DAY 5 – Why it’s difficult to feel your emotions | 100 DAY SELF-ATTUNEMENT JOURNEY

“I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That’s the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.” – Chuck Palahniuk

Hi, everyone. Today I have chosen to write instead of making a video. Today marks day 5 of my 100 day self-attunement journey. I meditated for 30 minutes and during the process, I had intermittent moments of intense feelings of nostalgia for certain past experiences. As I was reflecting on my meditation today, I felt relieved and proud that I allowed myself to experience this very deep and intense pain in my heart. It happened probably 3-4 times throughout my session and although the intensity passed pretty quickly each one of the times, I was kind of in awe how raw and intense the emotion was.

This motivated me to continue talking about the concept of feeling our emotions and write briefly about one particular reason (there are many) why adults survivors of childhood trauma struggle with feeling and acknowledging their emotions.

In videos from Days #2, #3, and #4, I address the importance of attuning to yourself, to your soul, and actually feeling your emotions. While full integration of all your parts and emotions is the goal and essential for mental and emotional health, for adult survivors of childhood trauma, this is an important part of the healing process. One of the ways that children protect themselves from confronting their caregivers’ abuse, neglect, and emotional abandonment is to split off parts of themselves (emotions, memories, etc.) that signal danger and pain. This happens within a child’s psyche to ensure survival and happens almost automatically when a child is faced with too much stimuli in the form of overwhelming situations and emotions.

In abusive and neglectful situations, a child learns to distrust their emotions and their senses in order to make sense of the abuse happening around them. An example of this includes a child having the appropriate reaction of fear and crying when they are being hit and the caregiver yelling at the child, “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about!” A child does not know how to reconcile the emotions they are already feeling with the caregiver’s statements because crying feels true to the child as he’s being hit. But he halts it because he knows that crying will induce more hitting and therefore more pain. Such perpetual situations of abuse and emotional abandonment cause the child to split off the emotions of pain and fear, which are necessary markers against gauging danger and being self-connected.

A myriad of examples exist that illustrate caregivers’ lack the empathy, support, validation, and acknowledgment of children’s feelings, thus causing them to grow up repressing (splitting off), avoiding, blocking, and minimizing their emotions. This causes a fragmented self.

Let’s view this as foundational information as I circle back to the beginning and address a particular reason why it’s difficult for you to feel your emotions. If you grew up in an environment where all emotions were expressed as actions by the adults around you (particularly violent, scary, violating, and demeaning actions), you probably fear your own emotions because you believe that you have to act on everything you feel. You may believe that you can’t just experience an emotion internally without resorting to an inappropriate, violent, violating, or unhealthy behavior. This is a false belief that may have been holding you back from self-attuning.

You may have lived your life believing that if you feel angry, you have to resort to yelling, punching, putting someone down, overdrinking, etc. That if you feel sad, you will resort to additive behaviors to “perk yourself up,” be unproductive, be avoidant, etc. That if you feel anxious, you will resort to over-controlling or over-criticizing others to minimize your internal unbalance. If this is what you witnessed growing up, it’s understandable that you were conditioned to believe there is no other way of expressing emotions.

Since you weren’t allowed to feel as a child, you were not given opportunities to practice healthy attuning to self and healthy expression of emotions. On healing journeys, we are dismantling our old and ineffective programming and replacing it with healthier ways of relating to ourselves and to the world. In this spirit, I offer two alternative ways of viewing and relating to your own emotions:

1) As sensory experiences and signs that may help you in deciding an appropriate course of action, that you have the choice and control whether you will take or not (see Day 4 video). You may choose to express it to someone verbally and ask for support in the form of words or a hug, but that doesn’t mean you have to act on all of your emotions.

2) Simply as internal states of arousal that you acknowledge and honor as part of your internal experience based on external stimuli, triggers, etc. Intense states of emotions do not last indefinitely. Learning to ride out the wave of emotions is healthy and empowering. When we’re feeling something, let’s practice acknowledging it, instead of avoiding or blocking.

Let me know how this post resonated with you. Email me at vi@healthylifewithvi.com

Thank you, I commend your courage, and I will see you tomorrow on day 6.

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