When repressed feelings start emerging

I think if we suffered a long time of being forced to repress our emotions and the sought ways to manage or medicate them when they start to emerge it can be deeply confusing and distressing. I remember after I had been sober for about 6 years and had started intensive psychotherapy after moving overseas with my husband how on one rainy day all of my grief just seemed to burst forward after arriving for my session in pouring rain in my dripping wet weather gear and bursting into tears as my then therapist Wendy reached out a hand to hold mine. It was that tender moment of recognition and connection that opened the floodgates all around the anniversary of my father’s sudden illness with cancer and all too quick passing 15 years earlier (and I had repressed this grief for all of those years… I had been medicating feelings for 8 years before ‘choosing’ sobriety. I was told in early recovery by a qualified therapist experienced with alcoholism I would not find any boxes of tissues in AA meetings and so I sought therapy in the UK.

I didn’t manage to make it through to resolution with Wendy, things broke apart for me after she went on a months break and left me alone to manage. I had a lot of other stresses at that time and I had an intense ‘pull back’ dream and that is literally want happened I decided to detonate my life in the UK and come home to Australia which was a wrong move as I now see it. However a year later Wendy told me not to see it as a failure she told me I had been strong to come back to the scene of the trauma but that I must get help if my depression got worse.

It was when I went back to see an earlier therapist I started the journey with before being sober that I found the recognition of why I had aborted. Brian told me that with the level of attachment trauma I had had I basically needed someone available to me 24/7. Now I know this is not how most therapists operate but for people with borderline trauma it is apparently essential to not be ‘dropped’ it can just be too traumatising to be left to fend alone for a whole month when things have been starting to open up and you are finally beginning to trust in a new attachment. And the reason I am with my current therapist now is that my other therapist I finally found after a long break with no therapy and about 8 other attempts went on leave for a month and would not leave me alone and so she sent me to Kat and Kat and I have worked together now for well over 3 years. I could just not bear to leave Kat when I first started with her because she was such a warm person and so connected, my other therapist was very analytical and detached and too ‘cold’ for me. And Kat kinda reminded me of my older sister Judith who was the most fully alive member of my family.

Anyway Astrologer Liz Greene says that for those of us with a Saturn Moon signature that speaks of an emotionally repressive childhood it is hard for feelings to be known. Often they just emerge as bodily sensations or symptoms and a while ago I shared a post from Bessel van der Kolk, an expert on trauma who speaks of how those of us with childhood trauma from physical or emotional abuse come to feel the body is very unsafe and we can start to shut down our feelings as they start to emerge. All kinds of defences can exist to keep true feelings at bay or untouched, feelings of anger or sadness rising up can catch us unawares and make us feel very frightened often all of this is just very unconscious.

Its a little how I have been feeling today after sharing the post about my living sister and on our walk to the lake we came across a group of school children and all the trauma of 1981 was sparked for me. I had aborted teaching to go north to study social work but things were getting out of control with a guy I had met who was an addict and I didn’t really feel safe so that Christmas I came home and asked Dad to go back to my teaching degree in my home town and he said I was not allowed to go back. I had to study at secretarial college. I love kids and I would have made the best teacher. I also over heard him telling my Mum I was ‘too bright to be a teacher’. I just found myself shedding tears as we passed this group of children and then I got a huge surge of anger at my Dad, then I felt like a bitch for writing about my sister and then I had the thought that my feelings were literally going to kill me. I have had breast cancer before so as some of you will understand this is a kind of constant worry.

I know these are just thoughts. I know intellectually my feelings wont kill me but at times it seems like they will. And then I got a text from Scott at an unpredictable time and everything in my mind got distorted into him playing me and being a scammer and so I got really terse with him and turned off the phone…of course he did not know what the hell was going on and I could hear he was distressed but he is used to me by now. I just ate lunch and cried while eating it. I really find my feelings hard to manage at the moment. And I am getting weird comments on my blogs from one of my followers that also are destabilising me a lot because they are doing nothing to make sense of the feelings or validate them as real.

I know feelings are not always facts. But is this more applicable to thought/feeling rather than just bodily feelings? I may ‘feel’ that someone is doing something to me on purpose or has deliberate intentions to hurt me and that feeling may not be a fact. Acting on our feelings is not always the best way. For example with my sister because I miss her even though I feel sad that she does not call me maybe I will make the choice to call her anyway even though I am disappointed because my love for her outrides the hurt of her ignoring me. But then I may bury other feelings and I know that when I am with her I do get a lot of body pain especially when she casts judgemental looks around.

I am writing my way through this just so that I can unjumble it a bit. Getting physically active and walking or grounding helps my feelings to flow too rather than just get stuck, it stops my thinking on some level (in terms of getting stuck in my head). Getting out of my own head at such times is important. Not always easy to do. Thoughts often will not lead me home like true feeling buried in the body will do and this often requires a trigger and then work of associating it all back. Its a complex process that forms the bulk of recovery. Thoughts sometimes muddy the waters. I am trying the power of prayer lately. I am asking for help to see the truth of things while keeping as much love in my heart as I can. I know like a lot of us I have absorbed messages that anger is sinful or bad, but often it is a sign of reacting to legitimate unjust or unfair treatment. I feel safest of all in my sessions with Kat. Often with others I don’t feel as safe to feel I am not at all sure if my feelings will be accepted or dismissed. I am sure this is why so many of us must spend a lot of time introverting or suffer from social anxiety. The world out there is not always a safe space for feeling.