The Emotional Easy Button

Lately, it has occurred to me, that I can no longer rely on the emotional easy button.

and I wonder if many of my friends can relate, as I often feel I hear echoes of this in their stories.

I feel I have learned lately through many life lessons that often, the right decisions, are the hardest ones to make.

The right choice, often means giving up that thing you want, that thing which makes you feel good at some cost, the thing that on the surface "seems right" but doesn't quite make sense and you JUST know it. It means learning to operate from a place of emotional balance and self parenting, rather than impulse and emotions only. It means sometimes letting go of your security blankets. And sometimes it means taking the longer slower path. And sometimes it means letting sadness, or other real feelings into your life for a while. Or having to be uncomfortable and solve things on your own. But something worth doing (LIVING YOUR LIFE AND LIVING IT RIGHT!) is worth doing right.

We are generally people of addictions, low emotional self regulation, the "walking wounded" in some way, carrying a strange mix of being overly trusting yet completely guarded and untrusting at the same time. Through this odd combination, we often fall for the emotional easy button. We like to fix our bad emotions through "quick fixes". Denial, fantasy, ("if I can't see it- it's not happening") or rationalization ("well, this is really happening because..."; or "this is Ok because...."). We like to find others to help us make the decisions that are too hard for us to make. We will often peck at the same easy button well after it has been broken or worn out just simply because everything else is too hard to try. Who knows if this is because nobody taught us otherwise, or our genetic/biological/emotional/intellectual make up, or a result of traumas of childhood. But, this lack of emotional forethought, self confidence, emotional intelligence, and stability is part of who we often are. And we often know better, at some level, and make decisions that we know are not the right choice, but will find ourselves still falling back because it is "emotionally easy" to do so.

Sometimes, the right thing to do at the time, is the hardest thing to do. And there are no emotional easy buttons for most of life. And that is part of being a grown up. And giving up our behaviors, all of them, the eating disordered behaviors, and the constellation of behaviors that go with it, and becoming a self advocate as well as watching out for the emotional needs of others around us whom we care about and becoming a strong confident grown-up is where we win our dignity back.

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You must be the change you wish to see in the world
~Ghandi~

Things do not change; we change.
~Henry David Thoreau~

Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.
~Arnold Bennett~

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy, for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another.
~Anatole France~

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
~Henri Bergson~

Change the fabric of your own soul and your own visions, and you change all.
~Vachel Lindsay~

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.