Ask Helen: a reader question about taking stuff personally

Dear Helen,

My husband is depressed and introverted and makes no effort to connect, yet he still wants intimacy. One of my sons is autistic and says hurtful things or hurts his brother daily. I find it hard to be a conscious, positive person in this environment, yet also stuck in the "prison" of my situation. I try to look at silver linings and to be grateful and be a good parent to my boys, but often take my husband and one son's behavior to heart. So, I suppose with that context, how do I navigate life without taking the challenges and "little cuts" personally?

Thank you!
Feels Personal

Dear Feels Personal,

Yes, it sounds like it would be very hard to be a "conscious, positive person" in the environment you're describing!

Then again, I think it's really hard to make ourselves be anything—especially if it's not what's already arising spontaneously.

What if you dropped the need to be a "conscious, positive person"?

Your mind might try to convince you that you need these efforts to be conscious and positive—otherwise how will you show up? Will you be awful to the loved ones around you? Will you not care how you treat them?

In my experience, that isn't what happens.

What actually happens is, we release ourselves from the added burden of trying to feel differently than we feel.

We welcome the feelings that are showing up.

We allow them to be here (no matter if they seem petty and negative).

We feel them, wherever and however they're arising.

And—and this is the clincher—we don't need these feelings to change!

We don't need to say the nasty thing back (so we can stop feeling hurt). We don't need to yell or get hostile (to make the feeling of frustration or irritation go away). We don't need to withhold intimacy (to drive home a point).

We can feel whatever we're feeling without needing it to go away, without needing to act from that feeling.

It will go away on its own. We just have to feel it first—and try not to cause ourselves more suffering by attempting to change or stop the unpleasant feeling.

The other part of this that might be helpful for you to look at is what feels personal.

Your husband's depression and how it affects your closeness.

Your son's hurtful words and actions.

Your mind has you believing that those things are actually about you. A real, solid, separate YOU that either deserves or doesn't deserve such treatment.

But what if that isn't true?

What if your husband and son are simply feeling things in the moment and then spontaneous actions are occurring?

What if none of it has to do with you? What if what you're taking personally can't, in fact, be personal at all?

I know it really seems like other people's apparent actions toward us must have to do with us. We're sort of conditioned to think that's how relationships work.

Things feel personal—but what if it's only because you're thinking you have a personhood to defend?

If you are whole and intact no matter what happens (and you absolutely are), then circumstances don't actually matter.

They might be inconvenient. They might occasionally feel upsetting or even devastating.

But they can't change what's fundamentally 'you,' because what's fundamentally 'you' is unchanging.

There is nothing to defend. Nothing is under attack. Nothing is personal.

There's just what's arising in this moment, what might or might not feel challenging—and there's something we call 'you,' who's observing those challenges and her feelings about them.

What happens if you allow it to be that simple? (Email me directly if you want to talk more about this.)

I hope this helps.

Love,
Helen

Ask Helen: a reader question about mindless scrolling

Dear Helen,

How do I go on a digital diet? I waste way too much time on my iPad, scrolling social media and playing games and not getting other things done. It feels like a problem.

Thank you!
Captive Audience

Dear Captive Audience,

You don't need a digital diet. You don't need a schedule or a timer or any other kind of strategy.

What you might want to try is feeling what wants to be felt.

The feelings that come up right before you find yourself reaching for the iPad or staying on the iPad far beyond what feels useful or fun.

Are you bored? Restless? Uncomfortable?

Are you seeking a distraction? A hit of dopamine? An avenue for procrastination?

Slow down a minute.

Try digging deeper than words. After all, what even is boredom or restlessness? How do you know you're uncomfortable?

They're abstractions, those terms. They're not made of anything. Our mind slaps them like labels onto what we're experiencing, but underneath them are actual feelings. As in, felt sensations. Wordless. Without stories or meaning.

When you dig deeper than those words, maybe you'll notice a tightness in your chest or a whooshing in your belly. Maybe there's a buzzing in your ears. A tense throat. Something rising up inside you.

Tingling, hollowness, a lump, radiating heat.

Some energy, somewhere in your body, making itself known.

Feel it. Notice the sensations. Stay with the sensations.

What if you feel the actual sensations in your body for just a moment before picking up the iPad?

Probably your mind will be quick to attach a story to the sensation. It might be quick to use the sensations as proof of something. But that's just the mind's chatter. What we're really interested in here is the feelings in or on your body.

We are designed to feel, and no feeling is actually unbearable. The narrative our mind weaves about the sensation is often more uncomfortable than the sensation itself.

And that's something minds are really good at: attaching a story or an autopilot action to a felt sensation. I'd venture to say that for most of us, it's habitual.

So, you feel the tensing up of your throat...and your mind jumps in and says, Reach for the iPad. That'll fix this.

And it does, in a sense. At least, in that it distracts you away from feeling the feeling that popped up just before.

Problem is, you find yourself scrolling mindlessly, endlessly...for what? To avoid feeling a fleeting sensation that didn't necessarily mean anything in the first place? A feeling that was perfectly safe to feel, but that your mind interpreted as not okay or a thing to avoid?

You can see how you might inadvertently spend a lot of time trying not to feel, yeah?

So, I'm advocating for welcoming the feelings.

For keeping the stories at bay and focusing on the felt sensations.

For pausing, giving yourself a moment to tune into your body...and then, who cares what you ultimately do.

If you pick up the iPad or scroll for another hour or two, it doesn't actually matter (though your mind will likely berate you for this; hilarious, of course, because it's the same mind that convinced you you couldn't handle the feelings in the first place!).

Giving yourself the chance to feel the feelings that come right before your scrolling habit—that's what matters.

I hope this helps.

Love,
Helen

Ask Helen: a reader question about "the right time"

Dear Helen,

How do you know when it's the right time to "push through" and "keep going," versus when it's actually the right time to stop doing, deeply re-assess your commitments, and pull back? And also, maybe you have some good advice on how to deal with commitments. I think of them as being set in stone—but, in reality, I think most things can be changed, adjusted, stepped away from, etc. (And I want to work on my mindset there.)

Thank you!
Stop or Go

Dear Stop or Go,

I don't think you actually have to manage any of this!

You think you do—that you have to know about a thing called "the right time" and that there could be signs or signals that tell you what to do or not do, accordingly—but that's all a layer of thought.

What does "the right time" even mean? What is it even made of?

Who could say, one way or the other, what "the right time" is?

Is it future you, looking back, and reviewing whether or not it was, in fact, "the right time" to do this or that?

Is it some authority figure who will let you know if you guessed correctly and chose the right action at "the right time"?

You see how this doesn't really hold up to questioning, yeah?

But this is what a mind does.

A mind pulls that sense of "knowing" out of context and makes it a capital-T Thing: a set of operating instructions that you need to decipher, learn, and follow from here on out. That's the layer of thought that I'm talking about.

Let's talk about it less abstractly for a moment.

Say you're running a marathon. (I've never run a marathon, but this is the first thing that popped into my head.)

How do you know when it's the right time to push through and keep going, versus when it's actually the right time to stop running, deeply re-assess your commitment to the race, and possibly change tack altogether?

First of all, is this idea of "the right time" something you actually need to know? Can you even know it? And what does it mean? Could there actually be a wrong time to stop?

It seems most likely that your body kind of decides for you; a decision gets made, without your mind's interference (though your mind will take credit for it, because that's what minds do), and you find yourself either pushing through or pulling back.

Secondly, doesn't it strike you as a little...redundant? I guess what I mean is, the thinking is pretty excessive when you consider the fact that the body has probably already reached a decision (mind you, a decision that an active, overly involved mind is probably trying to talk you into or out of).

So, here's the thing. By the time you stop to ask the question, "Is it the right time for me to push through or pull back?" I'm pretty sure you already "know" that you want to pull back.

You "know" it in the deepest sense—a sense that's probably beyond verbalization or reasoning or logic or "right timing."

It doesn't need to match up with some rubric that you've mentally established to assess whether or not it's "the right time" for you to act on your changing feelings.

It doesn't need to make sense to that part (or any part) or you. It can just be an inkling of desire to be done. To bow out.

And you can listen to that inkling! Without deeply reassessing anything!

I hope this helps.

Love,
Helen

Ask Helen: a reader question about poor self-concept

Dear Helen,

If I’m (really very) self-reflective and aware, how can my self-concept be so poor (outrageously different from what others tell me about myself)? I’m doing a lot of “the work”, but I’m still struggling to believe the (good) things they say about me. It’s hard to identify with them. Is there a trick?!

Thank you!
Down on Myself

Dear Down on Myself,

What if I told you your poor self-concept is nothing more than a habit?

It's something that served you at some point, probably when you were very young and before you had a lot of other ways of coping—but it has since ceased to be useful. In fact, it's more hurtful than anything.

What if your inability to identify with praise you're given means nothing about you?

You're not broken or damaged; there isn't anything to "work" on. You just have an old habit that's kicking around, playing some old tapes in your head—tapes that you don't even necessarily believe anymore.

The thing about habituated thinking is that it's efficient. Our minds love being efficient. Really, they can't help but be efficient; it's the nature of a mind.

So, at some point, it made sense to think poorly of yourself. Maybe it made sense to put yourself down or to not get too big of an ego or to deflect compliments, etc. It made sense to do that because you didn't know what else to do and probably there was some solid cultural conditioning floating around that encouraged this way of being.

Thinking poorly of yourself helped you to not be hurt or to feel hard, painful things; it helped you to secure love; it helped you to stay in good graces with people you depended on. Who knows exactly. But it made sense, so you did it.

What it sounds like you're coming up against now is that it no longer makes sense.

And yet, you're still doing it.

You get a compliment and your mind has an autopilot response system in place.

Nah, it says. They don't know who I really am. I'm not actually worthy/good/special.

It's not that you really think this (though I bet it feels like you do!).

And it's (obviously) not that this is even remotely true.

It's that you've thought it a million times before now, in situations just like this.

You see how it's simply a matter of programming, right?

How could you not think these shitty-self thoughts when they've been your mind's go-to for ages?

Your mind is running on old, easy information that doesn't rock the boat. It's beautifully efficient and tragically untrue.

So, what do you do now that you know it's just a habit?

You do, what I like to call, the Ope, there's that thought again!

(I don't think I ever actually said "ope" before moving to the midwest, but it's such a handy little word. Not quite so definitively apologetic as "oops," and not as excitable as "ahhhh!" It's the perfect amount of surprise, with an innocent little shoulder shrug thrown in for good measure. I think I need this t-shirt.)

Basically, you acknowledge the habitual thought each and every time it comes up.

Ope, there's that thought again! My mind sure likes to trot that one out in these sorts of situations.

It's a way of reminding yourself that there's no problem here; your mind has all sorts of thoughts floating through it at any given time, and this one just happens to be an oldie that's been given a lot of airtime (i.e. attention, "work," concern, belief), historically.

I mean it when I say this is all you have to do.

Recognize the habitual, impersonal nature of the thought.

Do a little mental shoulder shrug.

And carry on.

I hope this helps!

Love,
Helen

Is it okay not to be intentional?

Here we are, in the last month and last week of 2024.

Folks are perusing their Google Photos recap, sharing what's on their Spotify Wrapped, penning resolutions or intentions, choosing a word of the year, and so on. There are photo collages and montages, vision boards and quests.

It's a very particular kind of energy that swirls at the end of a calendar year, huh?

Lots of simultaneous summarizing and planning. Reflection and preparation.

All of which has inspired a question I'd like to tackle today:

Is it okay not to be intentional?

It's a popular idea, this notion of being intentional, and it's definitely become quite the buzzword in personal development circles.

But what does it even mean?

'Intentional' is just a concept. It's a label that humans have slapped on a set of behaviors and thoughts, and it basically means there's an extra layer of thinking, ruminating, or noodling going on.

It seems to suggest this extra layer has some power or influence to it, or, at the very least, it has some special energy baked into it—and that's regarded as better than behaviors and thoughts that arise without as much thoughtfulness behind them.

Folks tend to believe that living with intention means that, more often than not, they're living a life of their choosing. They followed the paths they intended to follow and make the decisions they intended to make. But I don't know that that's true.

Does the act of having intentions actually control anything or make anything happen?

I don't see how it could.

From where I sit, we don't really know why some things happen and others don't, regardless of intentionality.

Don't get me wrong, having intentions might feel good sometimes. It might feel responsible, wise, mature, or like we're being thoughtful in a really powerful way. It might feel like having a plan or voicing a desire. It might feel like we're speaking into existence some thing we really want for our lives.

Even still, you can be intentional, and plenty of things will happen that you never intended to have happen. The same goes with not being intentional; stuff will happen regardless. Intentions don't affect the outcome. I don't see how they could.

They might affect your perception of the outcome. Your feeling of agency over the outcome. But can they actually change the outcome? It doesn't seem to work like that, but go ahead and look for yourself. Do you think you controlled an outcome by having an intention ahead of time?

If it helps you to set intentions (for the new year or at anytime), go for it.

If it feels like something you should do, something you're supposed to do in order to get more out of life, pause for a moment.

That sounds like an unnecessary amount of work.

What if the right things, the right 'intentions,' if you want to call them that, will find you? (What if the exact right next step has been finding you this whole time, intentions or not?)

What if it's less about planning what you want to go after...and more about following the next thing that gives you that indescribable juicy feeling? That buzz of energy?

Being 'intentional' might start to look a bit like living in your head instead of living in the world, huh?

So, hold the idea of intentions very lightly. They're not essential. Far from it.

Your inner compass is on all the time. Fresh, new thought is occurring to you all the time. You don't need anything you don't already have, including intentions.

What do you think?

Does the perspective I've shared change anything for you? What do you notice when you consider letting go of all the intention-setting for the year ahead?

Drop a comment below and let's discuss. (I always reply to your comments, though Squarespace doesn't seem to ping you after I've done so 🤔, so be sure to check back here after a few days.)