by Aileen Journey

It’s an honest truth, people want to feel good. They want to feel good always and want to avoid feeling bad at almost all costs.  The problem is that people don’t always know what will help them feel good and avoid feeling bad.  The other problem is that there are long-term and short-term solutions. Alcohol may make a person feel good for a few hours, but generally it won’t solve any long-term problems.    The somewhat ironic answer to helping someone feel good more often is to let themselves feel bad whenever necessary.

What? Feel bad? That seems insane. How can feeling bad help make you feel better?  Well, for one thing, if you accept that feeling bad is okay and you don’t just try to find some short-term relief, you’ll have more chance of being able to stay focused enough and learn enough about what’s bothering you to find a long-term answer.

For example, I was feeling lousy every day. I was tired and sad and irritable.  I didn’t want to just take caffeine or sleep a the time, those were short-term solutions. I wanted to feel better long-term. I wanted to find out what my core problem was.  I let myself feel bad.  I also created hypotheses of what the problem was and tested it . I went to doctors and had myself checked for everything we could think of.  When all the test came back negative, I went on to talking to anyone about what I felt and got their  ideas about what it might be. This went on for months.  I started tracking my different symptoms. That meant that I had to let myself feel them.  It sucked. I have to be honest. I was miserable and working was incredibly difficult.  I felt that it was important, though, to finding the root cause and not just letting myself feel lousy day and night.

I finally found a combination of interventions that let me feel comfortable most of the time.  The issue, though, is that I let myself feel miserable. Sometimes I just have a strange, down mood or feel unmotivated even though I’m not tired.  Instead of ignoring it or trying to eat my way through it, I let the feelings exist in me.  I try to sit quietly and let the feelings bubble up to the top of me and even take over my whole body.

The way I see it, it’s like the negative feelings want a voice. They feel shut out and angry if you don’t listen to them. If you try to drown them out with food or drugs or sex or even activity they feel hurt and abandon and angry. They start to yell louder, making you feel worse and worse.  If you continue to ignore them they start to act like angry and hurt teenagers, they start to lash out at you.  Perhaps instead of feeling  a little lousy, you’ll start getting physical symptoms, headaches, insomnia, etc.  If you sit and listen to the miserable feelings, it’s like giving them a voice. They’re part of you and they just want ta say.  When you really sit and listen without judging then these hurt feelings and discomfort can find a way to communicate their pain to you.

Sometimes I recruit my dreams to help me understand what’s going on in me. I try to remember my dreams and write them down. There’s  a web site called dreammoods.com that I look at to help me figure out what the symbols in my dreams might mean. Sometimes it helps, sometimes not so much.

You don’t necessarily have to figure everything out consciously to help reduce the pain, you just have to truly listen to your own pain and discomfort.

by Aileen Journey
I went to see Harry Potter last night. I loved the series and read most of the books to my kids. I thought the movie was great and it felt so satisfying. I was trying to figure out why this huge, trying adventure felt so satisfying even though the idea of a boy going through all of that mayhem and misery would be horrifying. I realized (perhaps the last person on earth to get this) that these adventure, “holy grail” stories are a metaphor for our own lives, but set at a distance so we don’t feel so distressed by them. While watching the movie, I was thinking, almost unconsciously, about my new business and the goals I have for it and what I need to do first and next and so forth.

Building a new consulting business certainly seems a bit more mundane than searching for horcruxes and destroying evil in the world, but the element of the unknown and reaching goals is still the same. I have an idea of where I want to be (successfully earning money doing a job I like), but I don’t really know what obstacles I will be encountering. I don’t plan on having to slay any talking snakes or deal with actual evil, perhaps just with ideas that don’t work and cause me to have to start again.

In some ways it feels just as anxiety provoking to me as watching Harry battle the army of the Dark Arts. I knew he’d succeed. I certainly hope that I will. I do now plan to think of my work on my future as a great adventure. I will try to consider each obstacle as a new chance to triumph over my opposition. I’m not sure it will make the path seem less anxiety-provoking, but it may help me keep going and see obstacles in a more positive, if not exciting, light than I might have previously.

by Aileen Journey

I had some major technical difficulties this week and last week. First, I was trying to update this blog which has been live for a couple of years and my database got corrupted and I’ve lost all my old posts and second I was trying to get some things printed for my new business and the printer, which has always worked fine, wouldn’t work at all.

I felt completely halted. I felt like I could hardly do the things that weren’t even frustrating. Part of the problem was that I would never be able to cross these things off my to-do list (I am all about crossing things off my list) and the other was the fact that I had no idea how long these things might take to fix so I couldn’t schedule time to do them easily.

I struggled with each of them for the better part of several days. I would get to the tip of frustration then stop to work on them the next day. My whole list was thrown off-track. I finally sat down and did a little journal writing to find out why I was so out of whack with these walls of frustration. I realized that if I kept all of my “to-do’s” in the same list of my “can’t-figure-it-out-to-do’s” I felt completely incompetent and like I was doing nothing. I decided to separate them into two different lists. One list was the things that I was easily able to do even though I didn’t want to, filing things, paying bills, ironing labels onto 50lbs of summer camp items and the other list was for the things that I needed to work out.

This helped me feel capable of moving ahead again. I was then able to work to solve even my frustrating problems. I went to a printer store and talked my problem over with the sales clerk. She gave me helpful information so that I was eventually able to solve the problem. As for the blog, I decided to move ahead even with the lost posts and remember next time to check the database backup before deleting it.

by Aileen Journey

I managed this blog for a while then when I tried to update it, I lost my database and lost all my old posts. I felt pretty lost and frustrated. I’ve decided that I’m just going to move on from here. I might find a way to get back my old posts, but for now I am just going write new posts when they come to me.