Member-only story
This is Why Bad Habits Aren’t Bad
Consider a trauma-informed framework to address habits (and the world)
What do you think of when you think of your “bad” habits? For me, I think of how I constantly touch and pick at my hair, hunch over, and scroll through social media with no end game.
When I was in grade school, my “bad” habit was using my eraser too much. My fourth grade teacher taped over the eraser part of my pencil so I wouldn’t use it. She wasn’t concerned about where my perfectionism came from, she just wanted to stop the habit in its tracks.
I guess that’s one way to do it. Surprise: it didn’t work.
For the longest time, I used the same technique because I didn’t know any other way. I saw my hunched shoulders as a personal fault. I saw my hair picking as shameful. I saw it through other people’s eyes, and I tried so many times to just STOP it. But again, it didn’t work. And the thing is, the shame I felt stopped me from understanding where these habits came from and when they would happen.
Habits are not “bad” or “good”
The thing I hate about morality is how it positions everything as “good” or “bad”, “right” or “wrong”, and “strong” or “weak”. It treats actions and thoughts as objects instead of as human processes…
