Opening to where I closed before : some insights into the protective role of the judge within.

I had some insights about resistance to life and emotion in the bath this morning.. I had been watching a TV drama in which one character struggles with her husband’s cancer diagnosis and fights the feelings of powerlessness she feels.. she then goes to therapy and the therapist is always asking her to try and connect inwards with what she is feeling instead of reacting and trying to push the feelings away by taking control that is not wanted or called for in the situation.. She finds this impossible to do, gets angry and storms out of the session…

Now don’t get me wrong, there is a time to take action but there is also a time to open to, confront and accept certain emotional truths.. It got me to thinking of how I reacted when I knew my sister was getting shock treatment.. the truth is that was her decision and not mine to make and reading up about judgment and feeling today and how they are interconnected to each other its no surprise that when the welfare of someone we love is in jeopardy we may react all over the place. However, sometimes when we do this we are often reacting out of non acceptance of ‘reality’ and also do so due to an incapacity to tolerate our own feelings or experience or articulate them.

I got a clear message from my inner self and spiritual guidance today, the guidance came through that emotions are connected to our spirit and must be worked with, but in a state of inner receptivity and attunement, rather through acting out and back lash.. That said we are human and sometimes we ‘blow’ and that blow clears the air or breaks apart the old order of things.

My spiritual guidance also advised me to pick up a book that astrologer Melanie Reinhardt recommended to me in 2005 when I had a reading with her in London just following my head injury.. The book is called Soul Without Shame : A Guide To Liberating Yourself From the Judge Within. I just read parts of it again while eating breakfast and the chapter in concern was on feelings, judgments and communications. I don’t know if followers recall a post I shared a while back from the work of Sheri Dijk on working with feelings and judgments.. Sheri talks a lot in her book Calming the Emotional Storm about how judgments we make of others are so often ruled by feelings and it is only when we step back from the judgment and make an effort to come to grips with the feelings underlying them that we can start to get ourselves out of some of the hot water we end up in due to a tendency to react without emotional insight and sensitivity.

Byron Brown also deals in his book on shame with how as youngsters we were so often on the receiving end of aggression from parents that we were powerless in the face of. Also about how, in our society, strength is so often associated with power over, aggression, seeking retribution, or imposition of will, rather than with the capacity to exercise emotional intelligence, withhold reactions, center inwardly and come to grips with our feelings, passions and motivations. We are not often taught how to act effectively by speaking up, through advocacy and showing support for the self and our right to differences with others which affirm with life, energy and respect each others, feelings, values, wishes and needs.

In his words :

Few role models exist in this culture of positive, powerful strength being used in an open supportive way that does not put anyone down. ..because of this conditioning, expansive, self assured strength, can easily be associated with intimidation, threat, control, punishment, revenge and cruelty, even hatred (this means internally ) the judge becomes the mean one.

We then go on to consider we are being bad, mean or cruel to others if we feel ourselves feeling aggressive or strong around others, when in fact we are just expressing a feeling. Some of us even associate such feelings of expansion, energy, passion, excitement and joy with feeling ‘bad’ for actually being alive.. since from conditioning we have associated goodness and caring with being meek, small, weak or powerless (these were certainly the values inculcated to me in my Catholic upbringing, especially for women.)

Forces of the judge within us (absorbed by conditioning) then act to cut off our inner source of power and joy and even vital aliveness. We may the even seek to distance ourselves from others if we fear such judgement and one of the best way to gain distance is to then JUDGE OTHERS. A more intelligent alternative, he suggests, lies in learning to watch ourselves when we judge, in terms of how we act, what feelings we are having and why we feel it is so important to deflect, hide, project or self protect from such feelings.

Only by taking the part of the prison guard can you truly understand why you keep some part of you behind bars.

Don’t judge the judge, he advises, let this part of you ventilate in private, let it spew out everything it needs and wants and listen, learn not to fear the judge as the judge actually formed inside us for a reason, to defend against earlier feelings of being so small, weak and powerless at the hands of aggressive others while also receiving and internalising myriad messages or projections of incapability or unworthiness.

Once we can hear the judge and treat him with compassion his true motivations may all the more easily come out of hiding. This part of us will unmask our (and its) vulnerability because the truth is that for so long this part of us felt it had to defend against another part of us that felt so small and young, a part that never grew up, refused to stop needing and complaining, or learned to take care of itself.

Falling into the vulnerability and even emptiness that often underlies the judging mind, will then help us to come more in touch with our soul and open to our realer feelings. With this unmasking a more genuine deeply in touch part of us can open itself up.

The truth is that the judge is dead tired of having to work so hard. He needs some help and for us to understand the self protective role he plays in our psyche. Once the judging part gets more empathy, it may then feel safer to drop the self protection that prevented us coming to grips with just how powerless we really were as kids, as well as how much the wounded, scared child (protected by the judge) went on to rule our lives even, much later in life, turning against ourselves and others in blame or self blame.)

I had a sense of this in therapy after sharing a lot today both from Byron’s book and about the outbursts of rage I had on the weekend.. in the midst of it all I began to grow very cold and Kat has a lovely grey blanket with wavelike patterns on it in the cubicle which sits next to my chair so I reached for to cover my knees.. Immediately deep inside my soul I was overcome with a sense of being cold alienated and cast out from the warmth of human companionship and family, as I was during the time I spent at the coast house in those painful years following the end of my marriage during which I became paralysed and extremely introverted..

I remembered how one winter while there Mum came to visit and she was so concerned about leaving me in the cold house without adequate heating that she went out to buy me a blanket from the homeware shop (and ironically it is a purple grey blanket!). Earlier Kat and I had been talking of how little time Mum had to be close to us as kids, as well as about how hard it was for her to connect to us emotionally when we were younger. I started to cry deeply as I remembered the yearning for her closeness and comfort. I also felt deep in my heart the times my Mum loved me and cared for me and felt so helpless to help me in the years after my marriage ended and anger with family pushed them away.. I also heard in my heart and mind while the tears were falling a voice saying “one day soon, the memories of the times I loved you well become more powerful than the memories of the times I hurt you, either through neglect and absence or through physical punishment.”

Therapy had to end shortly afterward this watershed but just this time of touching base with my vulnerable sense helped today to soften me.. It also made me see how hard, in scrambling to make things perfectly tidy at home I ward off similar feelings my Mum most probably felt, absorbed from her own mother who had to struggle on alone just as her mother and grandmother had to do after Thomas went into the asylum.

I also got insight into why late last week after sharing with someone who is still filled with deep rage with a parent I was left feeling small powerless and shattered by our conversation and ended up crying for about half an hour. I know experiencing anger is important and the last thing we need is to be shamed for it, but softer feelings so often seem to underlie anger and sometimes they may be harder to come to terms with in the course of the healing process for not everyone will hurt us, as our parents did. The most important thing of all is for me to understand is that it is okay (and no longer life threatening) to come fully alive THROUGH FEELING THE ANGER AND SADNESS while at the same time learning to allow myself to be vulnerable at those times judgement only block me from demonstrating the love and care to others that makes it possible for me to bond again in healthy ways as humans who just like me are both vulnerable and imperfect, (no matter how judgmental they seem to be from the outside.)