How to stop contaminating your life with bad vibes

Stop contaminating good things in your life just because another one is breaking you up!

How many times have you experienced this before… one area of your life starts getting some wind and all of a sudden you contaminate it with something that has been draining you for a long time?!

Well, I have done this a lot! And many women do this specifically because we have the ability to connect the dots even if that is sometimes turning against us.

So many of us are unable to compartment our emotions and contain them so that we don’t end up self-sabotaging ourselves.

In the book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, the author John Gray stretches out a very simple biological fact that helps us understand why men are better at compartment of their feelings while women are not. He says men are wired to not make immediate connections between separate incidents while women combine everything in a melting-pot. Also, in the book Sapiens of Yuval Harari outlines the same thing based on the fact that men had to survive the wilderness and thus had to stop themselves from having all the fear emotions and connections of different things going on in the same time and focus on the hunt and preserving mental energy in order to survive. Being able to drown out the crowd is quite a manly thing to do according to how our biology has shown us. But at the same time, a mother’s instinct is able to drown out the crowd and only hear her child’s cry from all the noise around. That is a different type of skill developed while being the master of the house where a lot of things happen at the same time but while the surviving instinct doesn’t kick in as in the case of men hunting.

How are we able to compartment emotions in boxes in this case while not allowing them to affect one another?

Let me give you an example. Last week, after having an increased awareness of my financial situation which hasn’t been stable for a while now, I projected my insecurity on my boyfriend.

Expectation management fucked my inner compass about being aware that I am in a rut and I might project that rut in other areas of my life like my personal life.

Basically what I did was as imprudent as someone who has a broken leg for a while, and keeps it in a cast, and the moment it breaks the cast lose it starts running marathons being completely unaware of its own limitations.

We all have to work out the real issues behind the thoughts we have and to understand that if one thing goes bad, it doesn’t mean everything is bad!

Cognitive distortions and their role

Cognitive distortions as described by Aaron Beck, are a big part of the mental process that goes on in our heads when we have underlying unresolved things from our past that cloud our judgment in a moment of high emotional intensity. Usually having something going bad in one area of life attracts a domino effect of these distortions that happen one after another without our awareness or ability to stop it. Some things though can help inform the situation and get a more rational perspective over our reactions and stop this downward spiral. In order to become aware, we need to be able to label these processes and in order to label them, we need to know what they entail.

1. Catastrophe, radicalism, polarizing and exaggerating

Some people really need the drama! Let’s face it, it’s part of the excitement of life to look for something out of the ordinary. Otherwise, life would be boring, and we just want to feel alive and at a high frequency. But every time we live on a high frequency it comes at a cost. It costs us the energy that we will, later on, have to replace by having a low moment somewhere else.

The yin and yang of life are so well known to me by now that I no longer question the power of this boomerang to return which much greater force than the one that got it moving in the first place. But what if it’s only a frisbee and it won’t come back once you send it out to fly? Then you know that you can rewire your brain a lot easier.

The rollercoaster of intense emotions is more frequent than we think in people of all ages and backgrounds. I’ve come to the conclusion that part of being human is the need to learn to control these emotions from a place of kindness and compassion instead of stoicism and spartan discipline like I grew up to believe. When you’ve bottled up emotions your entire life, the moment you let loose, you start ridding that rollercoaster-like crazy and you can’t stop the dance until everyone looks at you like at The Joker or you really become mad. The contradicting nature of being in the rollercoaster is that the more you ride it, the less you are aware you need to hop off of it. You kinda get accustomed to being there to the point of no return.

When your boat is sinking in one area of your life, you simply can’t see beyond the sensations given by that event. You’re in the rollercoaster and you can’t see anything else but your emotions at every curve and spin and twist. It’s not even a blind spot, it’s more than that! People with this cognitive distortion think that one bad emotion is the equivalent of failure and they internalize the feeling and make it a fact.

2. The splitting game- “Black& White” only-

One other thing that happens is that you start splitting. This means that on top of overthinking which is a coping mechanism of the more cognitive focused people in the category explained about catastrophizing, you’re now also splitting between good or bad and you don’t accept anything in between this black and white thinking.

The ability to see shades of gray in this is context allows you to accept that the same person who was good a minute ago can also be bad but the overall “label” can’t be either of the 2 extremes. The labeling part is the most difficult of all. In meditation, we are invited to label our feelings to allow ourselves to recognize and observe a situation from a distance. However, the same labeling can be daunting if you apply it to other people. Some of the most basic instincts we have are to label people into good or bad when we depend on them as children. But adult life needs to put an end to wanting to know for sure if a person is good or bad but rather accept that both good and bad can coexist in the same person and check the intention they have about us and a specific decision they took concerning us instead of trying to put an overall general label. That is already generalizing which is another toxic behavior.

Tolerating ambiguity is a sign of mental health! — Harville Hendriks in Space between us

3. The turmoil needs to vanish — emotional reasoning

There is so much intensity attached to your thoughts that you simply can’t let go easily of the thoughts and they become part of who you think you are if you sit long enough with them. Once you’ve seen that you get attached to an idea or a label of your emotions and how “you are”, you start settling quite comfortably with the idea that this is who you are and you might stop questioning what is your real baseline.

The extreme emotions you get attached to, either positive and “good vibes only” or negative and “I’m addicted to the drama” type are all toxic. The more you tell yourself that this is who you are, the more you prolong the state of negativity attached to it. You then easily slip into the overgeneralization and discounting the positive distortions which make you blame yourself and effectively create the fortune-telling game of thinking you can predict an outcome even before it happens just because you have an intuition about what will happen.

4. Escaping the “should” type of thinking and exploring uncertainty with an open mind

A lot of people face the struggle of letting go of their need to control things and situations. The control fallacy is usually a problem formed in early childhood when we still have the “magical thinking” mind and the emotions of our caretakers become our responsibility ( according to Bowlby who talks about attachment styles) which makes us form automatic thinking about us being responsible for the emotions of others and situations failing around us. This way of trying to be in control is usually due to a lack of separation between the primary caretakers and the child which enmeshes the child with the parent and makes everything the parent feels a fault of the child. The “should” type of thinking becomes conditioning of the child in relation to what he could do to change the mood of the parents. The uncertainty of not knowing if our primary caretaker will be mad at us or not for something we did doesn’t allow to freely explore options and choices and makes people with this type of trauma to look for the certain situations, the “black& white” and execute what their inner voice tells them will secure their relationship with the caretaker if they do it. “Should” thus becomes a coping mechanism to reassure and create a false sense of security in the face of uncertainty. It allows the person with this thinking to regulate their emotions and feel safe again about having a direction and a plan that will solve the danger. Walking on eggshells with primary caretakers that didn’t secure that type of certainty makes it a must to secure that later in life at all costs hence the “should”.

Finally, the types of cognitive distortions can be further elaborated and discussed as part of the self-sabotaging ways in which we undermine our ability to form self-confidence and secure relationships with others.

Looking at the ways in which we allow one failure to affect and compromise all our efforts in other areas of life we can easily say that people who contaminate themselves like this are more prone to get back on track based on extreme failures rather than moderate distress. I’ve written here another piece on how to benefit from these extreme failures in order to find purpose and get back on track.