https://www.quora.com/Life-Advice/What-is-the-only-one-skill-that-if-you-have-will-completely-change-your-life
Once you get to understand language and how certain things are conceptualized in a language, you get to hear an adage time and again, with its rather timeless appeal: time heals all wounds.
Interestingly, we get to hear it when we face some setback. Setbacks that shoot pain in through psyche, cut through our emotions and sense of rational logic, and during crisis situations that we wish we weren’t there.
We are told, “Time heals all wounds”.
We are told, “Leave it to time”, where it could be gaping wounds in your trust levels, sensitive wounds in your psyche with scar tissue formed over time and you are still feeling the rawness of those wounds as you act out in irrational (but not illogical) ways in defense of your wounds, as a reaction to being controlled, as a reaction to being manipulated, as a reaction to being constrained.
The consequences are depression, sickness, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, frustration, anger, lack of creative juices, dissociative tendencies, jealousy, commitment phobia, creation of barriers from people that matter to you (and to whom you matter), fear of being judged and creating a smooth, shining, rock hard exterior to protect our fragile selves, that is only but paper thin.
We live a life of regrets. We don’t do things we feel we should do, because we are afraid of failure; of rejection; of being left alone; of being shamed. We search for association with others as derived from achievement-oriented utility only.
We learn to fear darkness and keep a rock to cover and bottle it up. And when we move that rock sometimes, we see ugly things crawling under. We cover it up by several masks, as for example, eating un-mindful junk, performing only for viewer appreciation (mostly on social media), calculating every possible risk to self-realization and building solid installations of those risks that limit us.
This is because when we are told time heals all wounds, we are told that pain can only come one or two times, or at best… is intermittent. We are not told it’s a constant feature of our lives. And that it is possible to get up and treat ourselves.
The one thing that makes a big difference in all that we do and think, and that one thing which we are not taught by some bizarre sense of worldliness is emotional hygiene.
When we fall down and our skin is abraded, revealing open little blood vessels and minuscule patches of flesh, we apply ointments. We bandage it up for healing.
When we have fever, we take medicines.
When we play in dirt and after we come back home, we wash up before eating.
When we pass on toxic substances, like snot, shit, piss, pus, we do not hold onto them because they come from us. We recognize they are bad for our bodies, we get rid of them, clean up and forget about them. We become ready to go.
We are taught physical hygiene, but when it comes to emotional hygiene we believe nothing like that exists, and yet emotional hygiene continues to impact our lives in much less illusory ways than we’d like to think.
When we fail at something we want to succeed, we run marathons in circles in our head as to why. We don’t stop at just identifying the reasons and hoping to correct them in the future; we don’t stop at reckoning that certain things could just not be achievable.
We ask ourselves, “Why the fuck couldn’t you get that? Why didn’t you try hard enough? What’s wrong with you?”
When we are rejected in love, we think the reasons lie with us; because we are not good enough. And then we keep on trying to be good enough and live with the gunk that comes with rejection. We don’t let it out of our system. We try to keep up with snowballing criteria of being “good enough” till we lose the essence of who we are in the process.
When we feel insecure, we don’t hug ourselves. When we feel lonely we don’t open up our heartache because we fear being further wounded in the process, knowing that we are surrounded by people who think like us.
Because we are not taught that emotional hygiene is important. Because even though a 3-year old knows where a physical wound lies, and by the time we are 5 years old we know when and how to put on a band-aid when we hurt ourselves, we are not told to be kind to our psychological wounds that limit us, make us hurt others, make us restless and make us responsibilize others for our own happiness.
By the time we are adults, we have perfected the art of masking our emotional health and anesthetizing our pain with the understanding that “time heals”. The truth is, time doesn’t.
We need to heal ourselves.
We need to pay attention to how our minds react to failure, rejection, loneliness, ideas of success and capabilities. When we believe we are incapable of something, because ofwho we are, we are reacting to a gaping wound in our psyche with a band-aid. This is why most people stop short of self-actualizing, and of being better versions of the selves they believe they are.
However, when it comes to a friend who we hold dear, a family member who is more important to us than anything else in our lives, we are much kinder. We don’t tell a friend who’s suffered a break-up “See, the reason lies with you. You are an abominable character, you were not caring enough, you didn’t try hard, you are not good looking enough, you should take a good look at yourself”.
Yet, we feel and tell ourselves things like these, when we are cheated by our partners, as well as when we are rejected by people.
We are beating ourselves up all the time. We are not friends with our own selves. We are not kind to our own selves.
Because we don’t know how to maintain the emotional hygiene; because we don’t pay enough attention to emotional health. Because we are fed the idea that looking after yourself borders on self-centredness or overlaps with narcissism, and because stoicism is celebrated being an indicator of emotional strength.
Yet, when we have a fever we don’t tell ourselves, “Let me go and stand under a cold shower and see how worse it could get”. We are careful with our bodies.
But when it comes to our minds, we keep digging…at the wounds themselves, hoping they would go away based on the process of scooping them out.
Countless studies document evidenced effects of loneliness and unhealthy self-esteem on physical health, stress levels, their impact on horrible diseases like cancer, their impact on suicide rates, their impact on heart conditions.
So, next time your boss yells at you, your colleagues play the game of politics on you, your significant other demeans you and attempts to manipulate you, don’t keep digging at your wounds. Don’t let others' projections form your own self-esteem. Fight negative thoughts.
Be kind to yourself. Be compassionate to yourself.
Practise emotional hygiene.
It will change your life.
Here are some links which could be a good start towards that:
- https://www.psychologytod
ay.com/... - http://www.helpguide.org/
article... - 5 Surprising Habits Of Happy People
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3. Google Images
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