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by
Pete Walker
Started reading
December 16, 2024
Unlike my family, clear, well-defined rules offered me the possibility of “getting it right,” of fitting in, of gaining appreciation and respect. Life in the army was not a constant maze of double binds and no-win situations.
My studies accelerated the dissolution of my illusions about my “perfect” family. I discovered glaring evidence that Western parenting practices have been devolving since the Industrial Revolution.
I have been down many blind alleys in my attempts to come to terms with my emotions. I’ve repressed them, swallowed them, drowned them in drink, ascended above them in clouds of hemp, starved them out, interred them with food, transcended them in meditation, outrun them, outsmarted them with rationalization, exorcised them, handed them over to higher beings, transmuted them into pretty lights, and even briefly felt them before purging them in dramatic catharses that promised to render them finally extinct.
emotional perfectionism.
A steadfast self-regard – one that is not diminished by emotional fluctuation – is something that we can all healthily aim for
We cannot be healthy human beings without accepting and experiencing the full range of human feelings.
“The only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid unavoidable pain.” I now know that the lion’s share of my past emotional pain, well over ninety percent of it, came from the myriad ways I was taught to hate, numb, and run away from my feelings.
stubborn willingness to be there for myself in every feeling state. The
My fear is sometimes a beacon that illuminates new pathways for me to follow into a wider appreciation of life. My envy shows me what I still yearn to develop in myself.
I have even found wonders in depression. Depression sometimes calls me into stillness, liberates me from crucifixion on the clock of time, invites me into an ever-deepening place of peace within myself, and allows me to rest inside my body as if it were the most luxurious easy chair imaginable. And grieving, particularly when it is intense, delivers me into a sleep so deep that I feel as if I am a dormant seed safely hidden in the rich loam of mother earth with nothing to do but wait for the rays of the sun to awaken me.
allowing myself to feel bad resolves that feeling and restores me to feeling good much more quickly than resisting it ever did. Our feelings vitalize and enrich us to the degree that we accept them in their full diversity. Now
Feeling tells us how and to what extent a thing is important to us.
Feelings and emotions are energetic states that do not magically dissipate when they are ignored. Much of our unnecessary emotional pain is the distressing
When we do not attend to our feelings, they accumulate inside us and create a mounting anxiety that we commonly dismiss as stress.
Stress is also the painful internal pressure of accumulated emotional energy.
Grieving, explored at length herein, is the most effective stress-release mechanism that human beings have. Grieving is a safe, healthy release valve for our internal pressure cookers of emotion. I have had numerous experiences of feeling as if I were about to explode that were immediately discharged with a good cry. I see others obtain this same wonderful relief almost daily in my work in private practice. We suffer many dire consequences when we are unwilling to feel. The price of emotional repression is a constant, wasteful expenditure of energy that leaves many of us depressed and
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Much of our unnecessary suffering is caused by the ghosts of our murdered emotions wafting into consciousness and haunting us as hurtful thinking. Denied emotions taint our thoughts with fearful worry, dour self-doubt, and angry self-criticism.
risk “acting out” our emotions unconsciously when we are unwilling to feel them. Sarcasm, criticality, habitual lateness, and “forgotten” commitments are common unconscious expressions of anger. Ironically, these passive-aggressive behaviors leave us in even greater emotional pain because they cause others to distrust and dislike us.
When Society Becomes An Addict,
In the war that our culture wages against feeling, emotions are becoming an endangered species.
Year by year we manifest more and more of the 1969 prediction of noted psychoanalyst Rollo May: I do believe that there is in our society a definite trend toward a state of affectless-ness as an attitude toward life; a character state.
Lesley Hazelton in The Right To Feel Bad
This is a state of severe emotional disturbance. Yet it is very close to the currently ideal state of no “negative” feelings.
When a child is not allowed to experience feelings of sadness, anger, loss, and frustration, his or her real feelings become neurotic and distorted; in adulthood, that child will unconsciously arrange life to repeat these same repressions of feeling.
most beautiful things of life – sex, food, exercise, conversation, learning, and work – lose their quality because our frenzied pace makes it impossible to savor them. Rarely do we slow down long enough to digest the full pleasure of these activities.
we sacrifice our peace because we are not still enough to feel, experience, and work through the undigested emotions that drive us, that rumble in our bellies as anxiety, that “toxify” our thoughts as constant worry, that make us run as if we were stuck in a constant jailbreak from our selves!
Experiences of peace and contentment underlie our undigested feelings. We can learn to safely feel and express all our emotions, and discover the deep comfort of full, undistracted inhabitancy of o...
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Our inner child can find enduring satisfaction in simple pleasures because s/he does not pursue them purely to escape inner emotional turmoil.
third type of individual who gives feelings a bad name by stubbornly holding onto them until they become embittered attitudes. Those who are perpetually entrenched in irritability or self-pity often alienate us from feeling or expressing any anger or sadness whatsoever. We do not have to let other people’s irresponsible emotional expression alienate us from our feelings.
Sublimation is the conscious choice to transform and redirect emotional energy into other modes of productive self-expression, such as exercise or dance. Suppression is the conscious choice to refrain from emotional expression in inappropriate circumstances; rarely do we benefit from yelling at the boss or crying in front of insensitive people. At such times we can postpone “emoting” until we are in a safer milieu.
If we can only be friends when we are happy and “up,” then our friendships are painfully
during the good times are fair-weather friends who are strangers to loyalty and trust.
surrendering to them is by far the most efficient – and, in the long run, least painful – way of responding to them.
with restored emotionality having many wonderful experiences of sadness
mellowing into solace, of anger unfolding into laughter, of fear flipping into excitement, of jealousy opening up into appreciation, and of blame giving way to forgiveness.
Death is not the tragedy, but the ten million times we deaden and close our hearts because experience doesn’t reflect what we consider acceptable.
deprives them of practice in handling pain. When parents don’t allow for open expression of pain, whether it’s minor (such as a disappointment or a failure) or major (such as the loss of a grandparent) children never learn they can experience pain, be deeply affected, and still survive. This is how we learn we have to be, or seem to be, unaffected.
Those who perpetually run from their fear never discover their courage. And those who refuse to feel blame never really feel forgiveness.
When we offhandedly banish blame from our awareness, we never discover its tremendous value as an instinct. Blame is a fundamental part of saying no, setting limits, protesting unfairness, and defending our boundaries. We will never feel safe if we cannot make blaming statements like: “Stop it, you’re hurting me!” “Don’t call me names!” and “No, you cannot take that – it belongs to me!” Such reflexive blame is a vital contribution from the feeling nature to the instinct of self-protection.
The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
If you would like to assess whether you have been poisoned by your own blame, close your eyes and notice your inner experience as you try to remember challenging your parents. Perhaps you don’t have any recollections of resisting them.
Children who are not allowed to blame their parents’ bad behavior often become adults who do not protect themselves from abuse.
perpetrators who seem to have a sixth sense for identifying people who have lost the ability to protest and blame unfairness. If we do not register a “negative” feeling response to hurtfulness, we cannot tell that we are being abused. Instead we tacitly “forgive” our abusers just as we were forced to tacitly forgive our parents, no matter how much ongoing abuse they dish out. This is why psychoanalyst Judith Viorst says:
