Let’s talk about feelings and tooth decay! You didn’t know you wanted that, did you?! If your tooth has decay we can all agree that you are past the point of being able to fix the problem with good dental hygiene habits. You need a dentist. We are going to call this the problem solving phase of life. The problem solving phase is often unpleasant, there is a lot to do, most of it is onerous or down right painful. The one thing it has going for it is that it is very proactive. You know what you have to do and it is just a matter of getting yourself up over that mountain.
Once you’ve conquered the problem, in this case, the tooth decay has been cleaned out and you are basically back at square one with your tooth. Now you enter the maintenance stage. Which sounds much, much easier than the problem solving stage. All you have to do is to keep that tooth cleaned and well flossed and you will never have to experience painful tooth drilling again. The pitfall of the maintenance phase is that it is much easier to get complacent. The fire-breathing dragon (aka the dentist) is not staring you down. There is no problem that needs solving. Maintenance phase is when you are doing what you know to do to prevent problems from ever showing up. There is a special type of person that feels just as fired up about maintenance as the rest of us do about problem solving, and thank goodness for them because the world needs them. For most of us, however, the maintenance phase ends up being the slow deterioration phase, landing us back in the problem phase.
So, what can we do about this? We’d all like to be better at the maintenance phase. The practical solutions are to make lists, follow yourself up, create calendars with regular reminders, but those rarely make the difference. We can ignore those alarms on our phone.
Well, not to keep banging the same drum, but becoming more resilient to feeling your feelings will also make us better at the maintenance phase. If we could sit down with each and every one of you and discuss the things in your life that keep getting neglected in that maintenance phase, we would bet that there are some resisted feelings around why doing that thing feels so onerous and unpleasant. And it is that soup of suppressed feelings and resistance that makes all of the calendars and phone alarms fail in getting you to stay on top of whatever the thing is.
To the wondrous downstream effects of feeling your feelings
