answer is something along the lines of “Heck no!”, we need to question ourselves on what we are expecting and why we are staying in this relationship that doesn’t fulfil us. What are we hoping for exactly?

Note : there’s nothing wrong with you for staying in a painful relationship. We all do to some extent. We learn relationships also by experimenting and learning what we want, and what we don’t want. But if you wait because the other needs to change for you to be more fulfilled, just need that it is not likely to happen.

It starts within us

Our intuition is actually more buried than it is broken. As if we had covered it with very fluffy blankets each time we didn’t trust our feelings or ur guts : it is still present, way under there, but the messages end up muffled, transformed, or just not loud enough to be heard.

Having difficulties with intimate relationships (close friends, close relatives, romantic interests) is an important information : it means there are things with have to settle with ourselves. We have to first learn better self-love.

When we want to have healthier relationships, we can’t start with focusing on others, or we will mostly repeat toxic patterns. We have to start working with ourselves first. We need to get rid of the fluffy blankets one by one, while training ourselves to hear our intuition better.

You see, as long as the blankets are there, we are in love with the fantasy of our relationships rather than the actual relationships. We fall in love with an imaginary potential of what it could be, not what it actually is.

The more we know and love ourselves, the more naturally we will be attracted by people that are better for us. Never perfect (we’re all humans), but way less toxic.  

To step away from a fantasy to what is actually happening, we need to first take stock on what we need or want to change for the situation to be different.

What are our blind spots about?

Change always starts with awareness. Our blankets work similarly to blinkers for a horse : they hide the truth from us, they bury it under anything they can.

We keep having the same problems when we don’t work on them. It is sort of our defensive make-up : we do the same things and choose the same kind of people (even when they are different, they are similar too) expecting different results. Which doesn’t work at all.

So the questions here really are : - If I had to describe what happens to me with those people, what stages can I observe? What’s the pattern? - How do I play along in the cycle? What can I do differently in order to help get towards a result I would be happier with?

They are many ways to sabotage relationships : - choosing people solely because we are attracted physically to them (or their money, their function...) - playing games with their emotions, manipulating the situation permanently - being so absorbed by our awkwardness or problems that we aren’t really there - having very negative beliefs about relationships or others - having very negative beliefs about ourselves - not communicating (especially when something’s wrong but not only) - not making real efforts : a good relationship requires some work from both sides - wanting any relationship to be perfect without actively working on it - constantly comparing ourselves to others - constantly looking “if the grass is greener elsewhere” - dismissing our pain and hurt as if it didn’t matter - breaking promises, secrecy or trust often - not repairing wounds when they appear - frequent hurting of one or both parties - acting like others are properties - being too controlling - accepting to stay in relationships that make us miserable - acting like a jerk to push the other’s limits...

What are your mechanisms?

The easiest way to ruin a relationship from the beginning is deceptively simple though...

We are responsible for our own happiness

Is this scenario familiar?

You meet someone, make sure you show them all that is good about you, and hiding very well your darkest corners so they don’t run away. The relationship strengthens, and you feel more and more comfortable. By spending more time together, inevitably, they see more and more of your dark side, until they hit a point where they ask “Who the F are you??” and leave. You end up devastated, absolutely certain that you can’t be yourself in a relationship, or you’d be rejected again.

So many of us make sure to not show anything they deemed as a good reason to be rejected. By doing so, we dismiss one major thing : people who stay don’t know us, only a polished image. Why would they stay when they discovered they’ve been lied to? When they started a relationship with someone very different?

It’s even more true if we play a role, no matter which role. If we aren’t ourselves, honest, vulnerable and authentic from the beginning, we set up for failure right away. We also reinforce the idea that we can’t be loved for who we are. Everyone loses in this arrangement.

Of course, the polished image or social persona is comfortable : it’s about avoiding rejection, so it will seduce many people who want to believe we can be that pseudo perfect person. It will also make anyone who would actually like you for who you are losing interest : who would want to be with someone that they can feel is fake?

Obviously, I’m not saying here that at the first chance we should all that is wrong with us and all the awful things we have done. That would be too strong and another form of sabotage.

Being in a good relationship can be very scary : suddenly, we are afraid we might have something to lose, something that could devastate us. Intimacy pushes our buttons like nothing else can, it will make us act irrationally.

We will hurt others we love (hopefully unintentionally), and they will too. There is absolutely no way a relationship can survive AND be fulfilling if we aren’t ourselves, ready to take the risks of being hurt and rejected.

So... Choose wisely. Choose to take risks for people you feel good with. A long relationship can only survive when it’s based on authentic friendship. Don’t settle for anything else. You deserve to feel loved as you are. And they do too.

See you soon, Love, L.

[thehappymessproject]

84/100 - Why do we fall for people we are not happy with?

Just when my brain was full-on avoiding to write about relationships even if I decided to do so, playing the old “I don’t know where to start” card, I was offered the opportunity to choose a braver option through a discussion with someone struggling with their romantic relationships. 

“Why am I falling for them so hard when we make each other so miserable?” is one of the questions I hear the most about relationships in my work. The answer is deceptively simple, as hard to act on as it can be too.

We don’t fall in love with people because we would have happy relationships with them, we fall in love with the people who make us feel what we experience as love. 

This can be tricky to get. You see, we start to form our concept of love very early, through our relationships with our primary caretakers. For a lot of us, that would be our parents. 

Most parents are very well intentioned, but they are still human. They make mistakes, a lot of them. 

We live in a world that is basically emotionally illiterate. Most of us believe that everything we need to know about emotions and relationships will come naturally with experience. This is a very damaging belief, making out the inability to have fulfilling relationships as a personal flaw, rather than the product of our personality, our upbringing and the way we analysed our experiences. 

So let me start by saying that if relationships are hard for you, this is absolutely normal, and you have nothing to be ashamed about. 

You are facing a choice though, because having relationships that feel good to us is a learnable skill, like everything emotion related. 

When we started to learn about love

When we were very young, we were very dependent on the people taking care of us and completely unable to satisfy our own needs. The people taking care of us early and later on, did it in a certain way, having a certain parenting style. 

This parenting style induced certain feelings more regularly than others. Not many people can really say that they felt completely loved and accepted for who they were by the people taking care of them as they grew up. 

Maybe we felt loved but only if we were pleasing them, or achieve certain things. Or we felt abandoned or rejected. Maybe we felt harassed, picked on constantly. Or we felt left down and disappointed constantly. Maybe we were abused, lied to, never felt safe, always felt like an outcast. Or like we were on an undeserved pedestal, or that we have to have a certain role to be loved. 

We also observed what it means to be in a relationship from the relationship we grew up around. If our parents were married, they modelled certain behaviours that we learnt to be what a spouse can expect and see as love. Not matter what happened to our family, it shaped our expectations too. We very often unconsciously or voluntarily repeat those in some way or another. 

We may believe those things are good for us, try to avoid them like pest or  compensate those things. It doesn’t matter : they are still in our referential.

Without some serious therapy AND personal work helping us see things and do them differently, we absolutely will repeat our history in some way or another. 

We learnt lessons from each experience involving others (or their absence) in the past, but those lessons are not necessarily helpful to us on the long-run. Without that deep personal work, we absolutely will fall for people who will make us miserable the same way we used to be miserable in the past. 

When we will later meet people sending us signals of such familiarity with all those similar feelings, our brain will analyse those feelings as being love. 

Those people will generally be the ones we actually feel the most attracted to. The ones we have the most passionate relationships with. Especially (but not only) if we ended up addicted to abandonment as a result of being abandoned a lot. 

OK, so... What can we do now? 

This question deserves other essays by itself, so I won’t try to squeeze into a paragraph. 

But the point is that there are ways of changing patterns in our life. Therapy is obviously an excellent one, as long as it involves hard work on our relationships. Any work on past traumas will help too.

We all have to deal with the cards we have been dealt by life. But that doesn’t mean we are bound to repeat the past for life and being miserable because of it. 

We can learn how to love ourselves better.  We can learn new ways to interact with others.  We can learn how to choose people more compatible with us.

We absolutely can, as long as we are willing to put the work in. It is hard work, I won’t lie, but I have never ever met anyone thinking it was a waste to actually do it. More on that soon.

See you soon, Love, L.

[thehappymessproject]

82-83/100 - A few steps towards tackling procrastination

Ok. I have been procrastinating to translate one of my reports for a couple of weeks. I feel quite foolish : it is long and annoying, not that hard to do, as long as I sit down, and actually do it. But since I committed to get it to the family this week and it is getting me very anxious, I’m decided to do it today, right now. 

Well, right after I write this : I figured that it would be a perfect opportunity to talk about how to “straighten up” ourselves in those moments. I know I feel more in control than I ever was about those issues now, but I also know it used to be so much harder and that I still struggle. I can use the help. 

I’d say first : you’re not alone. We all suffer from perfectionism and procrastination in some way or another. The ones who don’t procrastinate work often procrastinate pleasure, self-care, or any number of things we can choose as our priorities...or don’t. 

The negative and self-deprecating self-talk is surely going to be very clever, mean and choose exactly what will make us want to give-up or postpone forever what we need/want to do. Our inner critic is very powerful and efficient. They mean well though. 

Imagine your inner child : sat on the floor, they’re afraid an upset. They don’t know if they’re up to the task, that feels daunting. They really don’t want to feel the discomfort, of being wrong, of not being able to finish, to get it the way we want, to being too slow, too incompetent... 

Our inner critic is a bit like a clumsy but very committed bodyguard. Unless we have a very strong inner parent, the second our inner child feels bad, our inner critic will try to shield them from said pain and discomfort, no matter the cost. They don’t think very far, so they don’t realise that their battle, if won, will make the little one more anxious, sad and angry later. 

That’s why we need to try to not get too attached to the idea that we need to feel good, in the mood and motivated to actually do things, especially important and hard ones. 

When something means a lot to us, we should expect a certain amount of resistance. That’s a price we all have to pay for purpose : real deep purpose is always somehow scary. Steven Pressfield writes in The war of art that it is the job of an artist to face resistance day after day. That’s because art usually gets very personal, hence very scary. 

We are not fearful because we are not up to it, we are fearful because it matters. 

From there, there is not much around it. We need to feel all those feelings, and do it anyway. 

Reason our inner critic won’t work : they always have something to add. Even if we might convince ourselves for a moment that we are up to it and that everything will be fine. But we know deep down that there is always a chance it might not. 

Giving into their negotiation won’t work either : there will always be something else we could do before or instead. The negotiating isn’t here because we really need to do or want those other things but to shield our inner child from any discomfort or pain, even for just a moment and at the price of our mental health and accomplishments.  

Instead, let’s treat those inner kids with love and benevolence, but also with firmness. 

Brian Tracy, an expert of productivity has a concept he calls “Eat that frog”. It is based on Mark Twain’s weird quote “If you eat a live frog first thing every morning, nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day”. What that means is simply that when it comes to doing hard or annoying things, the sooner the better. It’s a good rule to keep in mind. 

So, here I am, in my bed. I woke up a couple of hours ago and only took the time to meditate to feel awake and alive, to answer some patients’ emails and to eat breakfast. There are so many things I could or would want to do. 

My inner critic is very creative :  “We didn’t even finish our routine, we should probably do that first” “I’d like to play instead, don’t you want to paint or letter something fun? It’s been a while” “We don’t move enough physically lately, shouldn’t we have a walk first?” “There’s some dishes in the sink, they could really use a wash” “I wanted to send those messages today, we probably won’t be able to if we don’t do it now” “Maybe there’s something cool on Instagram?” “I’m too tired, I didn’t sleep enough, shouldn’t we postpone when we’ll feel better?”

My inner parent needs help. So, following my own advice for perseverance, I make it easy on myself. - I decided it was today that I would do it, so I could finally breathe better, knowing my work was finally done. Then I made my best to make it happen. - I cancelled everything but my online sessions for the day. Warned my partner in crime I needed to have only one priority today. - My phone is on plane mode so I won’t be bothered by notifications and nothing will happen if I distractedly grab my phone. - I’m in my bed because I know it’s harder to feel anxious lying down, especially with fluffy pillows and a blanket.  - I have 6 hours before my first appointment, and a 3hrs task tops, so I have a comfortable amount of time.  - Translating my own reports is not very demanding at all (it’s actually a bit boring, hence the extra amount of procrastination), so I have the company of an old tv show I enjoy, that I don’t really follow but makes me feel less lonely in my temporary misery. Music could help too. - I’ll make some tea as soon as I’m finished writing, for extra comfort.  - Clever bribing always helps : I promised my inner kids that we would paint anything fun and/or order some cool stuff with our Christmas money, as long as we have time before my appointments to motivate everyone to be efficient. - Finally, since writing here is always on my priority list, writing this essay reminds me everything I need to actually start and finish the damn thing. 

Other than that, my only job is to say no. No to discussing this. No to protest. No to stalling. I don’t even really engage with my inner critic. 

As if my inner critic was a toddler making a tantrum, everything in my power is about staying calm, taking a big breath, and gently take their hand to go anyway once they are out of breath and energy : “I know it’s the worst and we really would do 1000 other things. But we said we’d do it. A family is waiting for us. It won’t change anything to protest, except for making it longer and more annoying.”.

Now, if you don’t mind, I have an annoying task to tackle and finally put behind me. 

See you soon,  Love,  L. 

[thehappymessproject]

81/100 - Giving ourselves focus and love by choosing one word for the year

This is very exciting for me to write about : I’ve never really done it. 

A little bit more than five years ago, I just had discovered the incredible work of Dr. Brene Brown on vulnerability and courage, and it simply blew my mind. I felt like I was reading about one of the most important things I could ever educate myself on. 

The books and her TED talks already had changed my daily life in subtle touches, but I wanted more. I also knew I needed more. I was afraid to forget about it in the next few months and hated the thought. So, I took some time to reflect, and over a couple of weeks, came to a big decision (especially for me who used to be commitment phobic in so many ways).

I would spend a year learning courage.

It became one of the most exciting years of my life. For me, learning how to be brave was essentially about saying yes to a lot of things I would have usually say no to out of fear, and no to a lot of things that would bring me comfort in the moment, but preventing me to do things that really mattered to me in the long run. 

I tried out a lot of activities I had never tried, but felt curious about like climbing, sewing, baking pastries... 

I paid a lot of attention to those moments where I would feel afraid, ashamed or uncomfortable, and pushed myself to be brave in my way of dealing with them. 

Choosing to tell a friend that I was feeling hurt and set a boundary rather than silencing myself in hope it doesn’t happen anymore. 

When really down, channelling more energy to do anything that would bring myself self-loving comfort rather numbing comfort. 

Breaking off relationships that felt depleting to me.

It was a tiring year, sure. But it was also one of the most empowering ones. Each time I would choose the brave path instead of the comfortable one, I would feel stronger and more centred. Embodying the experience of bravery, training those courage muscles. 

I realised at the end of the year, when I was feeling really sad about seeing what I called my brave year coming to a year, that I didn’t want to give it up, but I also didn’t want to repeat it as is either. I also noticed that overall, being brave for me had a lot to do with exploring my creativity. 

So I decided to make the next year my creative year. I had so much fun! 

I started taking way more photos, tried to learn guitar and piano for a while, spent a few months sewing like a crazy person, I wrote more that year than in the decade before, and towards the third trimester of my year devoted to creativity, started to paint with watercolours and do the lettering you can now see on my artsy Instagram account. 

Both activities were those bringing me the most joy while allowing me to let my guard down : when painting, I was less attacked by the voices in my head trying to bring me down and discourage me. (ah, the joy of defence mechanisms bullying us...) I was finding more easily ways to bypass them than in any other setting. 

I noticed that creating (and doing anything that mattered to me in my life) was only possible for me when I would take good care of myself. When I would commit to loving myself everyday by showing up. But self-care was so hard for me... 

So... Yeah you guessed it, I took my practice to a new ground by declaring the following year my self-care year. 

I had just discovered the existence of the Find what feels good channel on Youtube a few weeks before, I had ended my creative year with The artist’s way, a 8 weeks program using Julia Cameron’s wonderful book to discover or recover our inner artist, which had taught me how to journal in a way that would connect myself to my heart better than ever. And I had dabbled for a few years on and off with meditation. I had all the tools lying before me already. 

As often when we live an intentional life, the Universe (or call it luck if you’re more comfortable) was helping in subtle ways that can only be noticed when we pay attention to the opportunities we are presented with, and allow ourselves to take them. 

So I did just that. I finally found the courage to take better care of myself and making it a priority. That year was full of softness and whole heartedness. It felt like discovering the essence of who I was. 

Since I was struggling with commitment (still), I focused on one self-loving activity at the time. A few weeks mostly meditating. A few weeks mostly doing yoga. A few weeks getting back to journaling. I thought I could choose which activity I would keep, but realised they all were giving me so much, and yet so differently that I wanted to keep them all. 

I would still create more and more, and take my work as a psychologist to another level, and was struggling to make everything fit in my daily time. Now that I knew better what kind of life I wanted, I felt stuck at making it work as a whole.

So I dedicated last year to finding Balance. I loved it so much. It was like deepening everything I had built in the previous three years. The courage, the creative energy and the love. 

It taught me how to be more flexible and finding way to make things stick, one step at a time, one day at a time and to honour my pace. I set up a few challenges to help on the way. Strengthened my morning routine that felt easier and more necessary than an evening one (currently working on that). 

I explored how my love for art, psychology and writing could be intertwined. It felt like coming home to myself. 

This “year” actually took a little bit more time. I used to choose my word of the year at the end of summer. But last September, I felt stuck. I had just moved to the other side of the globe (another marvellous consequence of all that personal inner journey), felt completely thrown out of balance and quite depleted. 

Then, a few weeks ago, after a few months finding my footing back, it was suddenly obvious. What I struggled with and had to practice the most lately was letting go : finding ways to trust myself, my intuition and the process. I’d say in short : trusting the universe and finding the flow. 

So this year will be my year of flow.

I started by deciding that my practice could now fit better at the beginning of the year rather the school year, the end of the year being a perfect time to reflect and gather our bearings, taking stock. 

When I’m down, finding flow is about giving myself the time and space necessary to heal, letting go of the shoulds and musts. 

When I’m really happy, it’s more about finding pace, not over doing it. 

It is already teaching me how to let go of things, people and spaces that were really important at a time, but became depleting over time. I have never ever felt as free and can’t wait to see more of what this year is going to teach me. 

Choosing one word to devote every year to has with no doubt changed my whole life from the inside out. Like a soothing lighthouse in the dark, it gives me a focus point to always rely on. 

I am never feeling like time passed by without my awareness anymore, being intentional makes time pass more slowly and mindfully. It is helping me to remind myself over and over what is important, and what gets in the way and distract me. It is teaching me more about myself than I ever felt possible. It is allowing me to create the life I really want. 

If reading that essay inspired you to find your own word, I would love nothing more than to know which one you chose and maybe why f you would feel comfortable sharing. 

Here are a few questions that can help to start : What are you feeling like you lack of? What would your ideal 2019 be devoted to? What is preventing you from living your best life right now?

Write your answers down and any word that come up too : it will help you a lot to make it real, tangible. The right one for you will spark something in your body when you write it or if you start making art around it. Let yourself feel it, and trust it. Your heart knows.

See you soon,  Love,  L. 

[thehappymessproject]

80/100 - On making endings meaningful

Lately, I often feel more tense than usual, reflective, and a bit sad. Those feelings tend to come up when I experiment endings of things I really love and that mean a lot to me. 

Actually, I tend to push those moments back. It can take me ages to finish a life changing book, especially the last chapters! I love nothing more than finding an author I love that has published a lot of books so I can spend months, or even years, delighted by their ‘conversation’.

This time, I wondered for a while what I was sad about. Until I realised : only twenty days left for my 100 days project! I feel like I grew up so much as a writer in the past 80 days. It saddens me to know it’s ending, and scare me a little to not know what is waiting.

And like it often happens to me, endings come into my life in group. I am also at the end of a few books that were super important to me for the past few months and felt the need to take some distance to some relationships that were starting to feel really depleting me. 

I was wondering how I could be the most loving possible in this heavy-hearted period. It’s a good thing that it is happening right after the end of the year, and that I spent quite some time observing how we create festivity. I also have some practice making endings lighter.

I’m going to pepper the last 20 essays with grounding practices. I decided today that I was going to reread all my essays (I haven’t so far), in order to take stock.

Wether we journal or write any kind of texts, it is very important to take the time to go back and read past productions. It helps us grow (personally and artistically), and most importantly, it helps us being more compassionate to witness our own progress. 

To feel deeply how much we changed is so powerful. 

I am going to take stock. To write about what I learn, about myself, and about my writing. Taking the time to review what happened and what it meant to us to us is a great way to reinforce everything we worked for. It makes our progress even more meaningful. 

I am going to review which topics or messages come back over and over. I can feel I am repeating myself, and I am pretty sure it is about what means the most to me, what I want to say in priority. 

Twyla Tharpe wrote “The real secret to creativity is to go back and remember”. By reviewing our work, we don’t see only the tree anymore, like when we are working on a piece. We get to see the whole forest. Often, narratives come up : we learn more about what our journey is about.

I am going to make sure I play, but I’m not sure how it will translate into the challenge. When our heart is aching, play reminds us that there is lightness in the world, not only heaviness. Today, I painted some playful stuff I was looking forward to, and only then did I feel strong enough to write. 

Finally, I am going to prioritise rest, during and especially after the challenge is done. Pain is a call for rest and restorative healing. Even if our ego is pushing us to keep going and looking for those exciting moment of achievement, we need to honour our pace by always making room for rest and stillness. 

Endings will always have a sad component to them, but we can always find some soothing comfort in stealing time and space for ourselves. Self-love in hardship is one of the most precious, powerful and empowering gift we can offer ourselves. 

See you soon,  Love,  L. 

[thehappymessproject]

77-79/100 - 5 steps to train our perseverance muscle

Yesterday, I forgot to write. My daily structure is very challenged at the moment, so things slip through. Between the 75th and the 76th day of my challenge, a week passed. When I sprained my elbow and was forced to physically rest, I realised I was in great need of rest, not only physically, so I decided to take the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve off. 

Some might consider this as a failure of my 100 days project. I call it self-perseveration and know it’s key to make change last. 

Perseverance is a tricky business when it comes to us regulating ourselves. There is only one way to truly and sustainably discipline ourselves : with love. And yet, most of us use mainly self-abuse to that end. 

Here are a few steps that make it easier for me to implement change in a sustainable loving way : 

1. Start with where you’re at 

Ok, you’re imperfect. Welcome to the human club, don’t worry, we are all in the same boat. You don’t have to change at all. But if you want to, you are going to have to deal with imperfection. 

It is very important that we start from where we are at instead of dwelling on where we would want to be. I started to change my relationship with writing bit by bit. 

I started by cultivating intention : I spent a few months trying to write more. And experimented from there. I would spend more time playing with my Instagram captions, telling little stories about my art, writing 6 words prompted stories... I journaled more and more, because I learnt that journaling liberates our writing. I wrote a couple of articles for my professional blog, started a project with an artist I know.

I only started this challenge when I felt so frustrated about not writing regularly that I kept thinking about it and being mean to myself about not doing it. And after I had done earlier in the year 100 days of creative living, after doing a few yoga and art 30 days challenges to first feel that I am actually capable of persevering in anything. 

As much as I wanted to write before that, I had to accept that I had to honour my pace, respect the rhythm of my process. 

We need to make sure we start where we are at, because it’s the only way that will give us the time and space we all need to grow (in any kind of way). Trying to fast track growth actually hinders it. 

2. Taking stock : mapping our weaknesses

Ok, here is a part that is as uncomfortable as it can be empowering. To actually implement change, we need to know how we are actively sabotaging ourselves. If you think you never sabotage yourself, think again. 

Maybe we set impossible goals, leading us inevitably to “I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it”.  Maybe we spend more time thinking about things than actually doing them.  Maybe we procrastinate.  Maybe we avoid any thoughts about what matters to us.  Maybe we’re waiting for “the perfect time”.  Maybe each time we would have time and space to do something important to ourselves we end up involving ourselves in drama (yours or others’) instead. Maybe we act as if our anxiety (”what if this terrible thing would happen to me? and this one? and that?”) isn’t about stories, but actual facts.  Maybe we agonise over every details so much that we never even start, or stop ourselves midway because it’s not as we imagined it would be. Maybe we use self-deprecation and criticism until we feel so bad that we don’t even try.  Maybe we keep looking and engaging in situations we know will make us give up/fail when it gets hard.  Maybe we keep yourself so busy that we can’t even think or feel what makes you suffer.  Maybe we numb ourselves each day with TV, food or substances.  Maybe we keep finding things you “need” to do to be more prepared to do what really matters to us.  Or any of the endless list of ways humans use to avoid facing who they are, what they feel and want. 

I am myself guilty of a few of those. Most of us are when we are honest with ourselves. We also can be guilty of them, but not in every circumstance.  Like : I will use excuses to avoid exercise (”it’s going to be too hard”, “I don’t feel motivated enough”...) that I would never accept from myself in an intellectual endeavour, where I would brush it off immediately (”yes it’s scary, it’s not a reason to stall, let’s go”). 

A few questions to start you off :  What do you think are the worst things to feel or situations to be in regarding change/doing new/hard things? What do you do to avoid feeling like this, even if it means you won’t achieve what you wanted? When you tried to persevere but didn’t : how did you stop yourself? What happened exactly before you gave up?  When you tried to persevere, what personal flaws do you link to your failure to keep going?

We often think that reflecting on our weaknesses will make us feel bad and discouraged from even trying. It is actually the opposite. When we avoid facing them, they sneak up on us and devastate us. When we know how we sabotage ourselves and accept it, we then can plan how we are going to use this knowledge to our advantage.

3. Make contingency plans 

This is SO SO important. Most of us start recovery or change as if it will be this perfect learning curve, without any mistake or hardship, or the need to change the way we do things. As if motivation was the only thing that matters. 

But recovery and change are both messy businesses. And they both include to change the way we react to triggering or changing situations. 

Since I started this challenge, I had to devise a few contingency plans. Instead of essays, when I am exhausted, completely depleted or very short on times, I will often resort to make lists that are helpful to me. That’s how you will find lists of things I love, for which I am grateful for the hardest days. I will write about topics that are more comfortable and easy for me, or require less brain power. I will start a longer essay so I don’t feel pressured to even reread myself since I won’t publish. I often write essays that 750-1000 words long. When it gets really hard, I don’t force myself to do more than 500 words, the minimum I decided to write everyday for that 100 days project.

All of those alternative plans have the same function : giving me a maximum of flexibility so I can persevere in a loving way, making permanent changes instead of performing change only for a while. 

4. Cultivate mindful flexibility 

This one is very linked to the former point. Anything that is too rigid is bound to lead us to failure. Life is messy, humanity is messy, therefore change can only be messy and chaotic. 

I am not advocating for a perpetual change of goals, which is often a sign of a lack of commitment and avoidance. I am advocating for a change in the way we go towards those goals. 

I started this challenge by publishing everyday, but since I am still writing long essays, it became more and more frustrating. Until I really couldn’t finish a post one night, was almost in tears about it, and realised that I had settle to write everyday, not post everyday. I then started writing each essay in 2 to 3 days, a rhythm much more adapted to my personality and current mental health and way of writing. 

Now that I’ve done it for a few weeks in this new way, I noticed that : I love having a couple of days to write and reread myself, but I also love to strive towards writing shorter essays. Both ways taught me important things about myself and my process, and by accepting to change “the rules”, I made sure to learn way more than by forcing myself into one unique way of doing it. 

That’s also why I chose to take a week off for the holidays : my last 100 days project left me exhausted and depleted. I clearly pushed myself too hard. I wanted to see what would happen to my momentum if I listened to my fatigue and made my process more flexible. I am so happy I did, the last month of the challenge feels so much more enriching that way (even if it was indeed a bit hard to go back at it). 

Each time we focus more on how we want those challenges to help us become the person we really want to be and to grow instead of solely focusing on the challenge, we make those structures work for us, instead of the opposite, we make those processes more human. 

5. Make it easy to get to the finish line

This challenge was so important to me, I wanted to write everyday about my job so badly, that of course, it was really scary to do so. As exciting as it could also be, and as satisfying as it can get get, doing things that matter to us carry a strong emotional charge.

Because of that, the more important something is to us, the more resistance we are probably going to have to fight on the way. Facing resistance can get really hard. We need to make sure we are loving towards ourselves to resist resistance on the long run.

If you want to set goals, start small, always. If I had tried this 100 days project even a few months before, I would have failed miserably. I created mini challenges and wrote about so many things I liked before this, for years actually. 

I didn’t set up for writing as much as I coud everyday when I planned this challenge. I chose instead a minimum number of words I thought would be doable on a very long term. 500 words takes me about 20-50mn per day, that seemed doable for me given my lifestyle (see #1). If I would have experienced a lot of difficulties, I would have cut the word-count to 250 words, less if necessary. It was more important to find ways to stick to it than to have an actual number of words down everyday.

And all those former points making it easier for me absolutely made it possible on the way. When we take on challenges as if we need to be perfect, we make failure happen each and every time. Those challenges, or anything we want to persevere doing on the long term will make us face our deeply human imperfection. 

Perseverance is hard because it asks us to face ourselves, often with a focus on our least favourite parts of ourselves. 

When we don’t take it easy, all this discomfort will force us to quit, burnt out and disappointed because we did ask too much of ourselves.  When we make it easier, we face our imperfection and tells it “it’s ok to be the way you are, now let’s find a way to make it work”. 

By persevering in a loving way, we learn to love ourselves just as we are, perfectly human and therefore imperfect. We also make our dreams happen, even if most of them will include fear, discomfort and hardship. One step at the time. 

Each mini goal we set up to attain and actually did will make us feel stronger, more confident and trusting our ability to create a life for ourselves that we actually enjoy. 

So... What are you going to work with next?

See you soon,  Love,  L. 

[thehappymessproject]

74-76/100 - On practicing bravery

I’m always advocating for showing who we are in plain sight, no filter, no bullshit. I am acting on that very principle everyday, in small or big ways. But that doesn’t mean I am able to be 100% all-out everyday, no one is. It certainly doesn’t mean either that there aren’t things I feel frozen in fear at the idea of even thinking about doing them, no one is free from fear. 

Right now, I am at a crossroads, one of those regular moments in life where I need to decide if I will do more of the same and stay in the comfort of my habitual behaviour, or if I want to change the way I usually act and be brave instead. 

There is technically nothing wrong in choosing safety, as I stated in the beginning : everyone has things they are scared of in their life and that they procrastinate or avoid.

Like... If you have read me for a while, did you ever ask yourself why I don’t talk that often about relationships? I’m writing about self-care and self-love, our emotions, the way our brain works, creativity, sometimes about the way Western culture impacts our mental health... 

But there are still subjects I am very fond of, and work with my patients quite successfully... that I don’t dare to write about. 

I can put it the way I want, and believe me, my brain rationalises this in very clever and creative ways, the naked truth is : like so many of us, I don’t write about things that scare me too much and bring up shame too violently and easily.

I started to study psychology with the secret ambition of finally finding a way to have relationships I would enjoy and feel safe in. 

I have an atypical profile in many regards and was raised to be emotionally intelligent, but not necessarily socially. Friendships were always hard for me, and romantic relationships were quite hellish in many regards. Even if (and probably also because) deep connection is probably the thing I craved the most in my life.

On the way (after a few painful breakdowns), I learned that I can’t make my relationships easy, I can only cultivate the easy ones and say goodbye to the depleting ones, one decision and mistake at a time. 

My relationships are so much better than they ever were now, so much more fulfilling, with people more compatible, and willing to work on our relationship too. My 10-years-ago self would be amazed. 

But still, with loneliness and abandonment as my core traumatic wounds, and being human living in this crazy world of ours, I find them fucking hard, painful and scary to navigate sometimes (often).    

I know very well rationally that I can absolutely help others navigate their relationships better, that I have done in so many ways over the years, working with families, parents, children, friends, and always, seeing those incredible bonds emerge. 

That doesn’t make shut up the voice that wants me to have perfect relationships before I dare talking about how they work. 

And it’s not even the only big topic I really love that I avoid here. A few years ago, I realised that I had some difficulties linked to gender, with my patients, and in my personal life, my relationships with men became difficult the more I was feeling myself. 

I also noticed that a lot of my patients were turning towards feminism through their self-developmental process, so I dug in that direction, and add another critical level to my analysis of all things human. It was incredibly powerful to understand myself and us (all the humans) under this new lens.

But I also had a lot of frustrations about it, especially on the way some topics were treated. That frustration took me to radical feminism, which then took me to anti-racism education. 

Those topics ask a lot of digging through our darkness, are highly uncomfortable and painful : otherwise, you know you’re not unpacking your privilege, racism and sexism properly. 

And that very necessary struggle became once again the main excuse to not talk about it. To not wake up my imposter syndrome lurking. That voice insisting that I need to be perfect in order to be allowed to share all those treasures I amassed over the past decade. 

I’m all about vulnerability and showing our imperfect messy humanity, I do things everyday about it, but I’m lacking practice over those specific things. And therefore, I struggle. 

My perfectionism yells louder than the quiet confidence I’ve built over the years when it comes to sharing things that are truly controversial and showing too much my imperfection. My former perfectionist people-pleaser self is still very much ingrained in who I am. I very much suspect it will always be when I am about to show myself even more freely than I already did. 

Right now, after months of overthinking how to write about my social justice and relationship stuff, I can feel in my bones that it is driving me crazy not to talk about it. So I know it’s time to go from awareness of my problem to actual planning and action. 

“Surprisingly”, awareness and apathy aren’t that good of friends. 

Fortunately, there is a big (huge, really) difference between practicing courage as little as we can (to avoid all the unpleasantness attached), and practicing bravery as often as we can, while avoiding some specific areas. 

The experience is completely different : I used to feel like I couldn’t do all those scary but appealing things, now, I know that all I need is to find how to be scared, and transform terrifying goals into small manageable steps. 

Writing this text is a big step, but I wrote it over a week and took a break without finishing it because I was too depleted. Instead of sharing my thoughts for now, I decided as well to communicate more on social media by sharing in my stories the posts of others that resonated with me the most. I also commented more publications, to dip my toes in the water and take its temperature. I also bought social justice books from experts, to back up with data what I want to say, like for the other topics I work on. I wrote this first essay of red-to-green flags in relationships. I am collecting all sorts of infographics and reading others writing about those subjects, analysing what I enjoy or not, to find out more about what I want to write. I got back to old books I love, ones that changed my relationships forever (in the best way possible). 

And finally : I am knee-deep working my relationships in my real life : setting new boundaries, observing which ones are helping me on my journey and which ones are making the journey harder. And of course, working even more with myself, using expressive writing, therapy, journaling, yoga, meditation, self-care… Everything in my toolbox is fair game to give myself the best fighting chance. 

No matter what grand things we want to explore in life, it will require us to be braver, to take some risks and feel vulnerable. Wether we want to heal, grow or explore our potential, we will have to try out new scary things. The trick is to make sure we pace ourselves, we make it possible for us to make change sustainable by breaking down those mental mountains into doable steps.

When we keep doing more of the same hoping to change the result, we feed feelings of low self-worth, pessimism, helplessness. 

When we start to do baby steps towards new things, especially when we feel scared, like we are failing, not good enough,  we flex our bravery and emotional badassery muscles. 

So just remember : Yes, you can do it. Yes, even this. Yes, even feeling like that. Keep the steps small, especially at first : feed your ego with small wins. It gets easier once we started. With practice, feeling brave can be a daily sentiment, each time sweeter. Being yourself is the bravest thing you can do. Don’t think, DO!

See you soon, Love, L.