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December 29, 2023 - January 20, 2024
As women, we’re taught that we need to justify our pleasure, and the justification better be damn good. Accordingly, pleasure seeking is relegated to the bottom of our to-do scrolls, assuming it makes the list at all. Women wrestle so much with the mastery of immediate gratification that we don’t even give ourselves the chance to graduate to our pleasure.
pleasure is not a value that’s emphasized. Immediate gratification, yes. Pleasure, no. Hard work, efficiency, grit, and independence are the values we emphasize, and those are wonderful values to hold. At the same time, you do have to ask yourself, What’s the endgame here? Efficiency for what?
When you make your access to pleasure conditional (a “treat” for being good), you’re communicating to yourself that whether you deserve to feel good lies in direct proportion to your performance, not your existence. A pleasure-conditional mindset can rapidly metastasize into polarizing experiences of self-worth for anyone, particularly for perfectionists who are already prone to dichotomous thinking.
The reason people binge on immediate gratification is not that they want too much. The reason people binge on immediate gratification is that they’re burnt the fuck out. Pleasure is an energy source. Taking pleasure in our lives sustains us. Taking pleasure out of our lives destroys us. Immediate gratification is not a substitute for pleasure. There is no substitute for pleasure. Perfectionists get scared that they’re going to lose their competitive edge if they let in too much pleasure and get “too happy.” Look at the successful people you admire; joy is their edge.
The more you trust yourself, the more pleasure you allow yourself to experience.
You need what you’re doing right now to work out (a relationship, a job, a creative project) because if the thing doesn’t work out, you don’t trust that you’ll figure out a way to pivot and succeed regardless. You live with an attachment to a future outcome that generates chronic excess anxiety and you call that anxiety “hope.”
why do we still feel locked out of joy?
People who trust themselves allow themselves to adopt the role of “expert” in their own lives. Like all experts, those who develop trust with themselves move with confidence, not certainty.
You don’t have to have all the answers to be an expert; that’s not what makes someone an expert.
Experts are people who stay committed to both informed and experiential approaches in their domain of expertise. Your domain of expertise is your own true self. It’s okay if you’re not positive at every moment about how to be you; you’re constantly
the smartest people in the world are the ones who say, “I don’t know” the most.
they’re honest about what they need to restrict themselves from or altogether avoid. We think that the more we trust ourselves, the fewer boundaries we’ll need; the opposite is true. The people who trust themselves the most are the ones who honor their boundaries the most.
When you trust yourself, you’re not trying to prove anything. You may take more risks, which may mean you make more mistakes.
Trust engenders curiosity and openness. When you trust yourself, you focus on being curious about what you need instead of being suspicious about who you are.
For example, if you notice you’ve been numbing out all week beyond a level you’re comfortable with (too much TV/drama/food/shopping/alcohol/work/whatever) and you don’t trust yourself, you think, Here I am once again, ruining it all. I knew this would happen. Am...
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When you don’t trust yourself, you’re waiting to catch yourself in a mistake so you can pounce on your own certainty about how unworthy of trust you are. You get petty. You become fixated on your mistakes, and you keep a tally of those mistakes. In contrast, when you notice you’ve been numbing out all week beyond a level you’re comfortable with and you do trust yourself, you think, Huh, I’ve been numbing out so much, there must be something I need that I’m not getting. I wonder what that is. I wonder who could help me figure that out. When you trust yourself, ther...
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Healing is not about figuring out what to do; it doesn’t matter if you know what to do if you don’t trust yourself to do it. Healing...
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Be wary of the need to prove to yourself that you trust yourself via some big bold move you’re not ready for (impulsively quitting your job, for example). When you act with boldness to prove trustworthiness, the boldness backfires. Trust cannot be rushed.
It’s never ever the big bold action that reestablishes trust. The person who has been betrayed does not give a shit about a room filled with two hundred roses. The person who has been betrayed wants their partner to do simple, seemingly little things consistently for a long time, like call when they say they will call and be where they say they will be. You
We all have very good reasons not to trust ourselves. We’ve all betrayed ourselves badly, repeatedly, shamefully, and knowingly. Show me someone who hasn’t abandoned themselves, and I will show you a child. As we grow into adults, our world opens and we make mistakes. Ignoring your own needs and deserting yourself is a universal mistake.
Paradoxically, the people who trust themselves the most are usually the people who have betrayed themselves the most profoundly, but then made the decision to walk themselves home—inch by inch—to their authentic selves.
identity? Is the damaged version of who you are really your whole story? Are you not bored with this narrative yet?
You know why you’re not leading with that part yet? The part where you stake claim to what you really want? Because you don’t trust yourself to live up to that version of your story.
As Marianne Williamson so eloquently puts it: Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?” Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s
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liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
You described a sense of entitlement earlier, that it’s not okay to feel free to “run around doing whatever you want.” Do you ever wonder what makes you
feel so entitled and free to run around doing all the things you don’t want to do?
You feel free to do what you don’t want all the time. I’m asking you to seriously consider whether that’s where you’d like your sense of entitlement and freedom to remain.
she struggled with feeling entitled to “go around doing whatever she wants.”
She spent a lot of energy defending her decision to an imaginary council in her mind.
Sustainable change unfolds on such a granular level, so microscopically, for so long. When you’re in the middle of the change, you don’t realize how much you’re changing. Inevitably, there are moments of discouragement when you don’t think you’re changing at all. Then, a single visible moment stacked upon thousands of invisible ones bursts through.
The point is that you’re experiencing something that previously was almost impossible for you to even imagine.
“I’m open.” It’s not uncommon to arrive at the point of surrender after being broken open. It doesn’t matter how you arrive at the point of openness. What matters is that you understand that being open is powerful.
When you surrender, you’re not asking for anything, you’re affirming connection to that which exists beyond your individual self. When you’re disconnected from anything beyond your individual self, you operate against a panic.
and in the thick of that impossible pressure, you feel that you must control everything. Because it’s not all up to you and you can’t control everything, you fail.
When you lose control and don’t surrender, what you’re left with is immutable failure. There’s nothing for the failure to transmute itself into because you don’t believ...
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When you lose control and do surrender, what you’re left with is possibility. The possibility arises because in the process of surrendering, you let go of the narcissistic notion that you are the all-knowing being who can figure out every an...
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A 2017 study explored differences in well-being between adaptive perfectionists, maladaptive perfectionists, and non-perfectionists. While adaptive perfectionists reported the highest levels of meaning in their lives, maladaptive perfe...
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Without meaning, we struggle.
When you connect to something meaningful, you get perspective and purpose, but you don’t get control. You want to make something? You don’t get to control whether others like it. You want to love someone? You don’t get to control how safe they are at all times.
It’s terrifying to bring more meaning into your life. There’s no special hat trick for making the fear disappear. Remember that most of what you’re afraid of exists only in your mind, then let the paper tigers roar. Invite meaning anyway. A person who understands that they can use their everyday life to animate what’s meaningful to them is a person who is in touch with their power.
When you don’t give yourself the chance to animate what’s meaningful for you, you set yourself up for a death-by-papercut life in which you never get to be your real self in the world. You never get to be free. You feel as if you’re living behind glass, as if you can only be yourself in private. It doesn’t feel awful every day, that’s the most dangerous part. Experiencing freedom on a technicality feels familiar, routine. You can live your whole life that way, politely being less. Pretending you’re not powerful and calling that modesty.
The sun hits your skin differently when you’re no longer behind the glass. The difference is subtle, but the subtlety is everything. As you adapt inwardly, the shift you experience will be a subtlety imperceptible to anyone but you. At least at first, only you will feel it, only you will know. Letting yourself delight in that private shift is both a pleasure and a gift unto yourself.
In a control mindset, pleasure is a distraction. You don’t have time to feel good when you’re operating within a scarcity model that demands a continual supply of externally validated worth. You start intellectualizing joy, making an excellent plan to be very happy later.
In a power mindset, you allow yourself to delight in your world now, today. Not because you earned it or because you feel like being “bad” or “naughty,” but because you are alive. If pleasure invites joy and trust invites pleasure, what invites trust?
Why Won’t You Apologize?: Healing Big Betrayals and Everyday Hurts,
self-forgiveness. Self-forgiveness threatens our heightened sense of accountability, and (more simply) we don’t know how to forgive ourselves. What
Resentment is heavy. If you want to be light enough to be uplifted by joy, you have to let go of the things that weigh you down.
When you’re connected to yourself and you’re present, you don’t need certainty. When you trust yourself, you understand that no matter what changes around you, there are a thousand right paths to the true self within you.
