Emotions is an energy in motion inside of your body. Feeling too much is a trauma response. Not feeling at all is a trauma response too. Everybody is different and therefore everybody deals with their trauma differently. Imagine your brain to be a machine. When the machine becomes over-heated from running for too long, it has only two options how to cope with this situation: the machine either explodes and breaks down or it turns off as a prevention from catching a fire. Your brain that is experiencing a trauma is working in a very similar way. Trauma is anything that overwhelms the brain to the point where the brain has difficulty to process these overwhelming feelings so the brain either experiences a mental breakdown or it completely shuts down. When the trauma is not being processed properly and in an appropriate manner, people who are experiencing something traumatic might either become very raw, dramatic, hysterical, neurotic, animated and “all over the place” or they completely suppress their emotions, they push them down, sometimes so deep where they have a hard time to access them again. It can even happen that you will be switching from feeling too much to feeling nothing, back and forth. Either way, the trauma makes you emotionally dysregulated. There are more reasons why you are experiencing trauma that is crippling your emotions – you might have been through some traumatic event (for example, car accident), you are grieving a loss that you are not ready yet to deal with, you are recovering from abuse and bullying, you feel overwhelmed by stress at work or in school and so on. Whatever is your copying mechanism to cope with your trauma, feeling too much or not feeling at all is a survival protection mode.
The program “not feeling my feelings” was installed already in your childhood.
The children´s positive and negative emotions become a threat to the narcissistic parent´s control. The narcissists are all about control, they are control freaks. The narcissists are pathologically envious people and they envy even their own children. They feel threatened when the spotlight is taken away from them and when the spotlight is transferred to their children. The narcissistic parents feel threatened when their kids express happiness because the narcissists feel like they can only control you when you are miserable and unhappy so the narcissists will always keep you miserable and unhappy on purpose in order to control you. Did you notice that the narcissistic parents are always nice to you only when you are sick and miserable? It´s because when you are not feeling good, they can have a control over you way easier than when you are healthy and happy. When you are down, you are not threat to their control. Did you notice that the narcissistic parents start to treat you differently when you start to succeed, grow, thrive and when you are happy and glowing? Suddenly, they ignore you, scapegoat you or even hate you and punish you. Many scapegoat kids keep themselves small on purpose to avoid being scapegoated by their narcissistic parents. Because they know that every time they expressed their greatness, they have been punished for it. The narcissistic parents will always overlook their scapegoat kid´s achievements, ignore the kid´s good qualities, sabotage their kid´s talents and opportunities out of envy. The household of the narcissistic parents is a shame based household. Every time the kids express their negative emotions, they are being shamed for feeling the basic human emotions and also invalidated, rejected, neglected, scapegoated, downplayed, ghosted, ignored, punished, their parents gave their kids the silent treatment and they stone wall-ed them. The narcissistic parents lack of empathy, they are immature, they have low emotional intelligence, their emotions are stunted, limited, crippled, they are traumatized and they never put any work into healing their trauma so they act out their trauma and project all their disturbing behavior and toxic energy onto their own kids. And the children pay a high price for having such parents in their life. Every time the kids are trying to express their hurt, pain, frustration and anger, these all is being seen by their narcissistic parents as inconvenience and annoyance. It also threatens the narcissistic parent’s control because when kids misbehave and they are not good girls and good boys, it makes the narcissistic parents look bad to their audience and the narcissists are all about maintaining the fake facade and fake perfection in front of their audience so the narcissistic parents will give their kids “the corrective abuse” to force the kids to go back to the non-resistant robotically obedient mode. The narcissist´s love is very conditional. They love their children only when the children are good girls and good boys. If you have a bad day or God forbid you have some needs and wants, or you show your own personality with your own opinion, then the narcissistic parents will stop loving you and their love will be taken away from you or withhold from you.
The narcissistic parents do not fulfill their kid´s emotional wants and needs and if they do, with their lack of empathy, they do it in such an insensitive, depersonalized or even brutal way that the children learn already in childhood that feeling their feelings equals something bad, something dangerous, they learn already in their childhood that their feelings don´t matter, feelings are not safe, expressing themselves equals hurt and shame, feeling their feelings will be punished and they learn pretty quick that they will be often playing the ghost role in their narcissistic parent´s life because the kids are never seen and never heard. The kids learn already in their childhood that they are not allowed to be authentic to feel their feelings and every time they try to feel their feelings, they feel ashamed of those feelings. They learn that crying or being angry means that they are bad girls and bad boys in the eyes of their toxic narcissistic parents so they learn to never express their negative emotions and rather suppress them as a copying mechanism to avoid shaming and feeling the shame. The negative emotions serve an important purpose, it points where your needs and wants were not met. And when someone ignores your negative emotions, it´s the same as when someone tells you that your needs and wants do not matter. Kids are frustrated for a reason, they are angry for a reason, they are crying for a reason, they are trying to tell to the adults that something is not well with them, that something is wrong, that someone is crossing their boundaries. Ignoring your kid´s negative emotions is the same as telling them that you as a parent do not care if your child is not feeling well, not doing well, that you don´t care that something is hurting them and you are crossing your child´s boundary. The narcissists have a tendency to either exploit people´s emotions in a vicious way or completely invalidate them by ignore the people´s feelings where is absolutely appropriate to fully acknowledge them and validate them. No surprise that if you have the narcissists in your life for way too long, you will be trained to never express your positive and negative emotions because the narcissists are very suppressed individuals and they will suppress you too. The narcissists either make you feel very overwhelmed with their narcissistic abuse and lack of guidance of your dysregulated emotions or they make you feel like you are a ghost who absolutely does not matter and you feel like you are going to vanish inside of yourself into the dark emptiness and painful silence.
Overwhelming you with a toxic behavior is a form of abuse and ignoring your emotions is also a form of abuse. The sensitive and empathetic children completely dissociate from their feelings in their toxic childhoods as an aftermath of the childhood abuse and emotional neglect but not only that. In the same time, they also develop co-dependency because their selfish narcissistic parents use their own kids as a narcissistic supply. The narcissistic parents never fulfill their own kid´s needs and wants but they use their kids to fulfill their own needs and wants out of utter selfishness. The narcissistic parents regulate their own dysregulated emotions through their poor kids. The narcissistic parents have their kids for very wrong reasons. It´s always about the narcissistic parents (what they feel, how they feel) and never about their kids. The emotions of their kids never matter to them. If the narcissistic parents would be a part of a music band and write the lyrics, the lyrics will go like this: “Me, me, me and onlyyyyy meeeee, yeah”. The narcissists are almost like robots so life with them feels like you live in some kind of sci-fi movie with robots and over time, the robotic narcissistic parents will cripple your emotions. The narcissistic parents create emotionally crippled children. The emotionally unavailable narcissistic parents are emotionally cold, ignoring and withholding towards their kids and it activates and develops disordered attachment styles in their kids, lifelong anxieties, depressions and abandonment issues. Once these kids grow up, they either become the drama queens desperately chasing anybody´s attention they never had in their childhood, they become overly clingy and needy or they completely shut down their emotions hiding themselves behind the closed doors suffering alone in silence and they will avoid everybody (including their own selves) for years or for the rest of their lives out of fear to be hurt and rejected again. And also out of emotional exhaustion which is an aftermath of childhood narcissistic abuse too. A lot of people who grew up with the narcissistic parents and have been surrounded with high level of drama, trauma and toxicity in their childhood become adults who are emotionally exhausted and they barely managing to take care of their own emotions, not alone of emotions of other people so they isolate from others a lot. Dealing with other people´s emotions feel draining to them. People who have been raised by narcissistic parents will be all emotionally dysregulated - some of them will be “all over the place” loudly reliving their drama, acting out their drama and projecting their drama onto others or they will push all their feelings deep down inside of them and become emotionally numb replaying their trauma in silence. A lot of children who were raised by narcissistic parents develop codependency, they please others as a survival strategy while they completely neglect their own feelings. The narcissistic parents trained their kids like dogs to always take care of the emotions of their toxic parents (and later in their life to take care of the emotions of everybody in their surrounding) which is inappropriate for their age. Parentification and objectification are both a form of abuse - the adults (the parents) make their children responsible for their feelings, emotions, emotional regulation, they discuss with their kids inappropriate themes (such as problems in the marriage, adult´s problems, bills, traumas, etc.) and use their kids as the tools and objects to achieve their selfish agenda. The narcissistic parents are like vultures, they devour their kids and everybody around them. The empath-codependent kids orbiting around the toxic asses of their parents to the point where there is no space, energy and time left for their own self-care. The parents suppose to take care of the kids, not the way around. The codependents are being trained in their toxic childhoods that everybody´s needs and wants are priority while they don´t matter at all. The codependents do everything for others while they barely do something for themselves. The codependents become the experts in feeling everybody else´s feelings while they are unaware of their own feelings. Feeling their own feelings don´t even cross their mind because they are so busy to feel other people´s feelings. If 95% of your time is dedicated to feel other people´s feelings, thinking about their well-being, thinking about what they think, feeling what they feel, how on Earth you have the time, energy and space to pay attention to your own self?
The codependents dissociate completely from their own emotions and completely disconnect from their own feelings because they are trained to pay attention only to the emotions of others, they are so busy mapping their surroundings to make sure everybody´s needs and wants are being met while their wants and needs are never being met. When you develop the codependency in your childhood, your codependency will allow other people dictate you what you should be feeling, thinking and how to live your life, your codependency will make you a prisoner in your own life. The abuse and emotional neglect in your childhood have a lifelong effect on your life. Your abuser abused you and now the voice of your abuser is imprinted on your brain and dictate your life (even the abuser might be for years out of your life). Now you are abusing your own self by replaying the programming of your parent-abuser in your head. The greatest loss for all people who have been abused in their childhood is that they lost authenticity. The greatest despair is not being yourself. It will cause you self-hate and hate, depression, anxiety, drama or numbness. Because you are not authentic, you are not who you supposed to be, you are forced to be someone else. To be yourself means you have to feel your feelings in an authentic way (whether people around you approve it or not). If people around you feel like you are “too much” for them, well, then you are not around the right people, they are not “your people”. If people prevent you from being authentic, it does not mean you should be adjusting to them by reducing yourself and putting a fake mask on your face. It means you have to clearly articulate your concerns to them and if they still do not get it and they still do not respect your authentic emotions, your wants and needs, you should seriously rethink of having such people in your life. Cut out people from your life who can´t handle you expressing your vulnerability, authenticity and also those who ridicule and shame you for your basic human needs. Because if you do not take this step into your authenticity, you will pay a great price for not doing so. Your frustration, anger, all those negative emotions that are warning you that you are not in your authenticity and warning you that something is not right, these feelings will not go away, they are bottling up in you. Not feeling your feelings authentically and having suppressed emotions in your system will make you sick overtime and if your feelings will be ignored long enough, you can even develop psychosomatic, chronic illnesses and serious mental health issues. Even a cancer. The saddest fact about childhood abuse is that the abuse does not end with your childhood. If your parents are the narcissists, you will run “the narc program” that you are completely unaware of your entire life and that´s why you will keep attracting narcissistic friends and romantic partners into your life in your adulthood with whom you will be re-creating and re-playing the same program as you did with your toxic parents. Until you become aware of your own unawareness. And start to do the changes in your life.
There is nothing like bad or incorrect feelings. All feelings are valid.
Nothing like good or bad feelings do exist. There are no right or wrong feelings. They are all just different type of good. Smile is good. We smile when we are happy and that´s good. Crying is good too. Crying is just a different type of good. Some people might see crying as “something bad is happening” but actually, crying is “something good is happening”. Tears are shower for our soul. They clean us. The tears help us to release the emotional energy. That´s why after we finish crying, we feel much better. Crying can be also an indicator that something is hurting us, crying is helping us to bring awareness to our pain. That´s why healthy parent´s always ask their kids: “Why are you crying?”. And the kids answer their parents and tell them the cause of their pain so the parents can comfort their kids with their empathy, help the kids to navigate their emotions or fulfill their needs and wants. You are beautiful when you smile but you are equally beautiful when you cry. You are always beautiful, remember that. Always honor your authentic emotions. Everything you feel is valid. The toxic narcissistic parents often try to make their kids stop crying by beating them with words “Stop crying right now, I beat you so you have a reason to cry”. Or they say to the kids to “get over it” or “it was not that bad, man up” or “look at you how ugly you are when you´re crying”. The narcissistic parents want to silence their kids as soon as possible and want to move on from kid´s drama as fast as possible without even investigating why the kids are crying. Once the children were silenced by their toxic parents, the needs or wants of their kids were not met and they were even invalidated. This is teaching the kids to never bring up their wants and needs again, this is teaching them to suffer alone and in silence when they are in pain. Next time, when some high school bully will hurt them, they will not come to the parents to talk about it. The bullied kids will just close themselves in the room without complaining about being bullied. Next time, when the kids will be hungry, the kids will not come to their parents to discuss it, the kids will just close themselves in the room hungry. This is how codependents are being trained since childhood to never complain and “never cause the problems”. Are you hungry? Never mind. Are you bullied? Never mind. Are you sad? Never mind. Everything is “never mind” for the codependents, isn´t it?
Feel Your Feelings Playlist 💖:
♫ ♪ Youtube Aurora - The River
♫ ♪ Youtube Aurora - Runaway
What happens with the feelings when you don´t feel them? Where the unfelt feelings go?
Ignoring your feelings will not make your feelings disappear. They are still stuck inside of you even if ignored and they will come out in the most bizarre ways when you expect them the least. Your toxic husband provoked you the whole morning but you wanted to avoid the conflict so you suppressed your feelings? Once your daughter will come home from school, you will scream at her for no reason to use her as your emotional regulation. You will take on her your frustration you have with your husband and basically abuse an innocent person in order to feel better. In the morning, you had an argument with your toxic wife and she made you feel powerless and angry? In one hour, you will find yourself shouting on other drivers on the road for no reason trying to get some emotional relief by abusing innocent people that has nothing to do with your problem that you have with your wife. You will try to gain some power over innocent people because you feel powerless with your wife, you feel like abusing others and overpowering them might be an adequate compensation. The bottled-up emotions just don´t go away, they are still in us like a ticking bomb waiting to explode. Those who bottle up their emotions either erupt over a small nonsense thing in the future or they will become passive-aggressive. Being passive-aggressive means you have an anger issue, you don´t know how to stand up for your boundaries and say “no” when you want to say “no”. Instead of “no”, you say “yes” and then you are angry for saying “yes”. Being passive-aggressive means you are too coward to be aggressive openly, you fear to express yourself in an authentic way because you fear to be punished for being authentic. Being aggressive in general means you are frustrated with something and you do not posses the right tools or strategies to release your frustration in a civil decent and right way and instead of it, you choose to release your frustration in an unhealthy way by projecting your frustration on other people, usually the innocent ones who do not have anything to do with your frustration and with core of your problems. People who suffer from passive-aggressiveness are usually those who were not permitted to express their negative emotions in their childhood and their negative emotions were never validated by their narcissistic parents. People who are passive-aggressive are those people who were shamed a lot for expressing their negative emotions in their childhoods by their narcissistic parents. The only way for them not to feel the shame is to avoid feeling the negative feelings so they can avoid the shame.
And finally, we can discuss the process behind the art of PTSD trauma removal out of your system and feeling your feelings.
Emotions are sensations in your body. People might think that the emotions come from heart or soul, but I personally do believe that the emotions come from head (your brain and thoughts). At least, it´s where the troubles starts. First, you experience something traumatic and you think about it with your logical thinking. The thought will create an emotion (emotionally charged energy) that you can then feel as a sensation inside of your body. For example, you meet a person and this person betray you. First, you think about this betrayal. This thinking about the betrayal will create certain emotions inside of you followed by transforming these emotions into the sensations in your body. Thinking about how this person betrayed you (the thought) will trigger an emotional response, then you start to feel emotional (emotion), your body starts to shake from anger, you might feel sick from your stomach and so on (physical sensation). Your brain will start to obsess about your trauma because the brain is like a very logical mathematician, the brain needs to solve the riddle in a very mathematical way. If the brain is not capable to resolve the riddle in some time, the suffering of people become chronic – their head will be spinning because they can´t find the logic in what happened to them and this will also make the emotionally charged energies rush through their bodies with no emotional relief in sight. And this is where people get stuck in the cycle of trauma and obsessive thoughts. Your brain will obsess about the person who betrayed you trying to make sense of all of what happened. This is where education on abuse, trauma, psychology become important because through the knowledge you can logically understand what happened to you, to understand why someone betrayed you , what is the core problem that brought you in a such situation in the first place and so on. If a knowledge is being paired with therapy, you already have two very powerful tools to work on your trauma. The knowledge will give your brain the relief. For example, knowing that someone who abused you is a narcissistic sociopath and the problem is not you, the knowing that you could not prevent the abuse because the problem was the abuser and not you will give you a relief. You no more blame yourself for the abuse. Through the knowledge, you can also discover that you attract the narcissists because you are a codependent. Again, the logical knowledge on codependency might save your life because now you can identify your issue and work on it so in the future you make sure you don´t attract the narcissists anymore. Self-study is very important. But logic is not the only way how to heal the trauma, the logic needs to go hand in hand with your emotions because the trauma not only over-heated your head but also too much emotional energy is being accumulated in your body which makes you mentally, energetically and emotionally exhausted so you have to release those emotions. And to get to an emotional relief is to practice “feeling your feelings”. The process of feeling your feelings has nothing to do with your head. It has everything to do with your emotions. So, feelings can´t be resolved with thinking, only with feeling. You achieve an emotional relief through emotional expression and emotional experience. In order to process your emotions through emotional expression, you have to find the courage to talk openly about your struggle. Talk therapy is a very effective way how to express your emotions in a correct and safe way. You achieve an emotional relief also by adding the emotional experience exercise to your healing process. To experience your emotions is basically to surf emotional waves in a raw form every time the emotional waves come to you. You become a surfer, whatever emotional wave comes to you, you just surf it like a surfer, you do not suppress it, you allow yourself to fully feel it. Just lose all control. Stop controlling your emotions, just allow them to freely flow like an ocean. Some of the emotional waves need to be surfed multiple times. Sometimes, you will surf one emotional wave thinking this one was already felt properly, done and gone only to discover that this wave came back to be re-experienced again. Don´t panic, it´s normal. You will notice that every time the same emotional wave come back to you to be re-experienced, it´s intensity will become lower and lower with every experience. And one day, this emotional wave will not come back anymore because you felt it fully, you resolved this emotion inside of you. Repressing your emotions will not help you because eventually, those emotions will resurface somehow and some day in your life and you will be forced to feel those emotions anyway, repressing your feelings only make it worst when you finally feel them. Repressing your emotions is only a postponing of something that you can´t hide from forever. As the real surfer has his tool for surfing (the surfing board), you can choose your tool of your choice for emotional surfing. Some people prefer to write journal, some people prefer to sing, some people prefer to listen to music, some people prefer to write poems, some people prefer to paint a canvas. Choose a tool that fits you the most to express what you feel. The number one reason why people are blocking themselves from feeling their authentic feelings is shame. They have been shamed in their childhood for feeling the feelings so now in their adulthood, every time they try to feel, they block themselves with the shame.
Roadblocks on the way to feel your feelings.
Sometimes, the bad things that happened to us and the traumatic events we went through is just too much to handle. So, we try to avoid to feel our feelings, we try to escape them. We over-eat as a copying mechanism to deal with our trauma. We increase the sound on the TV while we watch some movie for 2 hours so we don´t need to hear our inner voice, our pain, our emotions, our thoughts. We go out to have fun so we don´t need to think about the fact that we have a problem. We do anything to distract ourselves from healing. Feeling your feelings can be sometimes a very scary experience, at least in the beginning. The more you will practice “feeling your feelings”, the less scary this process will become. It´s like going to the gym. It´s always very painful to go to the gym for the first times because you did not exercise a longer time so your muscles are in pain. And to be honest, it´s also embarrassing, you are just at home desperately trying to google the difference between the set up and squat. So, just like with the gym, the feeling your feelings takes a patience with your own self. It takes a lot of self-compassion to be kind to yourself understanding that you are doing your best.
Being self-compassionate is in the opposite of being self-critical. Every time you feel harsh towards yourself, remind yourself that you do the best you can. Feeling your feelings takes a lot of courage and you are very brave and courageous to do so, give your self some credit, my dear. As the part of the process, learn how to validate yourself. You do not need validation from others. You only have to learn how to validate your own self. Your feelings are valid and you have the right to feel whatever you want to feel in an authentic way, your feelings are nobody´s business but yours. Accept that every person on this planet contains of 50% of shadows and 50% of light. Our job on this planet is slowly reducing the shadows so we can become only the light. This is being called “the shadow inner work”. You slowly and step by step integrating your own shadows, you are bringing your subconsciousness to your consciousness, you are bringing your darkness into the light in order to heal yourself. Radically accept that healing is an ugly process. Healing will be not your sexiest moments of your life. And that´s OK. Welcome in the club, we all who are working on our healing are in this club. Feeling your feelings might temporarily make your trauma symptoms worse. This is normal. Just like your muscles hurt when you visit the gym for the first times and it might seem like “the gym is hurting you”, the beginning of healing your emotions will be more painful in comparison with you being more advanced and skilled with feeling your feelings. If you are not used to feel your feelings, when you will try to feel them for the first time in your life or after very long time, it might even cause you to have an anxiety, headache, weird or very uncomfortable bodily sensations, you might even feel like you are very emotionally overwhelmed, terrified, feel like you want to run away, hide and push your feelings away, you might feel like you are drowning in the shame or you can even vomit or feel like you are above to vomit. It´s OK. Those symptoms will lessen with every session of feeling your feelings. The feeling of your feelings is an emotional purgatory process, it is very painful in the beginning but very rewarding in the end of the process. You will not regret investing in yourself.
Emotional bypassing is a category of itself.
My article and advice should not be a replacement for a proper therapy. It should only compliment the therapy you already do on yourself. I always recommend adding meditation to your trauma work too. It will help you to calm down your nervous system. However, people often mistaken the purpose of the meditation. People often think they can replace the therapy with the meditation. This is not true. The purpose of meditation is only to help you to calm your mind. The purpose of therapy is to remove trauma out of your system. So, as you see, both have a very different purpose. The meditation will not help you to remove trauma out of your system at all. For a simple reason. Because emotional flashbacks do exist. The emotional flashbacks are post-traumatic triggers that work like a replay button, every time this replay button is being pushed, you relive your trauma over and over again. You can keep reliving your trauma even 20 years after the traumatic event if you do not work on trauma removal out of your system in therapy. It does not matter that you just meditated for one hour and you feel peaceful at this moment because the second something or someone reminds you of your trauma, it will trigger you and the trauma will resurface again to be relived again. Meditation is like alcohol for alcoholics. The alcoholics mask their trauma with alcohol. The alcohol might help them for couple of hours to calm them down, make them feel relaxed but it will not solve their original trauma that is stuck inside of their system. Only therapy can help the alcoholics to remove the trauma out of their system. Unpacking your trauma includes feeling your feelings, having difficult conversations, taking radical responsibility for your actions and implementing new healthy routines.
How to feel the feelings when you feel emotionally numb.
The first step to heal your emotions is to acknowledge you have a problem. The first step to healing is to acknowledge that you feel too much or that you don´t feel at all. That´s all you have to do as a first step, just sit with yourself alone in your room or home and acknowledge what you feel or not feel. You can change only what you acknowledge. If you can´t feel, don´t judge yourself, just sit in your “no-feelings” in sessions. Don´t stress about it, don´t obsess about it, just accept yourself as it is right now. Here is the thing – if I would tell you repeatedly “don´t think about the pink elephant, don´t think about him”, the more I would repeat it to you, paradoxically the more you would be thinking about this pink elephant. Don´t repeat in your mind “I can´t feel, I can´t feel”. Just sit peacefully with yourself and accept your emotional numbness. Let me guess – you can´t feel the negative emotions but you can´t feel the positive emotions either, am I right? It´s because of the nature of how emotions work - when we go through something traumatizing, we have a tendency to suppress those “bad emotions”. But emotions can´t be suppressed selectively, meaning, if you suppress the negative emotions, you automatically suppress the positive emotions too. So, once you can´t feel the negative emotions, you automatically can´t feel the positive emotions either. The trauma suppressed your emotions and you pushed them deep down inside of yourself where you have a hard time to access them due to the trauma. When we go through something very traumatic, we have a tendency to dissociate, disconnect and detach from our own selves and what we feel. It´s how we protect our own selves, its how our brain protects us. Not feeling or feeling too much (in other words, the dysregulated emotions) are just a different name for “unfinished grieving”. Feeling your feelings is about finishing the grieving process. Whatever we grieve (for example, a failed relationship, loss of our beloved ones, etc.), we get better only after the grieving process is fully finished. When the grieving process is being blocked or it failed, we fall into “a prolonged grieving” which is a part of a complicated trauma. Usually we can call something “the prolonged grieving” when your grieving lasts longer than one year. The grieve we have not felt and never finished, the anger we have not expressed, the pain we have not faced and felt is suppressed deep inside of us, deep in our subconsciousness, even we might feel it´s not there, it is there. Part of the healing is a process of reconnecting with our own selves (with all puzzle pieces inside of us). When we are not connected to our own selves, it feels like we are not connected to others either. The love always starts with self-love so we can love others. Connection always starts with connecting with our own selves so we can connect with others. First you have to connect with your own self, then you will be able to connect with others. The goal of re-connecting with your own self is to come back to your body. You consist of body, mind and spirit. All these three elements need to come back “home” inside of you. You can heal only when you are vulnerable and authentic with what you feel or even what you don´t feel. Do not normalize false positivity. Be sad when you want to be sad. Be happy when you are truly happy. Feel nothing when you feel nothing. Don´t pretend to be happy when what you really feel is sadness. Your sadness is calling you to sit with this feeling and listen to what your sadness has to say to you. You can´t heal when you are not vulnerable. Being vulnerable feels scary but you have to take this risk of being vulnerable. Because you will come to the point where what you suppress will be more unbearable than whatever is the result of the risk of being vulnerable.
“Inner child in inner house” – the exercise for feeling your feelings and self-love.
I am developing an exercise I have called “Inner child in inner house”. I see it very helpful and it´s so easy to do. Today, I would like you to try this exercise. It will help you to reconnect with your own self and it will help you to feel your feelings and loving yourself. The main goal of this exercise is to get out of your head and get into your soul and heart. Especially people who are thinkers have a problem to feel. Feeling your feelings is about feeling, not thinking. You can´t think yourself out of trauma, you have to feel yourself out of your trauma. How weird it sounds “I think my feelings”, right? You can´t think about feelings, you can only feel them. Self-love is to allow yourself to feel authentically. How cruel you are towards your own self when you don´t allow yourself to feel whatever you feel (no matter how bizarre those emotions are for your mind). How cruel you are towards your own self for suppressing your emotions. It´s opposite of self-love. The self-love is about loving your own self, fully accepting yourself and honor all your emotions. The motto of this exercise is: “Don´t think. Just feel”. Through the whole exercise keep reminding yourself that you have to avoid thinking, you should be only feeling. Every time you start to think, remind yourself to go back to feeling. Here is the thing with thinking. Your mind and logic want to justify and rationalize everything. The moment you want to feel your feelings authentically, your mind will be right behind you trying to rationalize why you should not feel those feelings. Your mind is like a jumping monkey in your mind telling you: “you should not cry, it is a shame to cry. Don´t feel sad, it´s embarrassing to feel sad. Don´t feel this feeling, you will look like crazy”. Your heart and soul do not care about any shame. For your heart and soul nothing is bizarre because every emotion is authentic, real, valid and beautiful. Your heart and mind do not have any opinion about your emotions, they don´t judge you. It´s only your mind who always judge and is opinionated. Judging is mind. And judging creates shame. And shame blocks feeling the feelings. Don´t think. Just feel. You don´t need to find the reason to feel (reason = mind), you don´t need to have opinion about your feelings. Just free flow style feeling. You are the river, just flow like the river. The river does not think in order to be able to run. Are you ready? Let´s go:
I want you to find 20 minutes in a solitude and silence where nobody will disturb you. Preferably somewhere where is bed. Lie on the back on your bed. This exercise is highly visualizing.
I want you to visualize this: You are inside of your head. You take a ladder and go down the ladder, step by step, until you reach your chest (the area where is your heart and soul). You enter your chest. Inside of your chest, there is a peaceful sunny meadow. In the middle of the meadow, there is a little cute tiny house. This is your inner house. This is your most safe place on this planet. This house is inside of you. You are safe inside of you. You are protected by angels in this house. You enter the house. Inside of your inner house, you see a little child, right in front of you. This is your inner child. Most probably, you are meeting your inner child for the first time in your life. For the first time in your life, you are acknowledging your own self. Your inner child represents all of your unmet needs, wants, all of your childhood trauma, your pain, your feelings of being invisible and unimportant. Your inner child looks like a homeless orphan, it stands in the middle of the room, dirty, crying, hungry. You walk towards your inner child. You take your poor inner child into your arms and take it on the couch. There is a table right next to the couch. On that table, there are nicely smelling vanilla and cinnamon cookies and a vegan hot chocolate. Feed your inner child. Your inner child is calming down and smile at you. You can feel like the inner child is calming down until it is fully calm and peaceful. Your inner child does not feel alone anymore because you are there for him or her. Hug your inner child and tell him or her that from now on, you are always there for your inner child and you will never leave him or her. Tell your inner child: “I am here for you, I will never leave you, I am listening, tell me everything you always wanted to tell while nobody was listening”. Your inner parent is now there for your inner child. The child is being taken care of by an adult for the first time in his or her life. Your inner child is now happy, peaceful and smile at you. You are there for your inner child and your inner child is there for you. You finally came home.
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