So self-support, is to be there for myself emotionally. To recognize what I am going through from moment to moment and to ‘allow’ myself to feel and recognize and honor what I am going through. Honor as in to just not suppress or glance over or think and assume I am supposed to be ‘fine’ or have these expectations of myself in terms of how I’m supposed to be experiencing myself within any given situation.
I have been feeling very ‘unsupported’ lately. ‘Support’ is a word that’s kept coming up in my mind, these backchat that “I don’t have support”, “I am not being supported”, “I feel so unsupported”, etcetera. Chalking it up to the situation and the things that have been happening and/or the things people have been doing, I didn’t ever really stop to look at whether I am living support as a living word and what that would practically entail to live support. Until last night where I was again feeling ‘sooo unsupported’ and ‘at my wit’s end’ and emotionally distraught, I finally decided to look at what living support even means as I realized that if I am feeling like I am lacking in support that must mean I am not living support myself somehow.
First thing that came up when I looked into “what does it mean to live support”, was to look at how can I be of support to others. That, maybe I am just not being supportive enough for those around me and maybe I just need to be giving as I’d like to receive more. Although to be honest, what occurred to me was, how can I appropriately support others if I don’t really know how to support myself first, so maybe I need to look closer to home first.
One area where I realized I have not been very supportive with myself is emotionally. I often feel emotionally strained and am often looking for someone to be able to talk to, someone to understand, or am looking towards the people in my life to ‘understand’ what I am going through and offer some form of emotional support, often ending up feeling emotionally exhausted, neglected, rejected and abandoned as I don’t seem to be getting this ‘understanding’ anywhere I look.
Throughout my life in general I have been very bad at even recognizing and being honest with myself about my own emotions and what I am going through or am feeling. I have made it a habit to down-right ignore, suppress and deny many of the emotions and feelings I was going through and experiencing from moment to moment, trying to fit into or live up to some kind of ‘ideal’ or ‘standard’ of what and who I believed I must be. Like I must be more aloof or appear more confident, not have so many insecurities, not have any ‘weaknesses’ (as I believed they were). Basically I must not feel anything lol. But yet, I felt SO MANY THINGS.
I often did feel moments of shame or embarrassment as a result of suppressing, hiding and denying my feelings, when they did manage to seep through the cracks somehow. Another message I was sending myself that apparently “I am not supposed to feel these things that I am feeling”. So long story short, my emotions and feelings have always been a blind spot for me because I have so conditioned myself to ignore, suppress and deny them. Leaving me now to oftentimes feel like I am ‘drowning’ in times when my external reality gets a bit challenging, as I have never learned how to be there for myself emotionally. So I will just throw myself off the deep end or allow myself to work myself up emotionally until I feel completely exhausted, stressed out, lost and overwhelmed and just don’t know what to do with myself anymore because I am struggling so much with my own emotional state.
I’ve never learned to recognize what I’m actually going through in moments and how to give myself space to go through and feel the things I am genuinely feeling, so the stress and ‘emotional exhaustion’ I end up experiencing is really just a consequence of my suppression and neglect of what is really going on within myself. A consequence of not being there for myself as ‘emotional support’ from moment to moment. So emotional support is basically just saying “hey, it’s ok what you’re feeling right now” to myself. Hold myself, embrace myself, hold space for myself and whatever I am feeling and going through – not any of it is bad.
There’s a lot more to go into as to why I developed this particular personality design or mind system of suppressing/denying my emotions and feelings. Why I developed this strange belief and decision that me feeling and experiencing anything by way of emotions and feelings is apparently ‘bad’ and cannot be accepted. But that’s something to go into in another post…
Thank you for reading.
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