I’ve found it useful—not without downsides, but useful—to reduce my dependence on emotional support.
There are two reasons to do this:
Other people have only finite energy for emotional support and you don’t want to burn them out;
The emotional support other people give you is often not quite right. You want other people to make you feel good in a certain way; but because they can’t read your mind, they very frequently can’t make you feel that particular way.
Learning how to give emotional support to yourself is pretty useful on both these counts; it doesn’t spend down a finite resource or overburden others, and you can tailor it precisely to what you want.
The simplest way is to remember and replay in your mind nice things people have said to you. If memory will recall the warm fuzzy feeling, you don’t actually have to go bug the person to say the same things to you over and over again.
Make-believe can be even better than memory. If you can vividly imagine and voice someone who is on your side and loves you, you can conjure up emotional support. It doesn’t have to be limited to people you know IRL; fictional characters, historical figures, writers, gods or spirits, etc. are all fine. Vividness is key; this works better if you can be in a trance or hypnogogic state so it feels like they’re “really talking to you.”
Finding a way to soothe yourself is very individual, but a good starting place is trying to imitate the environment of the womb. Dark, quiet, warm, swaddled, rocking gently. This communicates “safety” to your inner animal. I would go as far as to say that if you feel pressured around people, you should wait to make serious decisions until you’ve thought them over in a “safe zone.”
I don’t have all the answers yet, but I think I was much more often short of energy or acting out of conformity when I didn’t know how to make safety & comfort for myself, and I was certainly more unreasonably demanding towards others and more easily frustrated. So I think on balance it was a useful skill to gain.
I do think I’m more isolated now, though. I’m not sure if that’s a necessary consequence of learning to self-soothe, or if it’s just what happened in my case. I think a lot of tribal social connections are about trying to get the group to validate and support what you personally prefer; now that I’ve cut off the expectation that people can or should do that, I’m a lot more separate from the group.
Dependence on others to hold space is drastically lowered by learning the specific skill of self witnessing. This is one of the core things IFS and Focusing are both pointing to. You should be able to triangulate from the ‘unblending’ step in both to the feeling. I don’t recall their specific terminology. I think Gendlin refers to ‘holding at arms legnth.’ This shrinks the feedback loop on therapy enabling much more rapid progress.
To the extent that I understand what you’re talking about and can do it, I think I do it by modeling an imaginary benevolent observer. Does that sound like the thing?
I’ve found it useful—not without downsides, but useful—to reduce my dependence on emotional support.
There are two reasons to do this:
Other people have only finite energy for emotional support and you don’t want to burn them out;
The emotional support other people give you is often not quite right. You want other people to make you feel good in a certain way; but because they can’t read your mind, they very frequently can’t make you feel that particular way.
Learning how to give emotional support to yourself is pretty useful on both these counts; it doesn’t spend down a finite resource or overburden others, and you can tailor it precisely to what you want.
The simplest way is to remember and replay in your mind nice things people have said to you. If memory will recall the warm fuzzy feeling, you don’t actually have to go bug the person to say the same things to you over and over again.
Make-believe can be even better than memory. If you can vividly imagine and voice someone who is on your side and loves you, you can conjure up emotional support. It doesn’t have to be limited to people you know IRL; fictional characters, historical figures, writers, gods or spirits, etc. are all fine. Vividness is key; this works better if you can be in a trance or hypnogogic state so it feels like they’re “really talking to you.”
Finding a way to soothe yourself is very individual, but a good starting place is trying to imitate the environment of the womb. Dark, quiet, warm, swaddled, rocking gently. This communicates “safety” to your inner animal. I would go as far as to say that if you feel pressured around people, you should wait to make serious decisions until you’ve thought them over in a “safe zone.”
I don’t have all the answers yet, but I think I was much more often short of energy or acting out of conformity when I didn’t know how to make safety & comfort for myself, and I was certainly more unreasonably demanding towards others and more easily frustrated. So I think on balance it was a useful skill to gain.
I do think I’m more isolated now, though. I’m not sure if that’s a necessary consequence of learning to self-soothe, or if it’s just what happened in my case. I think a lot of tribal social connections are about trying to get the group to validate and support what you personally prefer; now that I’ve cut off the expectation that people can or should do that, I’m a lot more separate from the group.
Dependence on others to hold space is drastically lowered by learning the specific skill of self witnessing. This is one of the core things IFS and Focusing are both pointing to. You should be able to triangulate from the ‘unblending’ step in both to the feeling. I don’t recall their specific terminology. I think Gendlin refers to ‘holding at arms legnth.’ This shrinks the feedback loop on therapy enabling much more rapid progress.
To the extent that I understand what you’re talking about and can do it, I think I do it by modeling an imaginary benevolent observer. Does that sound like the thing?
Yes, especially to the extent that you can switch places with the observer and observe yourself with compassion.