Hate the way I am "making" myself feel

[teen_anxiety]

I feel like a failure right now. I had HW left to do on a Sunday despite all my efforts not to while still leaving times for breaks and hanging out with people I rarely see or will move away soon. On top of that, I may have accidentally made a couple of people cry today or at least upset. I can never seem to do anything right anymore, I try to be a good daughter to my mom but sometimes it's all too much and I feel myself pushing back again. I feel down for allowing myself to feel like this. The one good thing about today is I remembered how to cry again. I am finally cleaning my room only because I have to but I do need to and would have gotten to it soon on my own. A messy room stresses me out but at the same time, that pressure can stop me from starting the cleaning process. Sometimes I think I should let my mom know how hard it has gotten for me but I already know what she will say it is what she always says, that I am making and allowing myself feel this way that I am training my brain to feel this way. Even though that may be true to an extent that does not make me feel better because I am trying to heal and change. I finally decided to talk to a counselor at Clark but I have not told my mom because I am scared she will question me or say I do not need it. My mom is not a bad mom just so you all know but she does have flaws like all of us. Please no hating on her advice and tips welcome just no hate for her.

[FriendlyDude]

A lot of us feel like failures at times, you’re not alone in that just remember that the only real failure is to let it be final. I think the word “mistake” is usually thought of as one whole word, but if you look at it closely it looks like miss-take. You take a course of action, and it misses the mark. Mistake doesn’t necessarily mean you did something horribly wrong and you’re a failure, it means you did something that took you to a place you didn’t want to be in, and now you can redirect yourself to do something better.

When there’s a fork in the road and you take the ‘wrong’ path, finding yourself at a dead end (I’d call that a miss-take), by knowing that the path was a dead end you can then confidently travel on the other path knowing it’s correct.

It’s normal to have regrets. If you feel bad about accidentally making people upset or cry, then use that regret as nothing more than motivation to do whatever you need to do to resolve it. Guilt/regret is like what pain is to the body. When you fall off a bike or trip or something and scrape your knees, you get it cleaned and bandaged, right? Same thing should go for guilt. When you make someone upset and you feel bad, I think it should be a natural inclination to ‘clean up’ the situation, and ‘bandage’ the guilt by apologizing/forgiving/making things right. But that’s simply what I think. Just do your best to resolve whatever’s going on

I’ve seen you mention the idea of making/training/allowing yourself to feel things quite often. I’m not sure I entirely agree (and I do so politely). It makes sense for habits (repetitive action train your brain to maintain a pattern), but feelings are in another spectrum in my opinion. Unless you can’t feel, you’re going to have an emotional response to things. If someone yells at me, I’m going to feel uncomfortable and maybe even distressed. It’s not because I allowed myself to feel that, it’s an independent emotional response to the yelling. I do, however, choose my reaction. I act based on my emotional response.

What your mom is saying, I think it has more to do with how you act on your emotional responses, not the feelings themselves.

(I know you said you’re trying to change and heal, this is mostly hypothetical. Maybe it’s a “good, better, best” scenario too, perhaps your efforts are simply good, but there’s a better approach you just haven’t found yet).

Let’s say you’re regularly acting on your emotional responses in a non-healthy way. By doing that, your emotional response to whatever happened grows more concentrated and harmful to your mental health. As it gets worse, and if you don’t resolve it, your emotional response gets stronger and more painful. Over time, that cycle repeats over and over until it consumes you, or you break the cycle. If you consistently act on your emotional response in a not-so-good way, that’s where I think “training your brain” would apply. In that case, you’re not training your brain to feel bad, you’re training your brain to respond in a way that will produce an increase in harmful emotional responses.

A healthy reaction to an emotional response would be anything that helps resolve the issue in a healthy/constructive manner. By doing so, the problem that was inducing a negative emotional response is no longer relevant, and you therefore would have a good emotional response again Regularly practicing this form of emotional-response-action would train your brain to resolve issues, and return to a state of balance and healing, rather than causing further harm. Situations can be quite complex though, so it can be difficult to chart the best course of action when you try to act on your emotional responses to resolve problems. Make adjustments as you go, and just do your best if things don’t turn out good, redirect yourself and try something else. As you continually change and refine your approaches to emotional responses, over time you will get better and better at it

I guess I keep writing essays 😂😂 I hope you still don’t mind. I hope this was helpful, and I hope you feel better soon let me know if I need to take another look at anything I said, or if I need to clarify something. I’m not putting any of this out as pure facts, it’s just what makes logical sense in my mind. I’m also open to polite opposing opinions that can stimulate further understanding in a constructive manner

[teen_anxiety in reply to FriendlyDude]

Not gonna lie my fave part of this was the idea of misstake and I agree with and love everything you say you always have the best advice for when I run out of advice for myself thanks.

[FriendlyDude in reply to teen_anxiety]

You’re welcome anytime, my friend