February, the Time for Self-Love

We typically associate February with Valentine's Day with a focus on romantic love and yet the biggest opportunity to bring more love into your life is through improving self-love. How you feel about yourself on the inside gets mirrored back to you through interactions with friends and all of your loved ones. We often think of self-love with being kinder in the way we speak to ourselves, improving self-care, doing things that make you happy and building confidence. All of these are important but there is another extremely important yet often neglected action- validating your emotions. In this newsletter, I'm going to explain why this is so important for self-love and share a personal example that will illustrate how validating even highly confusing emotions can be helpful and how the opposite is often counter-productive.

You might perceive validating your emotions as indulgent as somebody else has it worse than you, fear judgement from others or decide that you're being selfish or overreacting. The reality is that your feelings are your feelings, and you can't choose them. Just because you decide that you don't like them, they don't actually go away but instead are repressed for another day bringing additional side effects along the way. Let me explain. If you imagine an internal saucepan containing all of the emotions you've avoided over the years - anything you didn't like, didn't want to feel or didn't know you were feeling. These are effectively inside the saucepan with a lid on top. Occasionally the lid can't contain the contents and so you get a boiling over of the saucepan - what can feel like an embarrassing display of anger or tears. Or it might be more like a simmering over creating a numbness, low mood or sometimes low-level anxiety. When you get an outburst, it can be quite confusing as you don't understand why you are feeling so angry or upset about something that seems so small in the present and that's because you are feeling every time you felt the same emotion throughout your life as it's accumulated in the saucepan. It's been triggered by this moment. The simmering over can be equally confusing as it's hard to understand why you feel the way you do.

I'm going to share an example of how easy it is to judge emotion and the power of finding acceptance and healthy outlets instead. Many years ago, I woke up to find a lump. I made an appointment with my GP who thought it was most likely to be a cyst but in accordance with NHS guidelines, arranged for me to have a scan. I felt surprisingly calm in the week leading up to my appointment. I was understandably a bit more nervous in the waiting room but was immediately reassured during the appointment that there was nothing likely to be of concern. I was booked in for a scan the following week which confirmed this.

You would imagine that I would feel relieved and happy after the appointment - there was nothing to worry about and all was well. Imagine my surprise when I returned home then, to find that I could not stop crying. I knew that I was feeling sad and also angry but couldn't understand why. I started to berate myself that this was ridiculous, and I had no reason to feel this way. I judged myself as disrespectful to people who actually had cancer or who were going through something far worse. I then caught myself in my judgement and was able to pause and reflect. My experience as a counsellor has taught me that whilst it's easy to judge or dislike emotions, they are there for a reason. Telling myself to stop feeling as other people have it worse or might not like my emotions doesn't help anybody else with whatever they are going through and it just adds to the saucepan creating problems for another day.

Luckily, I believe wholeheartedly in practising what I preach and recognised it was important to allow myself some time and to accept the emotion even if I did not like it or understand it. Rather than worrying what my family and friends might think, I stated confidently and from a place of self-love that I was going to have some time out to rest. I lay down on my bed and allowed myself to cry. I thanked the judgements that kept appearing and continued to allow my tears acknowledging that I was human, and I obviously needed to cry. After some time, some friends and family came to mind, and I realised I was grieving for the people in my life who'd either experienced cancer scares or who I'd lost to cancer. Some of the memories were related to when I had a young family and didn't have the time or capacity to be able to process these events fully. Once I had acknowledged this and allowed myself to cry with compassion, the emotion passed relatively quickly.

Once I had given space for my sadness, I then allowed the anger. Crying didn't feel enough so I let my body do what I felt I needed and kicked my legs against the bed. After a while, I felt so much better. There was no obvious memory that came with this - It may have been connected to the grief but sometimes just acknowledging that you feel angry and that it's human to do so from time to time is what's needed as we cannot always know the reason. Through showing compassion to myself, this process also passed relatively easily. In my experience, the more you do this, the quicker and easier it becomes and also the less triggered you are over time.

Afterwards I felt so much lighter, happier and more accepting of myself as well as grateful to myself for allowing something to shift. I was then able to spend the rest of the day having a nice bath, reading a book and going for a walk. I felt so much more rested than I would have done had I tried to ignore the emotion and carried on judging myself. Repressing the emotion tends to mean it lingers around a lot longer and then comes out when it's not convenient or unintended like the snapping outburst that can come with the saucepan. It doesn't mean that you always have to deal with the emotion there and then though, it's possible to acknowledge the emotion and come back to it later in the day when it's more convenient. This is parking the emotion rather than repressing it and works as long as you honour your commitment to return at a later date.

So, becoming more aware of your emotions, acknowledging them with compassion and having healthy outlets is an act of self-love. It also helps you to understand yourself and feel better about yourself as a human being. When you allow and release your emotions, your saucepan is then much freer allowing space for peace, joy, laughter and happiness instead. You also become more aware of the information your emotions have for you so you can make better decisions i.e when to say yes or no to others, identify what will bring more happiness and it also helps you flow and overcome any challenges or difficulties more easily as you're not bogged down with avoiding the situation or judging yourself. It's also a big help in speaking more kindly to yourself and allows you naturally to have more self-care. So the next time you find yourself questioning your emotions, try to accept them just as they are. Over time you are likely to notice that you have less emotion as your saucepan is less full.

Wishing you lots of self-love in February and generally - Natalie.