How to love and nurture your neglected self

Opportunities to love and nurture our neglected selves

What is the relationship you have with yourself? Are you aware of your inner dialogue related to your self-esteem? How do you treat yourself when you are angry, scared, or sad? The way we relate to ourselves during our darkest moments shows what kind of relationship we have with ourselves. Everyone experiences positive emotions when things are going well, but what happens when life doesn’t go according to plan? These are opportunities to love and nurture our neglected selves because the disowned self is the one to return home to.. What do I mean by coming home to ourselves? It means creating a place to honor our emotions, especially the difficult ones that require our attention.

Many people run away from their negative emotions and I used to be one of them. Also, who wants to experience negative states regularly? We want to feel alive and happy and negative emotions don’t fit into that plan. Or do they? Negative emotions have a purpose and we should not run away from them, but treat them frankly and compassionately. Because they are important messengers and flight delays our emotional well-being. Do you think about the negative emotions you experience from time to time? How do you process them? Do you journal how you feel and realize what they are trying to tell you?

Consider the following scenario as an example of why we should love and nurture our neglected selves. Your boss constantly criticizes you for your job performance, and you feel a sense of: sadness, frustration and anger. Over time, you bottle up these emotions because they remind you of your boss’s derogatory comments. But what if there is an underlying message contained in these emotions? Perhaps by connecting with them on a deeper level, you learn not to take criticism personally, but to improve the respective areas of your work, leading to a promotion.

Leave room for negative emotions

Emotions are transitory events that come and go from our nervous system, hundreds of times a day. Most people don’t take them into account because there is so much going on inside their heads. That is why we must listen to what is happening below the surface of our lives, otherwise we will succumb to negative emotions like a tsunami. Connecting with our emotional life means checking ourselves to see how we are doing. It means stop, feel and listen to what emotions are trying to convey. One practice I do when anger, frustration, or fear arises is to stop what I am doing and put my hands on my heart to observe my emotions. I sit and feel them, no matter how difficult or uncomfortable they are. I know these emotions will pass and my job is to connect with them through an embodied experience.

An embodied experience means somatically perceiving through our nervous system, the emotions without deferring them. Many people are distracted by: drinking, drugs, food, shopping, etc. when negative emotions surface. But eventually the emotion will seep in and grab our attention, when we least expect it. Our emotions are the calling card of our soul. They have no other agenda than to communicate the essence of our true self. They help us to give meaning to life, so that we can live in congruence with our authentic selves. For example, if you are not receiving the right love and affection from your partner, your emotions will tell you that something is not right. Some people try to rationalize it by telling themselves that their partner is busy at work or has a lot on his plate. But our emotions do not lie because they are the basis of our intuition, if we care to listen. Perhaps we are afraid to tell our partner that we need more intimacy in the relationship? We might fear that imposing our demands on them will make them think that we are being demanding, so we hold back.

Have you experienced anything like this before? It can start as a feeling that grows into confrontational because you have not communicated properly. Therefore, we must love and nurture our neglected selves because it is the part of us that we need to return home to. The neglected self is the comfortable sofa on which we lay our tired bodies after a long day at work. They are the comfortable pajamas we wear on a cold winter day. But like all emotions, we must also make room for negative emotions and process them frankly. The key is to be with your emotions and feel them in your body. Simply stop what you are doing and breathe into that area until the emotion dissolves or transforms.

I did this exercise recently after experiencing anger and tension from a busy day that didn’t go as planned. One night I sat up late, wanting to read, and was repeatedly interrupted, causing anger and stress. I remember a thought that entered my mind that said, “I don’t have time for this right now.” In the next moment, I stopped what I was doing and breathed deeply for three or four minutes, while shifting my awareness to my chest, where the anger was. What happened moments later was the most exquisite love I have ever experienced. His presence was reassuring and comforting and he didn’t want to go back to what he was doing. Since then I have experienced many more moments like this because what I learned is that on the other side of our negative emotions there is a pure and lasting love that invites us to return home. It is this love that we must cultivate often, rather than neglect to return home to our true selves.