Ana Asensio is the mother of a large family and an expert psychologist in psychotherapy. Throughout his career he has received patients who came to the clinic when they couldn’t take it anymore, being ashamed to ask for help, blaming yourself for not being well.
To help and accompany people who may feel like this, he has just published positive lives (B for Pocket). In it – let the title of the book not fool us – It does not encourage us to laugh at life by falsifying emotions, but to face it by taking care of them.
“In hard times, laughing at life is difficult, and I also do not recommend that you force yourself. Living positively is not falsifying emotions, it is not looking the other way, It’s not about letting go of difficult times,” tells us.
–What to do then when we are not at our best?
–In difficult moments, ask yourself what you need to feel better and if it is within your reach to develop it, that is the direction. Everyone will find their help, some in solitude, others in therapy, others with distraction, others with family warmth…
But it is important to accept and respect each moment of life, without falling into the drama that brings us suffering, but facing the pain and going through it until it softens.
–Coping with pain is difficult when we are not even able to answer the question “how are you?” sincerely. Why do we usually settle for answering a brief “fine”?
–This response is educational and cultural. In fact, if we are asking ourselves these questions, it is because we need to make a leap in our vocabulary and emotional use in order to be able to expand how we feel in a social way, but without the need to tell our intimacies, which is a bit the feeling that now one has to go from the brief and scarce response to everything and absolute nudity.
That is why I defend the idea of expanding knowledge in vocabulary and emotional intelligence that help us to relate and communicate, refining much more in how we are and this gives us a lot of calm and vital coherence.
–What advantage would it give us to connect with our fears or even with our anger?
–The advantages of connecting and relating to your emotions in a healthy way are all. This is comparable to sensations; if you listen when you are really hungry and eat, you solve a “problem”; if you don’t listen to it, this will have consequences later; and, if you listen too much or attend too long to your feeling of hunger and even amplify it, it will also have its consequences. The same thing happens in emotions.
A healthy relationship with emotions is a gift to the body and, moreover, a necessity.
Connecting with fear is healthy, in terms of knowing that it warns you and prevents you, but what is unhealthy is denying it or amplifying it, leading to panic, fear of fear, or terror.
And the same thing happens with anger, anger is mobilizing. If it becomes a trigger for things and helps you achieve challenges, it is well-channeled anger; if it becomes anger and it is directed towards someone or towards ourselves, it will be mismanaged and will hurt us.
That is why it is important to relate well to emotions, learn to listen to them, make the fair and necessary case, purify them and continue.
–In your book you suggest that we should start by accompanying children so that they know how to identify their emotions. How to do it without biasing them?
–Children are very connected to their emotions, as you would be, and, without a doubt, each person who reads to us with theirs when we are little.
Here the culture, the environment, mixed with the individual temperament, makes us amplify or calm down, and sometimes we cut off the connection with said emotions.
In order to support our children, it is necessary that we also be in contact with our emotions and validate them, in order to validate theirs and if we see gestures, tears, or expressions that make us sad, we can ask them, or clarify what they feel, or teach them a story where they can see reflected characters who feel the same way.
This will keep them in a healthy connection and learn to manage them in a healthy way.
-Perhaps the problem is that we adults don’t know how to cry either. Why is it still so hard for us to do it in public?
–Because crying, at the moment, is not a very social emotion. Sadness is not expansive, it is not dopaminergic, it does not generate pleasure, it does not generate exaltation, nor high and therefore not the most popular friend in the group.
But the intelligent people of life know that crying is healthy to free and clean the inner house, and that it is also necessary to connect with sadness and live it to purify all the inputs from day to day in a healthy way.
Crying would be something like taking a conscious shower, or a repairing bath.
–In your words: “Self-esteem is a whole in which connection, behavior, relationships, attitude and love come together”. So, it seems difficult to improve it when it is already damaged…
–Self-esteem is what you think, believe and feel about yourself, and this is based on your internal state and your external experiences. That is to say, our whole life, everything that happens to us and everything that we decide to do with it about it, intervenes in our self-esteem.
When self-esteem is damaged it is important to evaluate and know in what aspect it is damaged, what makes the person think and feel this and what they need to do, feel or think to start having other experiences and take real distance.
It is important to know what messages are in our head, what you tell yourself, how you interpret reality, what emotions you live with the most, what you long for, what you would like to learn, how you would like to act or feel, and take responsibility for yourself, strength to act and train.
If you train to love yourself, take care of yourself, treat yourself well, become the love of your life, be kind to yourself and interpret the world around you well and pay just enough attention to your thoughts, you will achieve a very healthy self-esteem.
–How well you say, what we say about ourselves ends up influencing what we believe about ourselves but, when self-esteem is damaged, we don’t usually speak well about ourselves. Is it possible to get out of this vicious circle?
-Yeah. You have to put awareness, perseverance, specific exercises and practice.
Remember that everything is practical, and this has to be born of the will, of love for ourselves, of a conscious decision, of taking action and of responsibility for ourselves.
–What role does self-forgiveness and self-compassion play in mental well-being?
–It is vital for our heart, for our being, for our life, to connect with who we really are, with the goodness that exists in our hearts and with the beauty that exists in our existence.
Love is life, and we are all love.
Kindness, understanding being loving towards us, compassionate, makes our body nourish itself just like a baby from a nurturing mother does, and this generates very powerful neurochemicals for our emotional health and well-being.
–You say that the social relationships we have have a significant influence on our well-being or discomfort. How?
–Social relationships and what surrounds us is also part of the social nutrition that we give ourselves, the people with whom we relate, the things we talk about, the topics we read (without obsessing), but most of the time what you do ends up conforming to you too.
That is why it is important to find a balance in relationships, that they add up and that we add up. That we give and also be open to receive, relationships with empathy, with kindness, respectful and where communication and commitment are well understood.
–Now that neuroscience tells us that the brain can change and that books remind us that achieving happiness is a matter of will. Should we understand that we are responsible for our unhappiness?
We are the product of our circumstances and the interpretation we have made of them, but we have the ability to enhance our internal vitality, and our love in that deep connection that is happiness.
We can realize that happiness is not enthusiasm, nor is it a moment, nor is it a house, or a bag… These are pleasures that offer us enjoyment and brain chemicals of pleasure temporarily.
Happiness is a decision, it is a way of seeing the world, it is a way of being, it is a way of wanting to serve and serve you in life.
Happiness has no cause, it is internal, it is something that no one can take away from you if you cultivate it and you also learn to know that happiness has moments of sadness and crisis.
But that happiness will know how to give you the intelligence to know that everything happens, and that life comes and goes, and that the only permanent thing is change and the only real thing is now at every moment.
That is true happiness, living in coherence with you, loving you, accepting, adapting, getting excited, falling down, getting up, learning, living, and continuing…
Why can gratitude be so powerful?
–I am crazy about gratitude, it is a very powerful attitude because it connects you with a lot of things. To begin with, it helps you a lot to be happy because, when you give thanks and train gratitude, in the end you have the feeling of being lucky, of being lucky.
You feel that the world gives you and does not owe you, and that is wonderful.
That, in addition, makes you feel like another way of living, which is to go through life with a calm and confident attitude because you see that life helps you…
This is fed back, so that if unpleasant things ever happen to you, it will always be easier to connect with compassion and understanding and empathy from that gratitude than if we go from what and scarcity.
–Finally, now that World Mental Health Day is celebrated, what do you think are the basic pillars to maintain your good condition?
Support, awareness and self-care (and/or care for family members as well). Mental health requires feeling support, in professionals, in life, in institutions, in my environment and in oneself.
In mental health it is important to know that you are not alone, and that there is someone who can help you.
It is important to be aware of the problem, the difficulty, where I am, where my life is, and from there, look for solutions that will involve asking for help, and that is where the self-care of the patient, the person or the relatives who need it with the therapeutic support along the way that is necessary.
To know more…
If you have been interested in this interview, you can buy the book positive lives (B for Pocket), here.