🌊 On Being My Own Encourager

+ Sunday Springs

Pet snuggles soothe me, too.

Here’s something I’m thinking about: I want to practice intentionally encouraging myself.

This flows out of my larger interest in learning to soothe my inner child, but with a more active sense of a regular, purposeful practice.

My default internal dialogue is a drone of perfectionism, with a repeating snare drum of self-doubt and erratic riffs of fearful self-blame.

What if, instead, it sounded like a sonata of gentle dissonance and resolution, with a melodic rise and fall of distress and soothing, and moving chords of self-encouragement?

“Good job.” “You’re doing great.” “That was really hard, but you did it. I’m proud of you.” What if my inner dialogue sounded like this, instead of the usual automatic self-hassling? Answer: I think my life would feel a lot calmer and happier.

This seems like a situation of unhealed-child parts of me—the ones trying to hold everything together or else something bad will happen—who need me to be the attuned, encouraging parent they always needed.

From another angle, this also seems like a situation of cognitive bias: my brain has a bias against trusting myself. It’s the exact opposite of Voldemort’s bias that Harry points out to him in HPMOR:

​“You have a blind spot around strategies that involve doing nice things for other people, to the point where it stops you from achieving your selfish values...You don’t see nice ways to do the things you want to do...Even when a nice strategy would be more effective, you don’t see it because you have a self-image of not being nice.”

— Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky

I have a blind spot around doing nice things for myself—and saying nice things to myself—to the point that it stops me from achieving my altruistic values (in that I’m wasting emotional energy on self-doubt), because I have a self-image of being nice to others but not to myself!

Therefore, I need to consciously compensate for that bias, if I want to operate closer to actual truth and effectiveness. I could maybe try some behavioral modification—perhaps a reward system of giving myself a point for each time I say something encouraging myself.

It certainly seems worth the try. Maybe I’ll report back with my results next time!

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Sunday Springs

(Although now it’s already Monday)

Section posts from the past week two weeks

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🖋️Writer’s Waters

🖋️ The Quagmire of Novel Revising

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☔️Parenting Puddles

☔️Why I will not railroad over my kids' consent and capacity

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🪷Serenity Splashes

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🪷Enlightenment is to healing

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Enlightenment is to healing
what flowers are to blooms--
same vibrance under different names,
like air in different rooms--

and just like flowers, both of these
need time and space to thrive--
and courage to face what's underground
and to open to new life.

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🪷Mind-fog Message

soothing my anxiety when my mind feels foggy

It’s okay to not have it all figured out.
Clear, sunny days are fun,
but clouds and rain are essential, too.
Take it slow in this fog, little one.

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🪷Forward, Enlightenment Knight

Forward, enlightenment knight,
to another day pursuing the light
of healing and living with mindful sight,
honest, brave, and kind.

Yours not to perfectly plan,
yours not to meet demands,
yours but to do what you can,
staying self-aligned.

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🪷The Voice in Your Mind

If the voice in your mind
is strict and unkind,
that’s not a voice of wisdom.

It’s a scared, hurt child
alone in the wild
who needs help and compassion.

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🪷To Build a Bridge

People who hold an opposite view
politically from yours
aren't evil, of course. They're people too,
with the same needs at their cores:

to feel safe, to protect their young,
and to have the means to live.
It's just a different route they've come.
Let us seek to build a bridge.

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🪷 You don't scold a daffodil

You don’t scold a daffodil
for not blooming on command.
It will open when it's ready:
this you understand--

and yet you scold a child
for not jumping to obey,
instead of adding light and time
to help them bloom their way.

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🪷 You're Doing Great

You feel like a mess and a screw-up, I know,
   but listen: what you are is real.
Real people have complex feelings and needs,
   and real life is a messy, screwy deal.

      You're doing great
      with your very full plate.

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