For years I thought the goal was calm.
Calm was the woman in the advertisement for herbal tea, sitting cross-legged on a jetty at dawn. Calm was unbothered. Calm did not raise her voice in the car park at the supermarket when someone took the space she had been indicating for. Calm, I suspected, had very few people relying on her and an unusually quiet neighbourhood.
I was not calm. I was, on most days, quite a lot of things at once. And so I concluded, as many women do, that I was failing at something.
It took me a long time to notice that calm was the wrong word for what I wanted. What I wanted was to be steady.
Steady is different. Steady can be frightened. Steady can be angry, grieving, exhausted or nervous before the meeting. Steady does not require the feeling to leave. It only requires that you are still standing in the room while the feeling passes through. Your feet are under you. Your hand is still your hand. You can feel the weather and you are not the weather.
A tree in a storm is not calm. Every leaf is moving. But it is steady at the root.
Emotion researchers have spent decades on how people manage what they feel. In an influential review, Gross (1998) described emotion regulation as the processes by which we influence which emotions we have, when we have them, and how we experience and express them. He distinguished strategies that act early, such as changing how we interpret a situation, from those that act later, such as suppressing the visible expression of a feeling already underway. The framework does not ask anyone to stop feeling. It describes the many small ways people stay in relationship with their emotions instead of being swept along. Gross (1998)
That idea of being in relationship with a feeling, rather than being the feeling, is close to what I mean by steady.
There is a small, almost comical technique that has helped me with this. In a series of studies, Kross and colleagues (2014) asked people to reflect on their feelings before stressful tasks, such as giving a speech, using either first-person pronouns or their own name and non-first-person pronouns. People who used their own name, for example asking "Why is Viktoria nervous?", tended to report less distress and were rated as performing better on some of the tasks. The authors suggest that this small linguistic shift creates a little psychological distance. Kross et al. (2014)
I tried it in the supermarket car park. It felt ridiculous. It also worked a little.
Viktoria is furious about the parking space. Viktoria has had a very long day. Viktoria would like to be home.
Something in me loosened when I heard my own name used kindly. It was as if a sensible friend had arrived and put a hand on my shoulder. The anger did not vanish. It simply had somewhere to sit that was not my whole body.
This is what steadiness has come to mean for me. Not the absence of weather, but the presence of a witness. A part of you that can say your name gently while the rest of you is having the feeling. A part that can notice the feet on the ground, the weight of the bag in your hand, the breath going in and out without needing your permission.
Calm is lovely when it comes. I hope you have it often. But you do not have to wait for it before you are allowed to be okay.
You can be shaking and steady. You can be grieving and steady. You can stand in the car park, furious about a parking space, and still be someone who knows her own name.
Ritual Invitation
The next time a strong feeling arrives, pause for one breath and describe it to yourself in the third person, using your own name. "Anna is frightened about the phone call." "Maria is so tired she could cry." Say it kindly, the way a good friend would. Then feel your feet on the floor for one more breath. The feeling can stay. You are simply standing beside it now.
Your Turn
What feeling have you been waiting to get rid of before you allow yourself to feel okay?
What does your own name sound like, said kindly, in a hard moment?
Keep the Thread
Steady, the second Witch in Progress book, is a gentle companion for exactly this: staying rooted while the weather moves through. Read Steady
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References
Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 271–299. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.2.3.271
Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., Burson, A., Dougherty, A., Shablack, H., Bremner, R., Moser, J., & Ayduk, O. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: How you do it matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(2), 304–324. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035173
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