We don’t really have the option to not feel our feelings.
We can try. And many trauma survivors do try to not feel our feelings.
We have all sorts of ways to try to not feel our feelings. Some ways we choose; some ways our nervous system chooses for us.
Why wouldn’t we want to feel our feelings?
Many of us experience such extreme emotional dysrgulation, that feeling anything is like feeling everything. I mean all the feelings, all at once. And that can be overwhelming.
Some of us were programmed to believe feeling anything was “weak.” Or “wrong.” Or “gross.”
Many of us are worried that if we let ourselves feel things, we’ll lose our tightly held grip on our behavior. That the only thing keeping us from acting out is the distance we’re keeping on our feelings.
In sum: we’ve been conditioned to believe that feelings are intolerable, darkly untamable and unpredictable things. Things that are not safe. Things that are not okay.
What BS (Belief Systems— but the other kind of BS, too).
The truth is, anything would feel overwhelming and dark if we thought about it and avoided it the same way we think about and avoid feelings.
Many trauma survivors have been led to believe that we just can’t tolerate this “feeling” stuff.
The thing is, though: we can.
It takes skill, and it takes practice, and it takes a willingness to not judge ourselves harshly when we struggle with it— but experiencing and managing our feelings is absolutely a skill we can learn and get better at.
What’s more: we really NEED our feelings— and we really NEED to feel our feelings.
I’m not saying we need to fell all our feelings at once, turned up to 11. I don’t think I’d enjoy that, anyway.
I am saying that it’s hard to live an authentic life while at the same time waging a war on our feelings.
Our feelings reflect our needs, our priorities, our values, and our experiences.
They are not random neural and/or hormonal events. Our feelings have purpose and meaning; rhyme and reason.
Because we cannot always hear that rhyme or decipher that reason in a given moment doesn’t mean it’s not there.
Getting on good terms with our emotional life is part and parcel of the larger project we face in trauma recovery: getting on good terms with ourselves, period.
We cannot recover from trauma, or anything sense, while simultaneously fighting and shaming ourselves.
If we’re going to have our own back, like we need to in trauma recovery, we have to meet our feelings like we meet every other part of our body, mind, or soul in recovery: with patience, with acceptance, with love.
Yeah, I said it: love.
You are not going to like everything you feel. I don’t like everything I feel. We don’t have to like or approve of every feeling that we experience.
But we do have to accept our feelings.
We do have to love our feelings, in the sense that we accept and care for them, even (especially!) when we don’t like them.
If we keep trying, and trying, and trying to not feel our feelings, to deny and disown our emotional life, our feeling don’t go away.
They will be acknowledged, and they will be expressed— as symptoms.
Speaking for myself, I’ve had enough of that sh*t.
How about you?
Use Your Damn Skills 