Cringeworthy Memories

Transcript

Welcome to you, welcome to a beautiful thought.

I wanted to tell you about cringeworthy memories.

A lot people have this problem myself included where occasionally something will just pop up in my memory, thinking about something I did that was extremely embarrassing.

Even from 10-15 years ago, pops into your mind and you’re left feeling that instinct to crawl into the fetal position just so you can try to soothe yourself of this terrible memory you have of saying something embarrassing or tripping over yourself.

You know these kinds of things, these cringy memories that evoke this visceral reaction.

I remember once sitting in a deep meditation and I was thinking about this, kind of floated up into my mind. Thinking Okay what can I do about this, there was this particularly cringy memory that would come to me once every few days so I asked this deep part of myself, what can I do about this?

And the response was “Oh that’s easy”.

And I was like “Really, that’s easy”

And this still small voice said to me “Yes absolutely it’s easy. All you need to do is embrace that part of yourself.

So I realized upon reflection what had been happening is actually when I had one of these cringy memories, what I’m trying to do is try to shut it off, try to deny that that is somehow a part of me. That this is something that could be kept in the shadows, hidden from me, hidden from my consciousness.

And therefor it continues to come into my consciousness. Kind of counter intuitive but a lot of people have heard this expression “What we resist, persists” and so trying to shut myself out from this cringe, shut myself out from the perception of myself that I was having at that moment.

I actually caused this memory to reoccur over and over again.

All you need to do. It’s simple, not necessarily easy.

All one needs to do is embrace that and say “Yes, I am that. Even when I’m at my worst, even when I’m at my most embarrassing.”

I tried for many years to sort of reframe these sorts of things with neurolinguistic programming perspective and this helps a little bit too.

I have this cringy memory, I did this embarrassing thing. How easy is it for you to remember a cringy memory about somebody else?

Something that somebody else did that they found extremely embarrassing.
I think that you’ll find that it’s not very easy to find in your memory banks at all, it’s actually extremely difficult to think of a moment where somebody else became embarrassed.

Then it’s like wait a minute I’m so self absorbed that I’m the only one who pays attention when I’m embarrassed. Everybody else thought it was funny.

Maybe they have a giggle about it now and then. Maybe they don’t, maybe they have no idea that it’s even significant to you in any way because you’re the only one who had that strong negative reaction for most memories.

Here’s another important perspective. A lot of the time when we look at our own actions we judge ourselves by our intentions and when we look at others we judge them by their actions.

It often means there’s a huge disconnect but in the case of the cringeworthy memory, it’s usually not like that. It’s usually the opposite.

We judge ourselves by our actions and not our intentions but if we do go back and practice this inquiry into these cringeworthy memories we normally find our intentions were good in some form.

Normally we’re trying to express ourselves or something or even help somebody and we manage to make a mistake and lead to this embarrassing moment.

If we look at our intentions maybe we were trying to do something good or maybe we were even trying to do something selfish, which isn’t inherently bad.

We were probably trying to help ourselves in some way and there’s nothing wrong with trying to help ourselves.

But maybe we made a mistake in our reasoning or a mistake in our execution but likely if we examine our motivations we can find that in some way they were good.

Another thing that you can do which I went into deeper on another episode is cradling our emotions so it’s like when we examine our emotions we don’t have to rush right in and go right in to them like an overbearing father breaking down the door to ask you what is wrong.

We can maintain healthy distance from our emotions, mindful distance from our emotions that way we can give them the space to transform while we are analyzing them, observing them, seeing what’s going on with them with a kind of mild curiosity.

Hey, what’s goin on with this emotion. If you’re not too close and not too far, not trying to push it away and not trying to get inside of it either or command it, you will find we often give our emotions the space to transform just like we do with people actually.

We give ourselves the same space to transform that we can give to others in a healthy supportive environment and that is pretty cool.

Thank you for listing. Those are a few tips on how to deal with cringeworthy emotions. Try to put it into context. Try to imagine times where you’ve seen other people embarrassed and how little you minded about it. Practice that healthy mindfulness, healthy distance. Examine your own intentions and find out what they were and find out probably that there was something positive about them and most importantly embrace that aspect about yourself that you try to deny or you try to run away from and when you do these exercises I think you will find you don’t worry so much anymore about these memories.

You’ll find in the short term more of them start to surface and that’s fine, that’s part of the process because what it means is you now have the tools to heal your own past.

You’re actively doing it, these things come up, you practice and you move ahead.

That;’s not something to be afraid of, that’s something actually quite wonderful.

Thank you so much for listening, thank you for having a great day, for healing your past, for exploring those cringeworthy moments to develop them in a caring environment and I’ll talk to you soon.