If I were to call you SELFISH, how would it make you feel?

Angry? Offended? Hurt? Defensive? All of the above and then some? (I mean, just to be clear I would 100% feel all of the above and be prepared to show you my receipts of acts of selflessness to boot, so you and I are totally not alone here).

Let's talk about selfishness for a hot minute. What does it MEAN to be "selfish"?

For a long time, selfish (to me) has been synonymous with "a lack of care for others". Egotistic, unkind, thoughtless, insensitive, uncaring, non-empathetic, self-centered. If you literally google (which I did, just for this newsletter) "definition of selfish", here's what you get: lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure.

I'm pretty sure NO ONE wants to be thought of as someone who doesn't consider others, so my guess is that we all think of selfish as a bad thing.

...but what if it isn't? What if it's necessary?

Google may strictly define selfishness as the worst thing ever, but in psychological science and in the wise words of life coach Martha Beck:

"Selfishness happens when someone is starved of self. If someone holds a pillow over your face, you can think only of your breath. But if you can breathe freely, you don't think of your breath at all. There are people who are very selfish and mean and awful, and you can guarantee that that person's 'self' is being stifled to the point that they cannot think of anything else."

Selfishness is a way to COPE.

If we look at selfish as just a "bad way to be", that doesn't answer the question of WHY we are being selfish in the first place and what to do about it.

What is it that's stifling us and making us act selfishly?

Here's the tough pill to swallow: it's all the things that make us feel bad inside. All the metaphorical pillows making us focus on ourselves because we can't think of anything else in order to survive.

The job that you dread waking up for.

The to-do list that never ends.

The relationships that feel exhausting rather than energizing.

The workout that you feel you "have to do" and you feel like a failure if you don't.

I've heard so many of my clients talk about their own shame of "falling off the bandwagon", drinking the bottle of wine, having the edible, scrolling absently on social media when they "should have" been going to bed early, the list goes on...

THESE are not the things that are suffocating us. These are the things we are using to COPE with the things that are suffocating us.

If we are not selfish, we can't make it through the things that make us feel bad inside.

We can only be selfless once we take the pillow off our faces.

In order to do that, we need to first identify what the "pillows" in our lives ARE.

And until we know what our "pillows" are, being selfish is not only important but VITAL.

Being selfish isn't bad, it allows us to take care of our own needs so that we can actually survive. Selfishness is the psychological equivalent of putting on your own mask before helping someone else with theirs.

So my questions to you this week are two-fold:

1) What "pillows" exist in your life and what is one tiny thing you can do to shift that pillow slightly away from your mouth? Here's my blog on breaking a habit cycle if you find this helpful here!

2) What is one thing you can do this week to be unapologetically selfish and fill your own cup so that you can actually be more selfless?

You are not a bad person for being selfish. You are doing the very best you can and it is important to be selfish. What I'm asking here is really, really hard. This isn't an overnight change, this is a big, hard, emotional thing. Maybe you just sit with these questions right now and don't answer or act on them just yet- that's okay. That's a form of self-care too.

When was the last time something properly pissed you off?

This week I'm in a tech-induced rage. Every single piece of technology I rely on for work, life, and dissociating from the current state of the world has gone completely cattywampus (my new favourite word).

I thought this week we'd talk about something familiar to all of us but rarely discussed in depth: anger.

In my childhood, I was raised to believe that anger was an unacceptable emotion. What I mean by that is that any time I was angry, my parents either weren't happy about it or immediately wanted to "fix the problem" to make me less angry. Now this is far from uncommon... (here's an interesting reflection question: how did your family respond to you when you were angry as a child?)

As a result I learned what my parents also likely learned growing up: that joy is a "good" emotion to have and anger is a "bad" emotion to have. As a result, I spent a lot of time trying to push anger down, aside, or away instead of feeling it.

As I grew up, studied psychology and emotions, and went to a lot of therapy, I now know that not only is anger not a "bad" emotion (spoiler: NO emotions are "bad" emotions) but it's actually an incredibly important messenger.

Anger tells us that something we've experienced is unjust, that there is a problem that needs to be solved, and is highly motivational in pushing us to find a solution.

Think of the last time you were angry...

What were you angry about? What was the situation at hand? What felt unjust, wrong, or made you feel compelled to take immediate action?

If you're like me and as a child you weren't taught what anger meant or how to express it in a healthy and helpful way, anger can be very confusing and overwhelming.

Unhelpful expressions of anger can be:

Pretending everything is okay when it isn't
Lashing out at or blaming others (whether in person, on social media, or otherwise), hitting/throwing things, or "explosive" bursts of anger
Pushing anger down and "imploding" (aka getting angry with yourself even if the problem is outside of you)

If you do any (or all) of these things, here are some things you can do to help:

Take a deep breath. Sometimes we don't notice we're angry until we burst, and taking a DEEP breath can help us think before we act.
Take a break. Anger can be helpful, but if you feel like you're about to express it in one of the above three ways, maybe it's time to get some fresh air and hit pause. One way you can take a break from a heated conversation for instance is to say, "I want to have this conversation non-reactively, so I'm going to go for a walk and then can we talk about this?"
Notice how sensations in your body change with anger. Anger can show up as feelings of heat, heart rate elevation, and a tight chest (kind of like you're a kettle about to boil- which you might be). The sooner you can become aware of these feelings, the easier it is to take a break and then use anger helpfully.
Ask yourself: what is the problem that really needs to be solved here? What has happened that feels unjust? Oftentimes we want to project anger at the nearest available target. That doesn't mean the nearest available target is actually the root of the problem.
And lastly, once you've taken a breath, a break, noticed sensations in your body, and identified the problem, who can you turn to for support? Sometimes we need a hype human, but anger is already a hyped-up emotion. Who can you talk to about the problem to find resolution calmly and responsively, rather than explosively?

I'm currently working on these five things when I notice anger emerging... and it's really, really hard. When I first started practicing this with my therapist, I felt deeply uncomfortable, and wrong somehow.

But remember- we live in a society where we're told which emotions are "acceptable" which are not. You are HUMAN. You are an emotional being who just occasionally thinks, and it's important that we learn how to identify and express our emotions in a way that hurts neither ourselves nor others.

....So I'm learning how to feel angry at technology, troubleshoot my tech issues, and NOT throw my laptop at the wall. It's a struggle. But I think I can do it *twitches*.

The IMPORTANCE of being SELFISH

How do you manage ANGER?