escape – The Healing Modalities

What are you resisting?

Sometimes we feel a sense of urgency to make a change in our lives. We think by making the change, we’ll feel better and we want to feel better NOW. This is what happens when we think our circumstances create our feelings.

There’s nothing wrong with changing our circumstances if we can easily do that. But we usually bring our emotional state into the new circumstances as well, if we don’t spend time managing our mindset first.

For example, a client of mine recently started dating again after being off the dating apps for over 10 months. The last time she was on them, she met someone she really liked. It was long-distance, however, and the other person ended things after two months because long-distance was too hard. They didn’t have a “want match” in that aspect. And that breakup was very hard for her because she enjoyed the other person so much.

During one of our coaching sessions together, she realized she felt a sense of urgency to meet and start dating someone new because of two things: 1) she had a belief, “If it doesn’t happen quickly, it will never happen,” and 2) she was trying to escape the feeling of hurt and sadness she still felt about the relationship ending, even after time had passed – she wasn’t over that person yet.

In her effort to escape (resist) the feelings of hurt and sadness, she wanted to change her circumstance by meeting someone new so she would no longer feel hurt and sad. Along with recognizing that, it was also important for her to see the limiting belief she held.

So this is what we did. We pulled out the limiting belief, “If it doesn’t happen quickly, it will never happen” and looked at why that wasn’t true. Since she is being more intentional with who and what she wants, maybe it’s happening FOR her that it’s taking some time before she meets someone she really likes. In the past, things had happened somewhat quickly where she met someone she really liked, but ultimately, the relationship didn’t end up being what she wanted – the “want matches” weren’t there.

I asked, “So how might taking ‘longer’ this time be happening FOR you?” She came up with:

– “I get to clarify even more who I want to be with and who I want to BE in the relationship.”
– “Even when it feels hard – discouraging, disappointing, rejecting – I remind myself why this is important to me and I keep showing up for myself instead of wanting to give up.”
– “I get to show myself love and compassion through this, which strengthens my relationship with myself.”

There are probably even more things she could find.

The other thing we pulled out was the resistance to her feelings. When she became aware that she was resisting and trying to escape those feelings of hurt and sadness, she began to allow them to be there.

She noticed that by allowing those feelings, the sense of urgency decreased. Because now there was less to resist or escape. She could be accepting of where she is emotionally and see that the feelings could be there and not overwhelm her. She could have compassion for herself about why she feels hurt and sad.

She now feels more comfortable with taking her time during this process of dating and meeting people, being intentional and patient. She recognizes that even in this, she is learning and growing.

Your turn: Where in your life do you feel a sense of urgency? Can you recognize if you have a limiting belief in that area? What is the belief? Can you recognize if you’re resisting emotions in that area? What are the emotions? If you find that you feel a sense of urgency, what does having compassion for yourself look like? How might this “taking longer” or “taking too long” be happening FOR you?

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Do you know what it means to escape yourself? We may avoid ourselves or escape from ourselves for different reasons, which I’ll talk about in a minute.

Forms of escape or avoidance that might be familiar to you are overeating, overdrinking, overspending, over-Instagraming, over-Netflixing, overworking, over-cleaning, over-exercising, or eating edibles.

It could be ANYTHING, if we’re using that thing/action to prevent ourselves from being present to feeling an emotion.

I call this type of escape “buffering.” What is buffering?

We buffer to avoid feeling emotional pain or uncomfortable emotions. When we buffer, we use external things to change how we feel internally. This means engaging in an action to put a buffer between us and a feeling we don’t want to feel.

We might feel like we’re taking care of ourselves by engaging in some of these actions. Sometimes we are. And sometimes, these things become false pleasures that have a net-negative outcome: when we overeat, we gain weight. When we overdrink, we end up with hangovers and half of the next day is ruined. When we overspend, we go into debt or don’t meet our savings goals. When we eat edibles, we are less present for our lives and those around us.

If buffering is what we do to avoid pain/discomfort, it makes sense that when we stop buffering, we’ll feel pain/discomfort. But most of us don’t understand this, which makes it almost impossible to stop buffering or escaping ourselves.

We have to be willing to feel uncomfortable in order to move past our buffers.

An analogy for this is like stepping into a house and turning on the lights and the house is a mess. The obvious and easiest answer is to turn the lights back off (to buffer) so the mess will “go away.” But the mess doesn’t go away – you just can’t see it now because the lights are off.

It’s similar with emotions. Avoiding an emotion doesn’t make the emotion go away – it just helps us not to see or feel it. We pretend it isn’t there, but it IS there, and it’s there for a reason.

And this is part of the reason WHY we buffer sometimes – to NOT find out what that reason is.

Buffering is a way to tolerate our lives when we know there’s some misalignment occurring.

We may be unhappy at our job, but we need to keep the job in order to support our family. So we buffer by overdrinking wine every night or impulse buying on Amazon or eating edibles.

Or we might be in a relationship that’s not working for us, but instead of having an uncomfortable conversation or making a scary, difficult decision, we stay in the relationship and buffer instead.

Or we don’t like the overall trajectory of our lives but don’t know what to do, so we buffer – which is easy – instead of doing the harder work of looking within, seeking professional help, or making tough decisions to help change our lives.

When we stop buffering, we’ll likely experience temporary pain. And the pain isn’t caused by the lack of buffering. What we need to do is stop buffering ourselves long enough to find the real cause of the pain.

It might mean taking a closer look at ourselves and our lives, our decisions and choices up to this point, and asking ourselves what we really need and how we truly want to take care of ourselves and our lives.

Your turn: What feelings have you been avoiding? What are the false pleasures you’ve been engaging in? In what way would your life be different if you didn’t have these false pleasures? Are you ready to stop buffering and willing to feel some discomfort instead, in order to move towards true knowing and well-being for yourself?

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Tag: escape

In a hurry to change?

When you try to escape from yourself