Refusing to Feel is Refusing to Heal

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"I can't feel my feelings, they would kill me!"

The lady who said that to me was a highly respected senior manager in a large organisation and she had a problem: she couldn't stop ruminating about the possibility she was going to lose her daughter to some terrible accident (her daughter was completely healthy but had gone to live away from her mum). This lady kept bursting into tears at the 'wrong time' and it had been going on for months.

Honey

And then there was 'Honey' (that's not her real name but she is a real person). Honey's husband had recently had an affair with her best friend and she had gone to stay with her sister - only to find out something had gone off there as well. She was so angry with the three of them (and had no-one else she could turn to as they were the most important people in her life up until that point) she was afraid she was going to kill them. She also had an adult daughter who was now telling her she didn't like her company any more. Honey felt she was no longer the person she once was and felt her world was falling apart.

She worked with knives in her job and she'd found herself becoming increasingly afraid of knives as a result of her rage. She couldn't get the imagery of stabbing these three people out of her head. It was affecting her sleep, her job, and she felt suicidal. Honey described symptoms of both phobias and obsessions. She couldn't understand how in a matter of 3 months she had quickly gone from being a happy person to this emotional timebomb.

I pointed out to her she was constantly criticising herself for being so angry - and I told her this was the problem. She had every right to feel besides herself with rage but she had no idea how to get it out of her system. I spoke to her about the safe release techniques I had used in the past and she told me she didn't feel able to do this (it's that same 'it'll kill me' belief system at work in the unconscious again - it's a common belief that one).

I advised Honey she needed to set aside some time to start acknowledging and moving towards her feelings so she could begin the healing process - but she was obviously not ready for that step yet. The pain was too intense. As she continued to talk I got the sense her husband had a history of physically abusing her and the pain of that was adding to the rage now churning within.

I once took a journey of emotional escalation similar to Honey's and I could see the enormous, long term reverse-pathway she had ahead of her when she was ready for it. Understanding that this journey is structured, and once you begin travelling in the opposite direction you will see this structure unfolding in the reverse order to how it originally evolved, can help you make your mind up to get on with the healing journey sooner rather than later. The trouble with waiting and delaying is that trapped emotional pain like this keeps 'building' - it builds false beliefs systems not only in regard to ourselves, but in regard to the emotional process itself.

A single principle I want to emphasise here is: Feeling IS Healing.

The false belief at work in all of us who become susceptible to emotional overwhelm is that we're not supposed to feel; not supposed to be dominated by overwhelmingly intense emotions for any length of time. This is not the reality of being alive, unfortunately. The reality of being alive in an organic body is that feelings, no matter how intense, must be felt. You are feeling them anyway - you're just refusing to allow your awareness to focus on this fact. Whether you bring them up for processing or keep them trapped down inside your body - they are there. If your feelings could kill you you'd probably be dead already.

The Refusal to Feel Process

Refusing to feel is the cause of almost all emotional illness.

There are 3 stages in the Refusal to Feel process:

• Suppression


• Repression


• Secondary Emotional Responses

Suppression

Suppression is an extremely useful social skill. Suppression is OK for a while. Suppression stops you giving your girlfriend's mother a piece of your mind when she tells you she doesn't like your habits much or from shouting at your boss when given an impossible deadline or from running when you need to be hiding in the presence of a predator.

Suppression is healthy - as long as you release your feelings in a 'safe' way at a more appropriate time. But if you don't like your feelings, if you can't quite believe how intense they are and you take the attitude of keeping them locked up inside, you have a problem. You have a problem because having commanded yourself consciously to move away from your feelings those commands enter the unconscious which then starts to drive those feelings down further into your body and away from your thinking mind. The problem is those feelings are now repressed.

Repression

In repression, not only are we suppressing the feelings created by our primary emotional responses (which has the affect of pressure-cooking our emotional energies) but we also manage to split off the conscious 'issue' at the centre of the original emotional response.

We simply forget what we were emotional about - we can't put our finger on the pulse of why we have these feelings any more. They're just an overwhelming 'mass' of horrible painful feelings - and we keep edging away from them. Our feelings are now the issue - not the original issues they were produced to deal with. The rational facts and words involved with the original issues related to the trapped feelings have been forgotten.

We just feel very bad and have trouble understanding why. We're angry all the time and hate it. Because we hate and fear these feelings of ours, and don't understand what's going on inside of us, we believe we are 'out of control'. We come to believe we are 'bad' and we identify with our feelings rather than seeing feelings as things that flow through us. We consciously command ourselves to control this inner seething badness.

This conscious command again feeds into our unconscious mind which in turn brings out the 'big guns' to deal with the problem. What are the 'big guns'? Our emotions, no less. We create secondary emotional responses to bring our 'wild and uncontrolled' primary emotional responses to heel. We've just created an internal, self-replicating war.

Secondary Emotional Responses

Phobias, panic attacks, depression and obsessions are all examples of secondary emotional responses - an emotional response designed to prevent another emotional response from gaining release from the body. All of these conditions are caused by the same thing:

Refusing to Feel.

Learning, testing, experiencing and then understanding the emotional process is the key to removing these conditions. The only way to do this is to Feel. I call this journey 'Going Into the Out-Of'. You must learn that you go in, and then you come out. Those who refuse to feel believe that once they go in, they're lost.

Going Into the Out-Of

In the same way the 3 stages are built, they can be reversed (I recommend you get professional support though as it can be a long and painful journey; especially if, like 'Honey', your social network has just disappeared):

Removing Secondary Responses

You cannot 'un-think' a secondary emotional response. You can only 'un-feel' it. Going repeatedly into the response and exploring it as intensely as possible for as long as it takes will eventually remove it naturally. Once the unconscious realises the 'danger' isn't dangerous it stops producing the secondary response - but you will need external support and it can take weeks if not months to remove a trapped secondary response. What's important here is to maintain your direction - maintain the 'going-in'.

Removing Repression

The feelings we're dealing with here are primary emotional responses (normal, natural responses but which you don't like) related to some buried factual issue you perhaps don't want to face up to. By remaining in the emotional response for long enough those issues will pop up as 'insights' and those insights then act as the mental portals through which you release your trapped emotional energy. It takes patience and you can't force the issue to appear - you have to wait for it to appear. Again, maintain the direction and it will all resolve.

Removing Suppression

You cannot remove suppression but you can manage it - it's a natural social skill we all need. But you need to acknowledge your feelings and find a safe way to release them at an appropriate time. People who are emotionally sensitive but criticise themselves for being too sensitive are at risk here - you must be MORE sensitive, folks! If you're the kind of person who says 'I know it's abuse but we all have to put up with these things and I've just got to be strong' you're not strong, you're wrong! In 'Honey's' case, for example, she should have listened to her very first feelings of pain when her husband had first started abusing her. By refusing to acknowledge what her feelings were telling her, and by trying to instead take responsibility for her husband's lack of conscience and self-control, she had set herself up to absorb and trap much more emotional pain than she otherwise would have.

Agreeing to feel and moving towards our feelings, particularly if you're someone who's either in a repressed state (or suffering the affects of secondary emotional responses) is naturally the last thing you want to do. It means experiencing pain and who wants that? But what we want and what we need can be two different things.

If we want to reach the state known as 'unconditional happiness', that emotional state in which there is actually no emotional state other than peacefully being alive, it's a journey we're better off making sooner, rather than later.

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Source by Carl Harris