This post is also available in: Español (Spanish)
If you have access to the internet, you have unlimited access to self-help. You can take your pick from an endless supply of books, podcasts, blogs 🙂, movies, TED talks, influencers (good and bad), apps, virtual events… you name it! There’s nothing you can’t find if you want help moving on from separation or if you simply want to be a better version of yourself.
Self-help is a hot topic because, well, we all need help, and believe it or not, we’ve been taught to be independent (I know this is hard to believe when millennials are around—no offense). The unlimited access we have to all the different self-help methods out there is exactly like the instant gratification topic I discussed last week—meaning it’s wonderful and scary at the same time. Information can help us a lot, but too much information can overwhelm us. It’s never healthy to go to extremes.
I am incredibly grateful for every single method I have tried to overcome my divorce and become a better me. I have learned a lot from every book, every podcast, every blog, and every person (famous or not) that has shared their points of view with me. Please don’t misunderstand me when I say that unlimited access to all this information is overwhelming. I’m going to explain what I mean through my personal experience. See if this is something you’ve experienced too. I would love to know if you have, and how you have managed to control it.
In my opinion, the overwhelming portion of the self-help world is when we find ourselves trying to apply everything we are learning at the same time, and it becomes contradictory. For instance, I was reading an amazing book about ego not long ago (Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday, in case you’d like to give it a try). The book makes us realize how our uncontrolled ego can hurt us in pretty much every aspect of our lives. I loved every chapter of it, and I decided to start checking myself more carefully to see when I was letting my ego take total control. Of course, it’s easier to point out when people around us are acting under ego than it is to recognize that we are the ones doing it, so I experienced some confusion for a little while with that tendency. Instead of analyzing myself, I found myself analyzing others.
One day, I caught myself pointing out an ego reaction in someone else, and then I realized that’s not what I was supposed to do. From that moment, I started to pay attention to MY reactions and everything I tend to do under ego. I’m sorry to report that the list is really long. I let my ego take control over me pretty much all the time. Now, here comes the overwhelming part. I wanted to pay attention to my ego reactions so I could work on finding better alternatives to that behavior, but I wanted to be kind to myself at the same time because that is one of the things I have learned from meditation. It turns out that the way I was pointing out my ego reactions and trying to be kind to myself at the same time were so contradictory that after a while I felt not only overwhelmed, but also exhausted.
The situation got so out of control that I found myself attacking me (out of ego) just to get someone’s attention. It took that person literally asking me, “Why do you attack yourself like that?” to make me realize that I was out of control. That question was what I needed. I took my time to meditate about it, and I finally got my answers. All I wanted was external validation because I was not able to find it internally among all the noise I had going on inside my mind. I believe that when we put two intense practices together, we totally overwhelm our minds to the point of exhaustion. I’m not saying that we can’t recognize the way we behave and be kind to ourselves at the same time. The mistake, at least in my case, was judging myself for being controlled by ego and trying to be kind while I was under my own attack.
What I learned from the whole mess was to pause for a moment and make the effort to find what way either practice would serve me best. I’m not going to lie and tell you that I magically stopped judging myself. Instead, what I’m doing now is recognizing when I’m in self-judging mode and let myself feel that emotion. I found out that if I try to be kind in that very moment, all I do is suppress an emotion that pops up later anyway. I’m not saying that I would let the attack take total control; I simply let myself see it from the outside without the intention to react. What helps me a lot is to see these emotions pass by like the clouds in the sky.
I know we want to try so many things at the same time, as we’re under the impression that the more we do, the faster we recover. But I can tell you from my experience that you should take overcoming difficult situations and becoming a better version of yourself one step (or method) at a time. That way, you can actually see and feel completely how each particular technique impacts you. Then you can start mixing them. After you try them one by one, you will be able to recognize which approaches are good to mix and which ones are better to apply by themselves.
It’s great that we have such open access to self-help! However, we need to take it easy, work smart, and choose the ones that serve us best in each moment.
Love,
Irene
