Back to the Basics
Life is hard, people say. That is absolutely true, particularly because humanity likes to make everything more complicated. It’s not enough that we can walk on two feet and have enough brain capacity to create simple tools like the shovel or the bow and arrow. Noooooo. We need to first harness the energy of other animals to plow our fields for us, and when that isn’t fast enough, we make something as complex as the automobile.
The same is true in relationships. Love is pretty basic when it is unconditional. Any devoted parent will tell you as much, but add in the complexity of ego in this day and age and Lawd, does love get complicated fast.
Sometimes, feeling better is about going back to basic skills. Not many of us know how to tolerate distress in healthy ways. We avoid emotions or we self-flagellate. We judge ourselves or each other for having negative emotions, even when they are a natural, normal part of the human experience. We don’t know how to soothe ourselves, therefore how could we possibly know how to soothe each other?
Distress intolerance and its opposite, distress tolerance, should be taught in every school across the world, in my view. It’s pretty apparent that it is lacking based the myriad examples of people freaking out at each other on social media, and sometimes in real life, every day.
The Centre for Clinical Interventions, which is part of the Government of Western Australia, has put together workbooks on various mental health conditions and useful, simple, productive literature and exercises on how to address them. They have one on tolerating distress, which I highly recommend.
Another component to looking out for ourselves and occupying space in this lifetime is communication. There is a difference between assertive communication and passive or aggressive communication. With passive communication, we fail to respect our own rights and acquiesce to the desires of others, even if we don’t want to. With aggressive communication, we try to trample all over the rights of others in the name of ownership or control.
Assertive communication is a middle ground, where we feel worthy of stating what we want and need, while being mindful of the fact that others have the right to say “no” and if they do, we have to be able to handle the disappointment or decide what to do next. The CCI has a great workbook on being assertive, which includes modules on thinking more assertively, behaving more assertively, and dealing with criticism or disappointment with assertiveness.
While having faith in God or Good is essential to well being in my view, sometimes its more difficult to even get underway, if we feel like we don’t have useful skills for dealing with the day-to-day problems that arise. Sometimes, it may feel overwhelming if we’ve never been taught how to stand up for ourselves or tolerate distress very well.
It’s harder to have faith if we feel like we get walked all over, we aren’t worthy of asking for what we want, or we don’t tolerate distress very well. So, perhaps start even simpler than having faith. Start with building basic skills for how to relate to the world, and then go from there.