Contents
“Demanding people with rigid thoughts suffer a lot”
Psychology
The psychologist Ana Villarrubia has written ‘Learn to listen to yourself’, a book with everything you need to start the great adventure of understanding our emotions
Looking inward, without fear, allows us to identify the wise signals that our emotions and our minds send us, and psychologist Ana Villarrubia says that knowing how to decipher and interpret them is the key to being in control of our life and managing it in such a way that let us make our measure, walking towards our objectives.
In her book ‘Learn to listen to yourself’, Ana Villarrubia assures that there is the paradox that we find, both in nostalgia for the past and in anxiety for the future, a kind of false shelter: as if when reviewing over and over again the history of our longings we could change the course of events; as if placing ourselves in the uncertainty of the
future we prepare to face it. Nothing could be further from reality: installed in the past we do nothing but dangerously and pitifully lick our wounds, in the same way that the uneasiness about what is to come worries us to the point of blockage and exhaustion.
You’ve written a book about learning to listen to yourself, how important is it?
I consider the approach I make in the book fundamental because without that period of stopping to listen to oneself to interpret what we think or feel, change is not possible. The process costs, but for that reason it is worth it and although it does not come out spontaneously, because stopping to look at what does not work hurts, it is something necessary to do.
On a daily basis we do things that do not suit us and do not define us and even threaten our values. We tend to define ourselves and say “I am this, this and the other”, but sometimes it does not correspond to reality because we act differently, and listening to ourselves is identifying the messages that I give myself and those that the environment returns to me. . Stopping to listen to yourself is a period of transition that is not pleasant but it is important because you become aware of who you are; it is about removing to heal, not to whip or have a bad time.
Does if we stop to listen to each other, does it mean that we have to pay attention to all our thoughts and emotions?
You have to stop running away from emotions because they all serve a function. It is essential to see, for example, where guilt comes from and how to transform it… Emotions must be listened to, attended to and act, to see how I can take charge of what I feel.
It takes a lot to take on some risks and responsibilities, and there comes a time when, without really knowing how or why, it turns out that we have strayed too far from ourselves. We realize it suddenly, although it has not happened abruptly. Much of what comes from our mind and our emotions causes confusion or fright, and we tend to avoid it. However, you should know that persevering in this forward flight can only make things worse.
So, do we have to be thinking beings of ourselves above others?
Absolutely. We must become thinking beings of ourselves to also be aware of how our behavior affects others. To make a constructive self-assessment that leads to changes or adaptations in our action tendencies that are relevant. We tend to focus on the behavior of others before our own, with a view to leaving it neutralized, or to make less of who we face if we consider it a threat or if it wants us to look where we do not want to look. It is easy to pigeonhole from the outside and look the other way.
But what about how we behave and how that can disturb or annoy others?
It seems that a therapeutic trend has recently proliferated that, in my way of seeing things, represents a true perversion of psychology as a science applied to the modification of behavior and the human psyche. Psychology misunderstood and put at the service of self-justification, selfishness or individualism. Take care of ourselves, of course. Putting ourselves, sometimes, above others in the pursuit of our interests, too. But not by system! Not at the cost of the unjustified sacrifice of others, not at the cost of taking advantage of who is most submissive or who most wants to take care of us. Who has not had, many times, the feeling of having been more aware of others than of himself? Our psychological well-being goes through balancing this scale, but not by becoming aware of the sacrifice of others and turning the tables for our own benefit. All human relationships and all truly valuable ties entail dedication and renunciation; it is only a matter of ensuring that, with perspective, a certain reciprocity has been maintained in this process.
Could stress, anxiety, and other discomforts have to do with not listening to ourselves enough?
They have to do with learning to listen to ourselves because stress responds to the demands of the environment, which we commit ourselves to face. Behind every stress there is a lack of work in the hierarchy of priorities, because you cannot respond to all requests with the same criteria, with the same quality … You also have to be compassionate with yourself in case you are being a little unfair with what that we demand of ourselves. On the other hand, if we speak of anxiety directly, it is that we do not think about ourselves and we do not listen to ourselves. If we suffer from anxiety it is a sign that we lost the role of being able to analyze and the future becomes unmanageable. Listening to yourself is identifying stressors, but terms should not be confused: with stress I can manage, but with anxiety I not only do not manage but I start to damage myself, so stress allows us a different margin of action.
You speak in your book about the importance of being flexible and not rigid in our thoughts. What differentiates some people from others?
Having flexibility, always with a limit, is synonymous with tolerating uncertainty, the unforeseen or managing changes. This makes us generate alternatives to the elements that distort our plans. Being flexible of thought, frustration is tolerated, the rational and analytical mind is activated, in addition to knowing how to negotiate, something very important, because who has a flexible mind knows that even if you want 100% we can settle for 50% because we win for another side. By saying something else, being flexible beings leads to healthier social relationships.
The opposite of what was said would be to be rigid. Blockage, frustration and each day more distant from the objectives. We know that stiffness is wrong, but many times we consider it a false defect and show it off. You have to understand that the demanding and rigid person is not happy because he suffers a lot. While flexibility accounts for a healthy and balanced self-esteem, being aware of my shortcomings, addressing problems and making good adjustments, stiffness does not allow any of that.
You also dedicate a section to psychologization … What is it and what does it consist of?
It has to do with the process of learning to listen to yourself. Become a thinking being that thinks to itself. Sometimes we hang labels on others, we put them in one group or another, but the important thing is to become aware of what we ourselves are, always from an internal and self-critical and not self-compassionate view; objectives can be achieved from self-criticism. Hence the concept of taking charge of oneself and putting the same effort into analyzing as others. It is essential to have emotional and cognitive empathy in oneself and understand oneself to make changes and achieve what one wants to modify and not to pity oneself.
When you go into the emotions we feel, you mention the possibility of being bipolar, a concept that we have as negative but instead it may not be so bad …
Bipolarity as a disease and disconnection with reality is diagnosed a lot, but in the real world and without a diagnosis involved, we tend to see many tyrannical people with very rigid emotions. They tend to have emotional instability, many difficulties, problems and insecurities. The truth is that the emotional experience is scary and we try to stay in a temporalized plane without highlighting, but it is not bad that from time to time we have emotional peaks, that the changes that surround us make us vibrate, both for good and bad.
About Ana Villarrubia
Ana Villarrubia is a health psychologist with a master’s degree in Clinical and Health Psychology and in Forensic Psychology and Damage Assessment, a specialist in psychotherapy and psychodrama, and an expert in couples therapy. Tutor and collaborator in different university master’s degrees at prestigious Spanish and international universities, she is a teacher at the Higher Institute of Psychological Studies, in the Master in Clinical and Health Psychology and in the Master in Cognitive-Behavioral Psychotherapy, responsible for the modules of ‘Evaluation of psychological problems’, ‘Therapeutic design’ and ‘Depressive disorders’. Since 2012 he has directed the Aprende a Listenrte Health Center in Madrid. Ana Villarrubia is also the author of the book ‘Smear and New Account: 12 Steps for a Better Life’ and of numerous psychological outreach publications in various written, audiovisual and digital media.