Learning to be at peace with our feelings

My feelings are my feelings. You might not like or concur with them but never the less they are my feelings. You may tell me ‘they make you feel a certain way’, then those are your feelings in response to mine. All of us carry a burden of feelings from the past. If our past was very very painful then we carry a burden of very painful feelings which are ours to own and work with not to project, never the less we can project pain hurt and other emotions onto others via a process of emotional contagion. We can see others as the cause of our pain or provoking difficult feelings but our responses rest with us and our triggers and the level of pain or hurt we already carry deep inside.

I am turning more towards an inner practice now. I believe in the past I have made people responsible for my feelings instead of owning I was triggered. I am learning. Ideally parents help a child to understand, name and contain their feelings but some parents cannot do this and I had a discussion with a friend yesterday about the type of wounds that came out of the First World War and depression, the traumas of that time meant a child could not be fully cared for or their feelings understood especially if they had to deal with traumatised parents.

I know for my own great grandmother the trauma she lived through and passed down, the lack of nurture holding and containment which meant my own Mum could not hold her feelings in well or they were all jumbled up. A friend was saying the other day that her own mother lived in constant fear, I believe my Mum was the same, as a small child with no father around she was left to manage on her own and I am sure was so often overwhelmed by her feelings, she often told me how she had to bury them. Cancer in astrology relates to mothering, nurturing and feelings and Mars rules self expression and Mars is in Cancer at the moment and the idea of the inner child and her difficult feelings are on my mind today after recent conflicts.

It is taking me many years of recovery coming out of active addiction to begin to learn to differentiate my feelings and sort out the jumble of what I had to carry for both parents along with trying find ways to deal with the deep and long lasting consequences of lack of responsiveness in my own family members. My older sister died 5 years ago but she was diagnosed bi polar after an aneurysm back in 1980, my second sister is still suffering very serious depression and anxiety. My mother died recently and she battled on as best she could trying to raise children without a lot of emotional skills and as many know I lost my father back in 1985.

Its no surprise that when a conflict happened back in 2017 I was in a very sad place, the previous year I battled breast cancer and in the previous 6 went through my sister’s suicide attempt, my older sister’s death and ongoing illnesses in the life of my mother. I carried a lot of the pain back then I see that now and trying to find some happiness for my own life was hard as there was still so much from the past I had not integrated or processed. Thanks to very good therapy lately I am managing to get a better handle on my own feelings but dealing with the feelings of others is not always easy nor is knowing my limits of influence due to my own co-dependency and attachment/ abandonment issues. I press on anyway and luckily I do have people around me now who can own their own feelings and don’t try to project them onto me all of the time and are open to repair things if that happens either way.

I read recently in a very good book on narcissism that many of us are raised to believe our feelings are wrong, or overwhelming or bad or ‘negative’. However there are no negative feelings, all our feelings inform us and give us information from our soul. We can have a feeling and make something deeply negative from it through the way we stew on it or by the stories we tell about how others or we ’caused it’, or how ‘negative’ or ‘bad’ such feelings are. Or we can learn ways to hold understand, process and honour our feelings, containing and working to alchemise them and help us to make sense of our place in the world and relationships with others. Once we love and accept our own feelings we are better placed to be a force of healing in our world.

Mindfulness and meditation are great tools here. I am grateful for this great book on anger I borrowed from the library last week. Anger is a difficult emotion for many of us. We may also struggle with knowing how to assert ourselves and fight for our feelings in a healthily self assertive, non aggressive way. When we are hurting we can often get angry if someone did something to trigger those hurt feelings. Anger and fear are also related in that when we fear the loss of something or being overwhelmed we may lash out or undertake defensive actions that may hide from us our deeper unacknowledged feelings. Anger is actually one of the five stages of grieving too, there is a lot of anger we have to work through as we process early childhood trauma abuse or neglect.

Lately I am seeing the wisdom of staying fairly self contained. My own painful feelings have at times led me down difficult roads, it has been hard at times to know what others are feeling or what motivates them (perhaps due to a degree of autism in myself, I am not sure). I live and learn and manage to survive. But I don’t think it is ever fair to be told we should not feel a certain way, learning positive ways to deal with hurt and painful feelings is so necessary if we don’t want to go on endlessly creating more misery for ourselves and other people. For me its all still very much a work in progress.