Tag: feelings

By Feelings.

I always knew that my quilting was Art Therapy, I just never knew how…it just was.

I never sat down and dissected the parts or even looked closely at the process, but rather was focused on the fabric, quilts and design, but not at what was happening behind the scenes if you will or what the overall technique was doing.

I was processing my pain…while the mind was focused on the quilt, my unconscious was leaking out in the overall picture.

It was like there were two selves down there quilting.

The conscious quilter and the unconscious pain.

My quilts were a barometer of my unconscious pain, my fears and sense of self; as my sense of self worth grew, the Lady in my quilt became more alive and animated. And at times answers to fears were shown to be unfounded.

What I find so odd is that I felt I was escaping myself by quilting, and yet it was there that I was most prolific. I wasn't running from me, but towards me.

My feelings would dictate the scene in the Art and the fabric and design. I knew I quilted by feelings, I just never looked at what I was feeling or why I chose what fabric I did and why I felt drawn to create a lady engaged in a certain feeling.

And there were times I would start out with one feeling and then take sudden turn and a completely different quilt would emerge.

All of this is very amazing looking back at my quilted journey of feelings.

What I recall most, is the times I felt so out of sorts in real life, so lost in the now and old relationships, and how at home the Lady felt on the quilt…and how she seemed to foretell my feelings, ahead of me being aware I felt that way…perhaps ahead of my mind.

Guess that is what Art is more about, getting out of your mind and playing with feelings.

Photograph by Hannah Jukuri

A clothesline full of feelings as a woman processes her pain, her life and seeks to find hope for her future. I was completely turned inside out and quilted from there as well. These are my insides; my feelings and emotions. Contrasts, convergences, waves of energy…processing who I wasn't and processing who I was…finding my way by feelings.

May 20, 2012

abuse, art, childhood, feelings, process, Quilted, self, therapy
Feelings feel felt.

"The fastest way to freedom is to feel your feelings." Gita Bellin

"This sounds pretty simple, but though it's easy to know you have feelings, easy to know their weight and agitation and suddenness of mood, it is another, more subtle matter to feel them – that is, to let them penetrate your being in the way wind snaps through a flag."

"This is necessary because if we don't feel our feelings all the way through, they never leave us, and then we do all kinds of unusual things to get out from under them. This is the cause of many an addiction."

"I've diverted myself many times by becoming involved in what surrounds my pain or sadness, while never feeling the thing itself. So, when someone asks me how I feel, I wind up retelling the circumstances of the pain, but not feeling it. Or strategizing what to do next, but not feeling it. Or anticipating reactions, but not feeling what is mine to feel. Or swimming in the anger and injustice, but not diving through the wound."

"Though we fear it, feeling our feelings is the only clear and direct way to free our hearts of pain." Mark Nepo

How appropriate to have this reading this morning. Feeling our feelings seems like it would be impossible to do, yet I quickly get caught up in the current of anger and injustice, the wide and swirling river of it…unexpressed feelings from long long ago.

It seems that river never runs dry.

What I believe happens is that if you can't feel as a child, then as an adult, you don't just feel this moment of feelings, but all the similar type feelings of the past pile upon each other to be expressed.

So, instead of being mildly put out, I am outraged.

Instead of feeling a bit overlooked, I feel totally neglected.

The wealth of feelings that I have to feel, truly feel like 50 years worth of bottled up negativity…and even joy.

Overreacting is standard for me…for in the past I under felt.

I never felt all the way through feelings…

And sadly, the more traumatic, the less I ventured in. Now all feelings feel like tragedies are looming. Simplistic and typical pulls and pushes of parent and teenage child, feel to me like I am being abused, again.

Feelings stored in me find opportunities to be expressed…so of course it is in relationships that they line up, pushing and shoving to come out.

Separating the old feelings from the new is very tricky.

Letting out and airing the childhood wounds AND not inflicting wounds upon my children is crucial. The two can't be joined…yet it seems this is where my expressing happens. I get a voice of expression, but at the wrong time…

When someone labeled feelings "Time travelers"….they were right.

I am saying what I needed to say, but 50 years too late.

How do I now feel them all the way through, without subjecting my children with their expression? How do you get them to rise to the surface without something/someone prompting them? Is it possible to get them to rise by myself? Is it possible to feel them, without a label?

In yoga feelings arise without labels….I feel.

In real life feelings are triggered, labeled. Does it matter?

Am I like a ticking time bomb waiting to explode? Is yoga the place to defuse that bomb? Writing and acknowledging and knowing is good, but it is when I get an emotional response that the feelings feel felt.

March 26, 2012

awakening, book, emotions, feelings, Mark, Nepo, of
In Control Within the Flow

Today's reading, March 21,in the Book of Awakening, by Mark Nepo "To Harbor and Release" I love this one.

"Often the pain of resisting makes us rust like iron, and in order to re-enter the flow of life, we need to be scraped back to our original surface. Our feelings, if not released, bread the heart with their grit. Like windows filmed by weather, we wait on loving hands to be rubbed clear. It is inevitable. Experience covers us over, and the expressive journey lets us come clean to the table of light. Again."

"All things in existence participate in this involuntary cycle. For human beings, the process of living stains us repeatedly with the grit of being here, with heartache and disappointment and the pointedness of being human, which can sicken us if harbored or make us whole if released. Again and again, we, more than any other life form, have this majestic and burdensome power to harbor or release the impact of our experience."

"Humbly, we are asked to keep the flow real between what is taken in and what is let out. We have only to breathe to remember our place as a living inlet. Experience in, feelings out. Surprise and challenge in, heartache and joy out. In a constant tide, life rushes in, and in constant release, we must let it all run back off. For this is how the earth was made magnificent by the sea and how mankind is carved upright, again and again, by the ocean of spirit that sets us free." Mark Nepo

What we have to remember, what we take in, we have to let out. I love, "Experience in, Feelings out." This one sentence alone says so much.

I believe that children who were abused in childhood, learn to experience and not to let the feelings out. We instead try and hold our feelings inside and do so til we explode in various ways.

Rarely are children allowed to express their feelings after being sexually abused or physically abused. We experience and then we have no outlet.

This alone has created an unnatural way of being human. To take in things in silence our of fear of reprisals, is living half way. This is how the rust builds upon us. And in my experience, only by expressing what has gone unexpressed, do we clear away the layers of film upon us.

The natural process of Experience in, Feelings out, is disrupted in abuse and this alone is the cause of so much disease and violence…we are out of control, out of order, not able to work correctly.

The term harboring resentment came to mind. I didn't know that when we don't express our feelings (release them) we are harboring.

I had truckloads of expressions to release, and in the beginning they flowed like a rushing river, tumbling over each other, with volumes raised, they tore out of me…held back so long their force near violent in the outward flow.

While it had to be shocking and out of character for others to witness this of me, it felt extremely healing to say what I had failed to say…for years.

I wasn't the most prolific or articulate or kind as the words came rushing out, but I was scraping off the rust of old feelings I hadn't felt. Some were not so pleasant or kind themselves…and all had to be felt in order to be released.

Now, it is my intention to not let layers of unexpressed or unfelt emotions pile up upon myself, for it feels heavy and a burden to carry…so whatever I experience, I let my feelings out…I don't like holding on to feelings.

Harboring your feelings seems safer when you have been abused…we learn to keep them in order to get along and for sheer survival for some.

Abuse teaches us to live only taking in…never in a healthy release.

I am still learning how to release. Sometimes it still comes out very fearful or childlike in expression, but to me…it isn't about the delivery, but rather that they get out. Maybe over time, with enough space and healing, I will be able to release them with a graceful kind and compassionate delivery…and not the hurried careless abandon that often rushes out.

I will find my natural releasing stance…that isn't totally harboring or rushing abandon…but rather a fearless authenticity, beautiful yet powerful, in control within the flow.

March 21, 2012

abuse, awakening, book, child, feelings, Mark, Nepo, of, releasing, voiceless
I left Apathy behind.

"One of the biggest obstacles of handling and letting go of fear is the fear of fear itself." David Hawkins, writes in his book, "Healing and Recovery".

Fear of feeling fear stops us from living life or walking into unchartered territories. But what if you were not afraid to feel fear? You know what fear feels like to you and if you can handle feelings of fear, you are limitless.

My feelings of fear are those of panic, and unable to escape or control…feelings of being caught doing something wrong, my gut does flip and I feel embarrassed, inept…

I would bet most of my fear feelings would equal those feelings of learning something new, or going some place unknown….Yet a more heightened state.

What David suggests is seeing if you can withstand the sensations of fear…that it isn't really the thing you are afraid of but the sensations of fear.

Becoming familiar and confident in withstanding the sensations of fear, will set you free to do and try many things.

I got to be pretty friendly with fear as I walked away from my family of origin. I feared feeling feelings, especially those that were negative and painful. But what I also learned you don't die from feeling…but are among the living dead when you don't feel.

Another sentence I read from Mark Nepo's book, "The Book of Awakening, was "We tend to make the thing in the way the way."

Reading this sentence gave me a new way to look at why it is that I am uninspired to do yoga.

The thing in the way is apathy, laziness…

It was the way for me.

But not the way to feeling a strong limber body. I stood on the path of apathy.

Today, after reading that sentence, I stepped off of apathy way, and onto the yoga mat.

There was nothing in the way from me doing yoga but being used to sitting on apathy way.

Two very popular pathways in my life are fear and apathy. Perhaps we don't want to feel fear and then become apathetic…for we are unable to move forward.

When I stood up from my chair, I left apathy behind.

February 9, 2012

apathy, choices, david, fear, feelings, Hawkins, I l, Mark, Nepo
Days to Slip By

My brother's Excel class had him calculating out the number of days he has lived so far, and I did the same. Today is number 19,365 for me!

That is how many mornings I woke up and seen a new day.

Yet for the first many thousands, I woke up living my life frozen in a pattern that was preset and one that seemed my destiny.

I even recall feeling the panic feelings of not being able to stop the way I was living, that there were so many people attached to the movement of my life. That me changing would be too disruptive, but that at some point, they will need me less and then there will be an opportunity to be free.

The more I explored how stuck I was, the more I wanted to live differently, but I had no idea how to suddenly change my life.

And then, Life seemed to suddenly change…and I followed it. But this time, I did it completely different. I hadn't realized at the time that I was going to transform my whole life. All I was doing was following my body and my feelings.

I just hadn't realized realized realized, that I hadn't been living my life from the inside out. I didn't really know how much of my life was lived for others, Until it came to me to follow my body and feelings.

The huge amounts of changes that ensued showed me how much of me and my life had been lived for others…and by me being fake.

I wouldn't have called it living fake, I would have said, "I am putting aside my feelings and my life unselfishly to make another happy." Believing that this is a kind and loving thing to do.

I lived 16, 775 days (yep I did the math 😉 pushing aside my feelings in order to make another happy. I lived disconnected from my body, disassociated from my emotions, and very focused on others…for thousands of days.

I would awaken each day carrying many lives upon my shoulders…worrying, wondering, thinking, and pondering their lives, giving very little thoughts to me and my life. My life was their life.

I had me pushed so far back, there wasn't but a teeny bit of me showing.

It seems impossible now. It seems scary to me to live a life with so little of me showing. To live without access to my feelings and emotions, to live stoically and remotely. To shut down and close off my life in order for another to be happy and at peace.

You can't go and get those days back, they have been breathed, lived and passed by. How much I missed, I can't even begin to imagine, how many emotions I pushed down and away for the sake of anothers is unreal. How they fit all stuffed within my body is remarkable…

For all that I stuffed down and away…never left. They just rode along waiting for me to one day focus on me.

The day I realized the truth of my life, the fact that my body has kept secure all my emotions, that none slipped by and away, was the day I began to live each day as me.

I began to feel…and feel and feel. Emotions washed over me, the terror, the helplessness, the empty trust, the negative feelings I had not looked at all came rushing in. Thirsty for me to feel. And I did.

My days were filled with past emotions and it felt like living on steroids. Eventually, the dam of emotions fell to a trickle…and I was able to live this day.

This day as it arrived, this emotion as it came, this moment in time…fully present.

I have lived without emotions or my feelings and it is a careless way to live. It leaves you caring less about your self.

Living days without a self isn't living…it is going through the motions without feelings…it is like living without a body or awareness.

Guess it is called unconscious being.

Trauma woke me up and actually trauma put me asleep…

I have lived life both ways, and there is no contest; being able to feel and allow each emotion to see the light of day is the only way to live.

Otherwise you are just breathing, unaware…counting years and allowing days to slip by.

January 8, 2012

days, emotions, feelings, life, living, unconscious
How It Feels

I am reading "The Body Never Lies," again by Alice Miller.

What is really standing out to me this time around is the fact about feelings. Or the fact that it is more typical than not to not be aware of your true feelings.

Alice writes, "Genuine Feelings are never a product of conscious effort. They are quite simply there, and they are there for a very good reason, even if that reason is not always apparent. I cannot force myself to love or honor my parents if my body rebels against such an endeavor for reasons that are well-known to it. But if I still attempt to obey the Fourth Commandment, then the upshot will be the kind of stress that is invariably involved when I demand the impossible of myself. This kind of stress has accompanied me almost all my life. Anxious to stay in line with the system of moral values I had accepted, I did my best to imagine good feeings I did not possess while ignoring the bad feelings I did have. My aim was to be loved as a daughter. But the effort was all in vain. In the end I had to realize that I cannot force love to come if it is not there in the first place. On the other hand, I learned that a feeling of love will establish itself automatically (for example, love for my children or love for my friends) once I stop demanding that I feel such love and stop obeying the moral injunctions impossed on me. But such a sensation can happen only when I feel free and remain open and receptive to all my feelings, including the negative ones."

"The realization that I cannot manipulate my feelings, that I can delude neither myself nor others, brought me immense relief and liberation. Only then was I fully struck by the large number of people who (like myself) literally almost kill themselves in the attempt to obey the Fourth Commandment, without any consideration of the price this extracts both from their own bodies and from their children. As long as the children allow themselves to be used this way, it is entirely possible to live to be one hundred without any awareness of one's own personal truth and without any illness ensuing from this protracted form of self-deception."

"A mother who is forced to realize that the deprivations imposed on her in her youth make it impossible for her to love a child of her own, however hard she may try, can certainly expect to be accused of immorality if she has the courage to put that truth into words. But I believe that it is precisely this explicit acceptance of her true feelings, independent of the claims of morality, that will enable her to give both herself and her children the honest and sincere kind of support they need most, and at the same time allow her to free herself from the shackles of self-deception."

"When most children are born, what they need most from their parents is love, by which I mean affection, attention, care, protection, kindness, and the willingness to communicate. If these needs are gratified, the bodies of those children will retain the good memory of such caring, affection all their lives, and later, as adults, they will be able to pass on the same kind of love to their children. But if this is not the case, the children will be left with a lifelong yearning for the fulfillment of their initial (and vital) needs. In later life, this yearning will be directed at other people. In comparison, the more implacably children have been deprived of love and negated or maltreated in the name of "Upbringing," the more those children, on reaching adulthood, will look to their parents (or other people substituting for them) to supply all the things those same parents failed to provide when they were needed most. This is a normal response on the part of the body. It knows precisely what it needs, it cannot forget the deprivations. The deprivation or hole is there waiting to be filled."

"The older we get, the more difficult it is to find other people who can give us the love our parents denied us. But the body's expectations do not slacken with age – quite the contrary! They are merely directed at others, usually our own children and grandchildren. The only way out of this dilemma is to become aware of these mechanisms and to identify the reality of our own childhood by counteracting the process of repression and denial. In this way we can create in our own selves a person who can satisfy at least some of the needs that have been waiting for fulfillment since birth, if not earlier. Then we can give ourselves the attention, the respect, the understanding for our emotions, the sorely needed protection, and the unconditional love that our parents withheld from us."

"To make this happen we need one special experience; the experience of love for the child we once were. Without it, we have no way of knowing what love consists of." Alice Miller

While I knew that having lived 46 years trying so hard to possess feelings of love and warmth toward my parents, and working at being a warmer person, it had never not once occurred to me that I wasn't the problem. That due to the lack of feelings of love didn't mean there was something the matter with me…but rather what I was trying to love.

I remember having odd and horrifying realizations about my self, when the lack of deep caring and love didn't arise from me, towards my parents. I would not even want to glance to long at this self that seemed to be so detached and cool. For what child doesn't want to be with her parents?

The double feelings that I had with the discovery that my father was a pedophile, was that I wasn't a broken love person. I wasn't cold or detached…I wasn't living in a broken body and cold toward family…I wasn't damaged…but my family was.

I am not sure I can tell you how it feels to believe you don't have access to warmth and caring or love towards parents…and feel you are damaged. That you arrived empty of that kind of love. Yet I knew I could feel, but couldn't carry those feelings to my parents.

It now gives me great peace to know I can't manipulate feelings…that emotions are natural responses, ones that come up without any assistance from me. It leaves me in a neutral position taking the lead from my body.

My body never lies…however, I have lied about my body.

I have lived faking my feelings.

Living a fake life.

But no more. Now, I simply agree with how It feels.

January 6, 2012

4th, abuse, Alice, body, childhood, commandment, feelings, lies, Miller, never, parents, The
Wish For Your Self.

What a great year of learning, again.

Lessons seemed to continually line up to serve to me… more of me; more freedom, more letting go, surrendering and allowing, more ways to be expressive, a deeper understanding, followed by affirmations of what doing the opposite would look like.

I think I thought, that when I said I was going forth with love, peace and joy, like magic, that was what would follow. Wrong.

Instead I was served up all of my relationships were no love, peace or joy existed, and asked to redo myself there.

I was given opportunity after opportunity, sometimes many at a time, all clamoring for my attention…insatiable energies of need and control, that had kept me from peace or feelings of love or experiencing joy.

What I believe lots of folks believe, is that they stay in the same place, but instead of feeling anxious, controlled, resentful, rage, anger, tight restraint…they will just work harder to feel different.

To stay with same relationships, BUT feel differently about them.

Feel more loving…will bring up love. And to become peaceful where rebellious feelings explode…to dial down or to a different frequency.

That isn't what real love, peace and joy is.

That is denying what is there and forcing feelings. Which is to have false feelings of love, peace and joy.

Many believe you can simply just 'think' differently about an individual etc and like magic, feelings will change. That your feelings are the problem within the relationship…not that the relationship itself is where the troubles lie.

Seeing life differently is where the key lies.

I am reading, "The Body Never Lies" by Alice Miller. This is one of the first authors who addresses the child, instead of the parent…she sees abuse from the child's perspective and how the body feels and then how the child is made to 'feel different' in order to honor and love thy parents.

She writes, "The parenting approach know as "Poisonous Pedogogy" breeds overly well adjusted individuals who can only trust the mask they have been Forced to wear because as children they lived in constant fear of punishment. "I am bringing you up in the way that is best for you" is the supreme principle behind this approach. "If I beat you or use words to torment and humiliate you, it is for all for your own good."

"In this famous novel Fateless, the Hungarian writer and Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz describes his arrival at the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was fifteen years old at the time, and he tells us in great detail how he attempted to interpet the many grotesque and appalling things he encountered on his arrival there as something positive and favorable for him. Otherwise he would not have survived his own mortal fear."

"Probably every child who has suffered abuse must assume an attitude like this in order to survive. These children reinterpret their perceptions in a desperate attempt to see as good and beneficial things that outside observers would immediately classify as crimes. Children have no choice. They must repress their true feelings if they have no "helping witness" to turn to and are helplessly exposed to their persecutors. Later as adults lucky enough to encounter "enlightened witnesses," they do have a choice. Then they can admit the truth, their truth; they can stop pitying and "understanding" their persecutors, stop trying to feel their unsustainable, disassociated emotions, and roundly denounce the things that have been done to them. This step bring immense relief for the body. It no longer has to forcibly remind the adult self of the tragic history it went through as a child. Once the adult self has decided to find out the whole truth about itself, the body feels understood, respected, and protected."

"I call the violent kind of "upbringing" abuse, not only because children are thus refused the right to dignity and respect as human beings but also because such an approach to parenting establishes a kind of totalitarian regime in which it is impossible for children to perceive the humilations, indignities, and disrespect they have been subjected to, let alone defend themselves against them. These patterns of childhood will inevitably then be adopted by their victims and used on their partners and their own children, at work, in politics, wherever fear and anxiety of the profoundly insecure child can be fended off with the aid of external power. It is in this way that dictators are born; these are people with a deep-seated contempt for everyone else, people who were never respected as children and thus do their utmost to earn that respect at a later stage with the assistance of the gigantic power apparatus they have built around them."

"The sphere of politics is an excellent example of the way in which the hunger for power and recognition is never stilled. It is insatiable, it can never be entirely satisfied. The more power these people have, the more they are spurred on to actions of compulsory repetition, restore the initial feelings of impotence they were trying to escape; Hitler is his bunker, Stalin in his paranoid fears, Mao in the final rejection by his people, Napoleon in exile, Milosevic in prison, Saddam Hussein in his mortifying fall from power. What impelled these men to abuse the power they had achieved to such a pitch that it ultimately plunged them into impotence and powerlessness? I believe it was their bodies. Their bodies sustained the knowledge of the impotence they felt in childhood; they stored such knowledge in their cells, and they set out to force their "owners" to face up to that knowledge. But the reality of their childhood instilled such fear in the hearts of these dictators that they preferred to wipe out whole peoples, to exterminate millions of human beings, rather than confront the truth – their truth." Alice Miller

I am reading this book for the second time, and it once again has a much broader meaning to me, than the first time around. I am now able to see more potently the actual ways a child has to disregard its own body in order to survive, to look for 'positive' so not to drown in its own mortal fears…and how quickly an outsider can spot the crimes, while those within are unable to see.

I have experienced the view of being an outsider and the quick slamming of the door behind me as I stood on the sidewalk, for the 'family unit' couldn't withstand the truth…mine and theirs.

Their impotency against truth is what causes such insane behavior. Their lack of self power and worth has them snubbing outside…like that is where their truth lives…within us.

You can berate me and kick me out of your life, but your truth, just as in the Dictators of the past did…but you are kicking us so as to NOT feel and own your own truth.

I know that I have been kicked aside. And it has nothing to do with me, but it has much more to do with the individual's fear of their own truths. By keeping me out of their worlds, they like the 15 year old Hungarian Boy, keep their concentration camp a place of positive living…of love, peace and joy.

I am so grateful that I was able to have the courage to see my own truth…

What I didn't know, is that the most violent among us are those who are in mortal fear of seeing their childhoods in Reality's Light.

That their violent behavior is to keep themselves from feeling the truth about their parents.

So, as you go forth on this New Year's day, be careful what you seek for your self in 2012.

If you seek, like I did, a life filled with love, peace and joy; you will first have to find all the places you have it wrong. It has been 7 years of learning what isn't…in order for me to then set forth again.

My wish for you is your own wish for your self.

January 1, 2012

2012, abuse, affects, Alice, body, child, feelings, lies, Miller, never, New, perceptions, The, wishes, year
The Grieving Process

I am rereading Melody Beatte's book, "Codependent No More," and I am very surprised to see how she spends a lot of time on the grieving process.

She writes,

‎"A codependent person or a chemically dependent person may be in many stages of the grief process for several losses, all during the same time. Denial, depression, bargaining, and anger may all come rushing in. We may not know what we're trying to accept. We may not even know we're struggling to accept a situation. We may simply feel like we've gone crazy"

‎"We may travel back and forth; from anger to denial, from denial to bargaining, from bargaining back to denial. Regardless of the speed and route we travel through these stages, we must travel through them. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross says it is not only a Normal Process, it is a necessary process, and each stage is necessary. We must ward off the blows of life until we are better prepared to deal with them. We must feel anger and pain and blame until we have gotten them out of our system…"

‎"Grief, like any genuine emotion, is accompanied by certain physical changes and the release of a form of psychic energy. If that energy is not expended in the normal process of grieving, it becomes destructive within a person. Even physical illness can be a penalty for unresolved grief…" Melody

‎"Learn the Art of Acceptance. It's a lot of grief" Melody

This section in the book has opened my eyes to many things. First that the five stages of grief don't run in a straight line, nor do they wait their turn, you can actually be flung from one to another in rapid succession AND, we can be processing many losses at one time.

I can see the road I traveled and why. And I love that she (Elisabeth and Melody) allow us to be in our stages of grief for as long as it takes, that there are no rules, that we will PROCESS that which we need to process in our own time.

I knew I was grieving, what I failed to appreciate was how many feelings I had repressed that had to be felt, as well as brand new ones that came in.

Not only did I have to grieve the loss of a father and mother in my past, but had to do so in the present moment as well when they failed to act parental in this moment in time. AND, to say nothing of processing my loss childhood and me…siblings, religion and all the trappings that go with.

What I also wasn't truly understanding while I was living it, was that my feelings my feelings were the key to healing.

She writes,

"Another problem with repressed feelings is they don't go away. They linger, sometimes growing stronger and causing us to do many peculiar things. We have to stay one step ahead of the feelings, we have to stay busy, we have to do something. We don't dare get quiet and peaceful because we might then feel these emotions. And the feeling might squeak out anyway, causing us to do something we never intended to do; scream at the kids, kick the cat, spill on our favorite dress, or cry at the party. We get stuck in feelings because we are trying to repress them, and like a persistent neighbor, they will not go away until we acknowledge their presence."

"The big reason for NOT repressing feelings is that emotional withdrawal causes us to lose our positive feelings. We lose the ability to feel. Sometimes, this may be a welcome relief if the pain becomes too great or too constant, but this in not a good plan for living. We may shut down our deep needs – our need to love and be loved – when we shut down our emotions. We may lose our ability to enjoy sex, the human touch. We may lose the ability to feel close to people, otherwise known as intimacy. We lose our capacity to enjoy the pleasant things of life."

"We lose touch with ourselves and our environment. We are no longer in touch with our instincts. We become unaware of what our feelings are telling us and any problems in our environment. We lose the motivating power of feelings. If we aren't feeling we're probably not examining the thinking that goes with it, and we don't know what our selves are telling us. And if we don't deal with feelings we don't change and we don't grow. We stay stuck."

"Feelings may not always be a barrel of gladness, but repressing them can be downright miserable…" Melody

When I let the gate open to ALL feelings, I was overwhelmed and flooded, lost in the sea of emotions. I sat for days (really years) and just felt. I wrote and felt, and walked and felt and expressed and swore and hollered and vented. I cried and cried and sorrow poured from me…

When I finally sat down to feel, I had 40 years worth of feeling to do.

The past emotions clashed with my present day ones to be felt, and the volume was scary and volatile, I literally thought I was losing my mind, but what I was really doing was coming alive.

I not only was feeling feelings on the darkest end of the spectrum, but I was at the same time feeling the most exquisite feelings of warmth, joy, peace, love.

I was moved to tears by beauty.

While it may be the scariest of rides, this ride through the grieving process, to accept the horrors of life, it also is the gateway into living an authentic feeling life.

My feelings now are welcome, for I know the cost of repression AND how it really is an act that is futile; for unexpressed emotions never leave you….time travelers they have been called.

All you are doing is blocking ALL feelings. If you can't feel the sorrow, you will not be able to feel the love, the peace and the joy.

I lived blocked, like a block of wood for way too long. I now celebrate feeling! It matters not to me what the feelings, are I accept them all.

This book also offers to me and explanation for so many who are unable to walk in their truth…and feel. It explains how they are not skipping around the mountain, but trying to hold it back…they can until they can't. For now, they are not willing to leave that stage of the grieving process.

December 17, 2011

acceptance, beatte, codependent, Elisabeth, emotions, feelings, grieving, Kubler-Ross, life, losses, melody, more, no, process
Living Vicariously.

In the last blog post about Authoritarian child rearing…where the child is taught to listen to the parent, always…and forget how IT feels and how the parents are not open to a new way of seeing the world, PERHAPS from the child's eyes…leads to the greatest downfall of human kind; The separation from your own feelings…your truth.

And actually, it isn't that we are separated from them, but we are taught to disregard them. And in the disregarding of your own feelings, you are raised to live BY the feelings of others.

Instead of a seeing eye dog to lead the blind around, we are given a Feeling Like I, person that we follow.

We are taught NOT to use the wonderful instrument called the human body, but to disassociate from it….and hop on the backs of someone else's feelings and live from there.

Living vicariously through their lives.

I had to look up the definition of Vicarious….

indirectly, as, by, or through a substitute; "she enjoyed the wedding vicariously".

Imagine, we are taught to live Indirectly and not directly in our own lives.

I spent 46 vicarious years on the backs of my parents, my church, my friends…you name them and I was there in their lives…contributing and giving to make their lives 'happier' or whatever, meanwhile, I was nowhere to be found in my own.

I was substituting their life for my own.

When we are raised to not be directly with our feelings, we are then taught to not feel, that which we feel and to give up our feelings for the sake and happiness of another's feelings.

We are brought up to live outside of our own bodies…and it doesn't help when we are abused, for in that moment too, it isn't about our feelings, but the feelings and needs of our abusers. We assume this is life as usual, for our feelings have never mattered.

How is sexual abuse different from physical or verbal, when our feelings don't matter?

Abuse compounds the authoritarian parenting style.

Or perhaps, abuse is the outcome of trying to hijack another life and make it your own.

My demeanor was very dark as I mothered as an authoritarian…I was stealing lives just as my mother did. Raiding their feelings to make me feel better. Insanity and incredibly selfish.

The only reason I let go of being the Authoritarian, is that I learned what I had the authority over….Abuse.

My power, my control, my high handedness was all to keep abuse flowing freely and protecting and pouring loving feelings into a dark pit…a vortex of unending demand.

I was a key player in keeping the Play called Family alive and when in reality, it wasn't family, it was abuse.

So, I had taken the same power and control and worked it sadistic magic to steal my children's feelings, hijacking them to make me feel good, just as I was taught as a child. And we called this love.

It was only when I seen the Reality Play and the Characters without the masks I was continually providing, did I stop acting.

It was my acting that kept this all alive…I acted differently than I felt. I acted in ways that made my parents smile, made them happy, even if it was allowing abuse.

Once I seen what the script I was reading from was really doing, I was horrified. It wasn't about a loving family, it was all choreographed to keep a pedophile operating.

By Acting against my feelings and by keeping the family script going, I was not seeing or feeling what was really going on…and in doing so, was blind to the abuse.

What still haunts me is the depth of my blindness and the breadth of my believability…how naively I was born upon this stage and began speaking in double speak, going the opposite direction of my feelings.

And in doing so, gave me a life that was the opposite of reality.

I am now an authoritarian about my feelings.

I live directly with them and will not stray away from how they feel.

If you can't be direct with how you feel, most likely you are living vicariously.

December 13, 2011

abuse, authority, direct, feelings, honestly, parenting
I need nothing from Christmas.

What I haven't realized until it was gone, are the feelings of heaviness and weight of the added stress of holidays…What I had thought was extra work, was actually being slammed by feelings.

Feelings come alive and merge and meld in multitude of ways during this 'Family' time.

If you have reconciled all your feelings, trimming the tree is just trimming the tree….there is no hidded wound it has to fill, no making you feel 'overbright'.

When I hadn't come to terms with all my feelings or felt truthfully all that I had felt, It seemed like I was being scrambled by the holidays, that they were forcing me to do things I didn't want to do or were exposing things I didn't want exposed. And during this family time, well, we had just damn well better be a family!

It was trying to bend into the Spirit of the Holiday with feelings that didnt' match.

I have come to terms with the new me…and feel okay, settled and the Holidays are not asking anything of me…or putting me in a position that brings up feelings that I don't like. And I have no false expectations of Christmas making a family that isn't already there.

I am not sure I can put to words the absence of my feelings being pulled and prodded; where hidden in each 'tradition' lay a sword that could split me in two.

I had three Christmas filled days and nothing bite me. Nothing felt bad or overburdened and sad, no Blue Christmas….tones floated in.

I am not sure I have ever had a Christmas minus awkward feelings of something.

The childhood expectations always were left wanting…when I was young, and I thought I was seeking a better gift, when what I actually sought was to live in a space free of expectations…perhaps expectations that were impossible to deliver.

Christmas had to deliver to me what the rest of the year failed to do.

Without expectations, there is zero stress.

My gifts are just gifts, they expect nothing in return.

The tree isn't there to bring me happy feelings…with happy feelings I trimmed the tree.

The difference is like breathing or not breathing.

Bring a happy person to Christmas is what I could not do before…Christmas was to make me happy, while I struggle and stressed to make it just right, so I could be happy.

Imagine.

Now I don't need Christmas to deliver to me that which is impossible to deliver, I need nothing from Christmas.

December 12, 2011

Christmas, dysfunction, expectations, family, feelings, Holiday