Self forgiveness: “I shouldn’t have lied to Mrs. Starinsky about that assignment. Everyone makes wrong choices sometimes, and I’ve been so afraid that I’ll fail this class but that doesn’t make what I did okay. I’m not going to do it again.” 

Love yourself. I'd heard the advice, but it never sank in. The people who screamed the message seemed self-centered and arrogant, and I didn’t want to be like them. But making everything about you is not what self-love is about. Not at all.

The lesson was difficult. There are many circumstances in life that we can and should change. But sometimes, as much as we want a different outcome, what we have is what we get. It may be a diagnosis, a loss, a death, or some other circumstance that cannot be altered. At that point, life is what we make of it. And what do we make?

Fact: For every good way of coping we might choose, there is an equally destructive or damaging way of coping we could turn to instead. We might turn to alcohol or drugs to numb the pain of a failed relationship instead of sitting with it and examining the part we played, or we might choose to cope with low self esteem by trying to be the best at everything instead of doing the hard inner work of changing what we believe about ourselves. Unfortunately, we can even use people as an unhealthy way of coping the same way that we can turn to people for healthy support, guidance, and love.

There are a LOT of ways that we can practice emotional numbing. Some of us might use alcohol or drugs, others might turn to a never ending to-do list to avoid feeling. Even if we don’t use any of those approaches, we can still move through our days with a “just don’t think about it” approach that puts certain feelings away in a box instead of learning how to deal with them (Michael, 2020).