Emotional Skills I wish I had, 2023 Edition

Last year, I wrote a post about emotional skills that I was lacking. As I said in the post, this seems like a wildly unexplored area outside of a therapeutic setting. Even within therapy, we’re often tinkering with malformations and things that need to be fixed to bring us to baseline. I’m curious what happens when we purposely try to improve our emotional skills beyond the baseline.

Ready to Hand Loving-Kindness:

I had a close relationship end earlier this year in a wildly painful and upsetting way. For a long time, I oscillated between anger and sadness, and it wasn’t until I started trying hard to practice loving kindness and forgiveness toward this person that I started to find a bit of peace. I still have moments of fear, anxiety, doubt, and anger that spike into me about this relationship, but they live also alongside gratitude, delight, and soft kindness.

Over time, I hope to deepen this skill. This year has taught me that it’s possible to have this ability even when it feels unlikely.

Hardiness:

There are lots of ways that I’ve shaped myself into a stronger and more disciplined person over my life, but occasionally, the burbles of childhood, shouts of chronic pain, and sighs of angsty depression voice themselves as feelings of self-doubt and self-deprecation. Those are hard days.

A skill I’ve been building and growing, but still don’t have mastery over, is the ability to just calmly say, “No one is going to fix this for you but you.” A lot of times, this is enough for me to step back and really see if those thoughts and feelings are real, or if I’m just worn out. It’s okay to be worn out, but there are times I give up on things or let my feelings ruin my day without first giving them real resistance.

Self-doubt in the Face of Known Decisions:

When I choose to move slowly with a deliverable, choose to work out especially hard, when I commit to a course of action, I want to defuse my remaining doubts. If the decision has been made and the die is cast, it’s not worth fretting over how others perceive me or if the decision was the best. There will be time for retrospective decisions in the future, but in the current moment, I need to give myself the full internal support of my decision.