As I wandered through my attempts at healing, there were so many times when I had to ask myself, “Am I just paying to be gaslit?”
In group classes or group therapies, at motivational speeches, at exercise classes or in inspirational tiktoks, even at church, so often the advice is just, “Tell yourself you don’t feel like that.”
I’d try so hard to follow along with the affirmations – You are enough, You are loved, The world is full of possibility – but there was always a voice in the back of my mind calling out “BULLSHIT!”
I had evidence backing up my feelings. They didn’t come from no where. I had been shown by family members, institutions, society, exactly what my worth was. Some of us are just born with critical brains, but a lot of us come by our negative feelings in response to something. Trauma, disability, poverty, bigotry, neglect, betrayal. They have a name for ignoring those things by pretending to be spiritually above it all – spiritual bypassing.
John Welwood is the psychotherapist who came up with the term, and he defines spiritual bypassing as using, “spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep personal, emotional ‘unfinished business,’ to shore up a shaky sense of self, or to belittle basic needs, feelings, and developmental tasks.”
Spiritual bypassing is incredibly seductive, but it’s like putting wallpaper up over black mold. Even if it looks pretty for a bit, that mold is still under there, festering away, until the problem grows too big to hide and causes more damage than it needed to.
You can’t learn to regulate emotions you are refusing to admit you have, and you can’t heal by ignoring wounds you won’t see.
A lot of healing advice starts by trying to improve self esteem, thinking that if you feel better about yourself, you’ll take better care of yourself. But that can often be another spiritual bypassing trap. You don’t have to feel good to start making change. Feeling good can come as a result of making change. Ignoring the past events that inform your skepticism or suppressing any doubt or bad feelings is just avoidance and repression and not a long term solution. A sustainable relationship needs to have room for negative feelings.
When life has shown you some things, self love can be so hard. It can be so earnest and twee and can feel like a fantasy completely divorced from reality and survival. I spent a lot of years trying to fight with the scripts in my head, trying to ignore them, out logic them, pray them away, and it all failed. Because they’re FEELINGS you’re arguing with, and the only way to make them go away is to feel them.
I had to have a reckoning with myself: “Look, do you want love and peace or happiness or not? I know this is scary and unfamiliar, but do you want it? If this is what you want, then let it happen. Quit rejecting and undermining because you’re cynical and afraid.” So I just tried to be a little less untrusting every day and to commit to myself a little more. At first it felt so ridiculous. Looking in a mirror and repeating affirmations, I couldn’t say them earnestly. I could only put on a stupid voice and make fun of it. But when I backed up my words with action, even when those words were sarcastic, a switch eventually flipped and I realized I was saying all these things earnestly, and meaning them.
Therapy showed me that I do not have to feel good to start making positive changes in my life. Living with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder means I am constantly afraid and doing something anyway. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy teaches Opposite Action as an emotional regulation skill. If you are feeling a distressing emotion, doing more of what you’re doing will only keep that emotion around. If you do the opposite of what that emotion is telling you, your emotions will change. Your feelings do not have to lead the way, instead, they can respond to your actions.
Paul Rudd has this incredible scene in the movie Wet Hot American Summer. He plays a cool kid at a summer camp and he tries to walk away without cleaning up after himself at lunch. The camp counselor stops him to put his tray away and what follows is a physical performance of resistance that even toddlers would be impressed by. He huffs, he puffs, he whines, he acts as if his limbs are made of lead and every movement is a personal insult. But in the end? Lunch is cleaned up. You never have to be happy about your care responsibilities, but if you do them, even bitching and moaning the entire time, you will still improve your life.
You don’t need to have a ‘positive attitude’ to start getting health results. Behavior and self care is what counts. Showing loyalty is more effective than professing love.
What matters is that you START. With a stupid voice on if you must. Go ahead and bitch and moan and flail in resistance. Because trying to force yourself into loving your body can just become a new way to hate it. It can feel like more proof of worthlessness because you’re not even loving yourself right. The positivity becomes toxic and feeds right back in to all those negative feelings you’re ignoring.
For me, sarcasm was a bridge to hope. It was a place that made room for all my negative feelings as they were, while I worked on making some changes. It even made room for the negative feelings that may never go away. Living with disability and chronic pain, I’m always going to have some negative feelings about my body. But when I’m more focused on showing my body care instead of just telling myself I care, those negative feelings settle into a place of peace.
Ideally, we only START sarcastic and somewhere along the way it doesn’t feel so false. If you show yourself care by prioritizing your body needs and meeting them, eventually you will have the proof you need. You’ll have evidence that you are worthy of care, because you are receiving it. If it starts as a joke, it doesn’t matter. It’s still getting done. “Look at me, I’m a girl who eats vegetables!” “Lalala, off to bed because I’m a well-rested girly!” It will feel less stupid every day until it feels true.
I mean, wouldn’t it be funny if we thrived?