Morning Reflection: You have to face, and feel, your feelings

You have to face, and feel, your feelings.

We all have feelings we like to feel. Feelings like joy, happiness, excitement, love and comfort to name just a few. Those are the emotions that make life worth living.

But we also have to deal with the other type of emotions, like loss, loneliness, frustration, pain and shame. Those are the emotions that hurt, and make us wish for a change in how we feel.

How do you avoid your negative feelings?

For me, for a long time, it was food. That’s how I ended up morbidly obese, and closer to death than I want to admit. But that wasn’t my only ‘coping mechanism’. I would also become angry at myself, preferring the pain of self loathing rather than the pain of someone else being angry or disappointed in me.

Last night, I had an occasion to face a negative feeling, rather than try to run from it, or busy myself in something else to forget it. The negative feeling was sadness, after I failed to follow through on something that someone very dear to me asked of me. It wasn’t something earth shattering, but it made that person feel unappreciated.

But this time, rather than get angry with myself, or get quiet and withdraw, I made the conscious decision to allow the feeling to exist, and feel how it felt. No avoidance, no rationalization, nothing to try to ameliorate the feeling of acknowledging that I let someone down.

And it didn’t feel good at all. But I lived.

Growth comes when we stop avoiding our feelings, and learn from them.

Growth comes when we accept that things might hurt for a while, but we don’t try to dull that pain with other measures.

Growth comes when we take a deep breath, and allow the truth of who we are to wash over us, and bathe us in the emotions that can change us.

Like the small flower that struggles to pierce the earth to find the sunlight, or the child who struggles to walk despite falling again and again, we too can struggle through and learn from our painful emotions if we will but face them, feel them and find the strength to change through them.

Running from your emotions never solves the problem.

The only way out is through.

Go through it. You can do this.

-- Dr. Alan Barnes

@maddrbdc

Morning Reflection: When you can’t explain the pain that you feel.

When you can’t explain the pain that you feel.

Sometimes, there are no words to adequately express the things we feel. How do you describe the agony of losing your first love, of your first significant public embarrassment, or of shame when you realize that you have let yourself down?

How do you describe the overwhelming feeling of happiness when you truly, madly and deeply love another person beyond all understanding?

Language, it seems, is insufficient to fully explain our emotions. Poets craft with words, singers with songs and artists with paint and canvas… but usually we fall short.

Often when I am coaching with someone, we reach a point beyond which they are unable to vocalize their feelings about a certain event in the past or express their fears of what could come in the future. As though the ability to explain has been taken from them, they hesitate, stutter and often fail to even briefly explain the thoughts and feelings that they encounter in their soul.

These are known as mind blocks, but I choose to think of then more as soul barriers. Often the truth behind these barriers is wrapped in pain, and is usually originally experienced in childhood, where our reasoning is limited, and our vulnerability amplifies the intensity of the pain.

Such painful emotions are not coded in language, but in sensations and images. The feeling part of our brain uses no words, but the part of our brain that tries to understand these feelings uses language to make sense of things.

And so the disconnect is born, and we have to painfully drag out these emotions, and examine them through the lens of language, so that we might pick out the falsehoods that accompany these sensations and images, and lay them to rest.

The next time you feel afraid, angry, sad, threatened or any other unwanted emotion, try to explain as clearly as possible why you feel that way. The answers may surprise you.

For practice, try explaining the emotions that the picture accompanying my words evokes. Share your description if you feel so inclined.

This process of explaining emotions is hard, but worthwhile. Unresolved pain creates more barriers to peace than anything else I have encountered.

The journey of self awareness is a long road, but the destination is a place of wonder.

-- Dr. Alan Barnes

@losingtowin120