One of the biggest hurdles we face in therapy and healing is facing the fear and anxiety that we feel at being able to express, allow and process our feelings.. I had a huge outburst of rage in therapy yesterday, it was a full body experience and as usually happens during it was shaking and disrobing and taking off bracelets and watches as my entire body underwent a spin/melt down. As a child I was often forceabley restrained, in fact last night on the brink of falling asleep my body felt the pull of that day my Mum yanked my arm out of my socket trying to tear me away from a ball I wanted to play with and take away from the shop.. This was just one experience of some of the restrictions I underwent along with boundary invasions as well as severe injuries from neglect such a burns and hits and cuts.. Yesterday I experienced too the shutting down contempt of this living sister I have such a challenging relationship with.. I was actually screaming at my family.. “you will not erase me” at the same time of being overcome with fears of making a mess of my therapist Kat’s office..
This fear of overwhelming feelings may also relate to grief.. There may be a million tears we need to cry for the lost self in us that never got to live or for the ruptures forces upon us when we were only young and lacked any kind of real power.
Pete Walker points out in his book on Complex PTSD the critical role that a shaming inner critic may play in trying to prevent this feeling work.. In one dream this figure appeared as a stern nun who had an entire class confined in stocks.. In the dream I spied the keys to set them free but lacked the nerve.. this dream occurred around the time I aborted my first serious attempt at therapy in 2001. This shaming critic may appear as we begin to touch base with the truth of feelings and we may meet in on the outside in the form of those threatened by our deep healing work
According to Eleanor Payson author of …The Wizard of Oz : Coping With the One-Way Relationship in Work, Love, and Family, often men suffer from this fear of overwhelm and vulnerability even more than women may.. In our society men are not allowed to show fear and women are not allowed to be angry.. often a justifiably angry woman is demonized by the men around her.. But for men a million messages telling them to show no fear and shut down their sensitivity means that in therapy and in relationships they may struggle even more to unmask their vulnerable self and true feelings and often they will project them.
A step forward is made in our feeling work when we take the risk to allow anger, depression, sorrow or humiliation and experience bodily that in time the rising wave will pass.. Over time we get to develop what my therapist Kat calls ‘our sea legs’. When a wave of feeling threatens to rise we may be able to actually open to it, instead of resist.. to unclench rather than clench, to surrender rather than to fight against it defensively.. Buddhist teacher Thich Knat Hahn calls this holding our feelings tenderly.. he talks of how in anger we are best to let ourselves allow that feeling and open to it rather than even acting it out super aggressively.. that said the hitting out of anger will drive us home to a deeper realization and may even be the act that then allows us to open up to a deeper wave of sorrow or hidden grief.
Letting our feelings out safely also gives us more confidence in our ability to survive. And what my first therapist Wendy Bratherton once called ‘deep dives into depression’ may actually be phases and precursors to the rising up of feelings that for so many long years remained subterranean.
We must also be aware that on the healing path intellectual understanding and insight alone will not suffice for us to heal. Payson makes a point that recovery writer John Lee also makes in some of his writing that not all therapists move beyond the level of intellectual insight alone.. Deep feeling work is intense and so it is not something every one is fully able to acknowledge and even allow in an emotionally feeling wounded culture that may demonize the primal. Fear may be at work here even with some therapists. but as the Bible says : perfect love casts out fear so we have to open in love as well as deeply unconditional self regard as we take the brave steps to move into deeper feelings.. In order to heal we must feel, for as John Gray has written.
We cannot heal, that which we are not prepared to
(accept and allow) and feel.
Emerging From The Dark Night 