Eat It Away. Drink It Away. Fuck It Away: On Reactive Behavior
So for the last two weeks, I've been talking about reactive behavior. Ye olde "eat it away, drink it away, f*@k it away, smoke it away, GAMMMMMBLE it away!!!!!!!!"
I posted on my IG story this week some VERY attractive photos of myself (😂) because I wanted to show the process of "going through emotions." (I'd been doing some heavy crying.)
I decided to do this because I had a client once ask me "do you ever get sad," and I was almost flabbergasted. OF COURSE, I GET SAD!!!
I received some interesting responses about it from my most "stuck, can't budge their life an inch" friend.
He told me this seemed like a "cry for help." He also told me he felt that people in the "help" industry "need the most help."
Now, in my business, ladies and gents, we call that a judgment. I used to be full of them when I would think about "how others should behave."
People who drink even a little bit too much are always doing it. "WELL, AT LEAST I'M NOT LIKE SUSAN. SHE DRINKS IN THE MORNING. I ONLY DO THAT ON SUNDAYS DURING BRUNCH."
It's really funny.
I love to hear what people outside of personal development think about what we do, but more so, I love to hear how humans think we should be. Like, bro, there's nothing wrong with anyone. EMOTING is a natural part of the human experience.
And when you don't allow yourself to emote properly, to go through your negative emotions rather than push against them, we end up with the surface-level behaviors of "eat it away, drink it away, fuck it away, smoke it away, gamble it away."
And then people will be calling me up, saying "I wanna stop drinking."
Amazing. Let me drop in the famous Jimmy Breslin quote: "When you stop drinking you have to deal with this marvelous personality that got you drinking in the first place."
Ditching a habit isn't hard. Our reactive behavior to unpleasant emotions (that has us reaching for said vice) is what's hard to part with. We'd rather run back to our proverbial old lover of Chardonnay than ever deal with the underlying crap.
And I don't necessarily mean DEEP ASS OLD TRAUMA. I mean, if you have a bad day at work every day, why is every day a bad day? Are you taking on too much because you're a people-pleaser? Are you being disrespected and not standing up for yourself? Are you underpaid but don't have the confidence to move on?
That's hard stuff to deal with because it deals with the whole of your identity. It's so much easier to just do the reactive behavior of "let me have a glass of wine."
I saw another instance of this recently with a woman quitting smoking.
She expressed how she'd gone a month without smoking, but her spouse was leaving her after a presumably long time. She "just needed something to get through it."
The weird thing is, after a month, you're free of the physical drug addiction to nicotine.
All smoking would do would be reintroduce said addiction, and all the "relief" she would get from it would be from the nicotine withdrawals. Cigarettes don't make you calmer. They actually put you on edge. So does alcohol. It's just so minor, you don't notice.
This woman would rather reintroduce a drug addiction so she could REACT in relieving the withdrawal from it, than ever sit with the horrible, gut-wrenching emotions of her marriage ending.
Because... here it is... we're taught here in the West that if you're too upset, or remain too upset for too long, there is something wrong with you.
"It's a cry for help!"
Feeling like someone is ripping your intestines from your body when your marriage ends... that's APPROPRIATE. It is a HURTFUL feeling. Because as humans, we love in an attached way. It's part of being human. When someone leaves us, we hurt.
LET ME GET TO THE TAKEAWAY because you want to go live your Sunday.
Reactive behavior is always disrespectful to you.
Emotions are not.
Feeling sad, depressed, despondent, angry, hurt, or any of those contracted emotions we hate SO MUCH and believe are not "part of it all-"
That's not disrespectful.
Reaching for poison to put into your body? That's disrespect.
And the dose makes the poison.
Eating a cupcake? Not disrespect. Eating 35 cupcakes? Disrespect.
Your contracted emotions are normal. I promise. You’ve just been sold a bill of goods for a long time and don’t believe it.
Maybe this week, in just one small way, try to feel rather than react. See what comes up.
