I Wanted to Feel Better. Why Am I Suddenly Seeing Everything I Don’t Like About Myself?
By Dr. Marie Feuer
You begin meditating, working with someone, or paying more attention to your spiritual life because you want the quality of your life to change. You would like some peace. A little more clarity. Perhaps you imagine becoming someone who can handle things without getting so upset. Instead, you start noticing how angry you are, how much you tolerate, how often you say something is fine when it is not fine at all. Now you are uncomfortable with things you used to live with quite happily, or at least without noticing how unhappy you were. What the hell? Wasn’t this supposed to help?
People often describe what they want as moving to a “higher vibration.” I work with energy, so I am not dismissing the possibility of an energetic change. I am questioning what people expect that change to feel like. Often the expectation is that we will become more serene, more wise, more in the flow, and less bothered by ordinary life. We may not be looking for a Mercedes or a bigger house. We may sincerely want to become more authentic. But have we considered that becoming more authentic might involve discovering how inauthentic we have been?
That is a rather different experience from the one we thought we signed up for. You wanted to feel better about yourself. Now you are seeing things about yourself that you would very much prefer not to see. And because you are seeing them now, you may assume the work has made you worse. Sometimes what has changed is your ability to notice.
Think of water moving through a stream. When the flow meets a rock, the water swirls, divides, and makes currents around it. The rock may have been there all along, but now there is enough movement for you to notice what happens around it. I use this image to describe something I encounter in energetic work: an area that seemed quiet can become very noticeable when something begins to move. What felt like peace may have included a very effective arrangement for keeping certain feelings out of awareness.
Perhaps you think of yourself as a loving, kind, harmonious person. You do not get angry. You understand everybody. Then anger shows up, and it does not fit your understanding of yourself at all. You may have good reasons for that anger. You may have spent years being neglected, accepting treatment you did not like, or making room for everyone except yourself. But you also have a belief that anger is bad. So now you have the feeling, your judgment about the feeling, and the upsetting possibility that your lovely picture of yourself was incomplete.
It can feel like lifting up a rug and discovering everything that has been swept underneath it. Suddenly you are thinking, “How could I have missed this? How long has this been here?” You may even become angry with the people around you. Why didn’t anyone say anything? Were all those compliments bullshit? Did they know something about you that you did not know about yourself? Before long, you are no longer looking at one thing that needs attention. You are questioning whether you have ever been honest about anything.
This is where I think we need to slow down. Seeing something you want to change does not mean everything about you is false. Nor does the intensity of your self-criticism tell you how accurate it is. You may be recognizing a real pattern and then using that recognition to beat the hell out of yourself. Those are two different activities. If every new discovery becomes evidence that you are a loser, how willing will you be to discover anything else?
There is also an important distinction between relief and change. Sometimes you need to be with someone who is comforting, nurturing, and able to help you settle. There is nothing wrong with that. It can be part of healing. Sometimes you need comfort before you have the strength to look at anything else. But if you want something in your life to change, eventually you may need to look at something that reassurance alone does not address. Feeling understood is valuable. It does not automatically teach you what to do the next time you abandon yourself to keep someone else comfortable.
At the same time, feeling worse is not proof that something profound is happening. I want to be very clear about that, especially when we are talking about energy work. “You are uncomfortable because my vibration is higher” is not an explanation anyone should be required to accept. A practitioner can misunderstand you, push too hard, behave badly, or simply be the wrong person for you. The absence of an obvious insult does not settle the question. You can examine what has been stirred up in you while also examining how you are being treated. You can ask questions, disagree, take a break, or leave.
What interests me is our ability to become curious before deciding that every uncomfortable experience means the same thing. What actually happened? What did I feel? What did I decide that feeling meant? Is there something here I recognize from other parts of my life? These questions leave room for discovery. They also leave room to decide that something is not right for you.
Another unsettling part of change is that what used to be acceptable may no longer be acceptable. Perhaps you were accustomed to relationships in which nobody talked about feelings. You made that work. You did the explaining, the accommodating, the pretending not to mind. Then you begin noticing your own experience, and suddenly the same arrangement is difficult to tolerate. It can seem as though your growth has ruined a perfectly workable relationship. But was it workable for you, or were you good at making your discomfort disappear from the conversation?
That recognition does not hand you a complete set of new skills. You may know that you cannot keep doing something without knowing what to do instead. There can be a period of feeling displaced, unskilled, even stupid. I have described it as a loss of gravity. Your familiar explanations are no longer holding everything in place, and you do not yet have another way of living that feels natural.
We understand this more easily in ordinary circumstances. You get a promotion, and suddenly you have responsibilities you have never had before. You discover skills you did not even know you needed. Getting something you wanted can make you feel less competent for a while. Why would we expect to know how to live differently just because we have finally noticed what needs to change?
This is one reason I encourage people to practice with small, concrete things. Say, “Please don’t use that tone of voice with me.” Admit a mistake to someone who will not use it against you. Notice that you are angry without immediately explaining why you should not be. These may sound unimpressive beside an extraordinary spiritual experience, but you are learning to remain present while something unfamiliar happens. You are finding out that you can feel uncomfortable, make a choice, and see what follows.
And be careful about what you are practicing. Learning to tolerate the discomfort of saying no is different from learning to tolerate more and more of a situation that is hurting you. You can spend years trying to become peaceful enough to put up with everything. That may look like spiritual practice, but what is actually changing? Are you becoming more honest about your life, or more skilled at explaining why you should not mind it?
The size of the step matters. If you have not been to the gym for six months and decide to do a four-hour workout, you may spend the next day saying, “Screw this. I’m never going back.” That does not tell us much about whether exercise belongs in your life. It tells us something about how you approached it. Fifteen minutes might have given you an experience you could build on. We can make the same mistake with personal work, pushing for an enormous breakthrough and then becoming so overwhelmed that we want nothing more to do with the whole thing.
There is no shame in going slowly. There is also a difference between going slowly and arranging your life so that nothing you believe about yourself can ever be questioned. That is a distinction each of us has to keep examining. Sometimes we need rest. Sometimes we need help. Sometimes we are frightened of taking a step we already know matters.
For me, the useful question is not simply, “Do I feel better today?” It is also, “What am I becoming able to notice, to tell the truth about, and to respond to differently?” You may still feel afraid when you set a boundary. You may still dislike admitting that you were wrong. But if you can do those things with a little more honesty and a little less punishment, something in your daily life is changing. That deserves your attention as much as any extraordinary experience.
If your spiritual or psychological work has left you seeing more but unsure what to do with what you see, this is something we can explore in private one-to-one sessions. My work brings psychological understanding, psychic perception, and energy work together according to the individual. We can look at what is happening, what needs attention, and what pace you can actually work with.
You can learn more or schedule at DrMarie.org.
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