Emotions are our friends. Even the big “scary” ones. We have been taught to try to control and tame our feelings, but by attempting to do so, we create monsters out of them and end up puppeteering and imprisoning ourselves. We feel out of control, hopeless, and afraid. This is because repression locks in a story that there is something scary we need to ward off, so we cage ourselves in states of dread and avoidance. Emotions are not flukes of nature, even when they come from trauma. They have really important messages for us that we as humans are designed to process. When we surrender to them and let them run their course, we experience cathartic relief, joy, and bliss. Feeling our feelings allows us to finally satiate the something missing feeling that controls many of our lives. This can be done either by just letting them crescendo and naturally dissipate, as they will do when we give them the green light, or in a more targeted practice that lets our intellect feel more involved (and thus safer engaging in what it has long run from). Both methods will be offered in this post.
As I mentioned in the previous post (read it before coming to this one), humans in today’s society are terrified of feeling our emotions. We think that painful emotions would break us or earn us rejection if we let them in, so we readily engage in the gazillion ways to avoid authenticity and vulnerability offered to us. We ingest mind-altering substances and foods, we rigidly contort our bodies to look like everyone else and avoid emotional flows in so doing, we distract ourselves with screens, and we stick to inside-of-the-cultural box conversations. The exception here for many is anger, which is our nervous system’s first order of protection against shame. Complaints and criticisms have been deemed okay for some reason by the cultural puppeteers, the collective unconscious, the “them/they.” But, even if we let ourselves access anger, we often use it to displace what we are truly upset about; we compulsively seek a person or issue to orbit against rather than exploring what is really bothering us. Also, if we only go towards anger, we block shame.
When repressed, shame becomes a leaky pit deep in our subconscious, and locked in our bodies. Maintaining this stuck energy vortex makes us feel like we are deeply shameful and broken and that we must always hide aspects of our selves from others. If we instead allow ourselves to feel the shame we are hiding from and articulate why we believe we are shameful, we realize that all these reasons are bogus illusions from the past. When we look shame and the fear of it in the face, we get to mature into adults who love and accept ourselves. This is what we are all deeply craving, and by feeling all of our feelings we naturally get there. Then, we get to stop waiting for others or for external substances to make us feel worthy (which will never satisfactorily happen because our brains are constructed such that only we can decide that we deserve unconditional love and are enough, which can only happen when we are willing to look at all of ourselves and feel all of our emotions).
We overthink and overcomplicate our realities with our emotional-avoidance gymnastics. The secret is, there is nothing to be afraid of as an adult. When we think there is, we puppeteer ourselves from traumatized inner children who run from the past and render “us” into our biggest enemies. The result of fear-based repression is a tangle between the young, critical parts of us who feel that there is something wrong and seek to fix ourselves anxiously and aggressively and the parts who feel shamed by these parts and thus reach for ways to soothe themselves/replacements for the love that is really what’s missing (we can’t operate in states of love/thriving when we are in states of fear/stress/survival because of the bifurcated nature of our nervous system). When in these tangles, which we can’t get ourselves out of from stress states, despite our best efforts, we lose faith in ourselves and our capacity to feel joy. We become bitter, hopeless, and disillusioned. We think life is hard and stressful and impossibly complicated. Tragically, we do all of this out of fear of what ultimately are our inner liberators. When we let ourselves access what we are really feeling, we don’t feel pain at all. Instead, we feel really good.
By mustering up the courage to look at our emotions, not only do we experience confidence in our bravery, but we also get to enjoy the catharsis of achieved by releasing physically held negativity and doubt. This catharsis allows both a physical and emotional deep breath, as we can finally feel what our inner children (aka personified aspects of the trauma brain) have long wanted to show us — who then relax. Then, these children get to become mature adults who blossom into who they would have been had they not been stunted by being overwhelmed by and learning to hide from intense emotions. Explained somatically, we hydrate our dehydrated fascia and release toxins. This allows blood flow to previously constricted parts of our nervous systems and brains that contain aspects of our personality, executive functioning, and aptitudes that were previously offline.
All the years and effort spent trying to hide our true feelings from ourselves makes the parts of our bodies/consciousness holding them feel deeply ashamed and despicable, but when we allow them to be seen, all of this shame and fear of it can be released. This intellectually may make sense, but many parts of our consciousness avoid the release and maturation process because of unmet childhood needs. Some of our trauma-holding parts don’t want to grow up because they never got to experience innocent, self-consciousness-free childhood. They choose to remain stuck in the past, believing that unburdening would mean giving up on what they have long hoped for, so they keep repressed emotions frozen in our fascia and divert blood flow and hydration to these areas. They look at this process through childhood schemas, believing that a controlling parent is trying to force them to become someone they don’t want to be (which is sometimes enacted internally when a controlling, critical child-part is the one trying to force shame-oriented parts to change). On the other hand, shame-oriented parts may be afraid to let go and allow relaxation to run through places where their fear is housed in the body because they believe the part in charge of this process is that mean critical one they are afraid of. These shame-driven parts believe that without their [maladaptive] attempts to provide relief from all the pressure imposed by the critical parts, such as through shame eating or the compulsive use of mind-altering substances, we would become burnt out and feel even worse.
So, because many inner children are afraid of being displaced and being forced to grow up, they lock stress responses and shame in our bodies, bottle up their true soul longings, and ingrain bitterness about lack of freedom. Sadly, they never achieve what they are looking for. Unmet needs can’t be met from the states of fear locked in by repressed emotions. This is not because of a lack of effort. Our self-conscious trauma parts work very hard, perpetually seeking their unmet needs, but they do so frantically by grabbing the steering wheel in our consciousness and running from the parts they are in opposition to, not trusting that their true needs are allowed or attainable in either our inner or outer environments. Without granting themselves conscious permission to be themselves, they hide what they really want from us (such as play, performance-free creativity, and the foundation to feel lovable and love themselves). If we don’t allow our true motivations and desires to be consciously known, and if we don’t feel inner permission to achieve them and deserving of their attainment, we can’t truly feel satiated. Shame- and avoidance-oriented pleasure-seeking is just seeking. It may allow momentary relief, but without whole-bodied presence and permission to enjoy the activities. And, it is followed by inner criticism from the other child parts and exacerbated shame when not engaged in consciously. Similarly, if we pursue achievement out of a fear-based need to prove ourselves and battle inner shame, we can’t attain a full-bodied sense of success. If we allow pride at all, it is a fleeting feeling that these parts will anxiously and forcefully keep chasing while meanwhile burning us out, thereby propelling the other encampment of parts to seek shame-laden relief.
Paradoxically, if they were to let go of immature victim, self-criticism, and seeking patterns (aka “drama”), our inner children would finally get to be childlike (not childish), whimsical, and give and receive unconditional love. These intrinsic human qualities and needs(which are part of the thrive/social engagement system/regulated nervous system/love rather than fear flows of the body we naturally would be in were we not traumatized) are not erased by becoming an adult, they are squashed by brain F.O.G (Fear.Obligation.Guilt). A true adult is not rigid, serious, performative, and boring. These qualities are the products of black-and-white childlike thinking and self-imposed pressures resulting from stunted maturation. The desire to play and explore and create and delight in life never goes away in adults who love and accept themselves. A self-loving person is aware of what she likes, who she is, and she lets herself meet her needs. It’s tragic to not have had the foundation we would have needed in childhood to have become a whole-self-loving adult who feels safe to express themselves fully, but this is not a life sentence. Even if we didn’t get what we needed in childhood through no fault of our own and our ego parts got locked in time, forced to figure out how to survive rather than discover who they were and what they liked, we can bridge the gap today. All we need to do to unlock the permission to actually be free to love and play is feel what we are afraid of, then all the [self-imposed] “limits” frustrating us melt away.
In fact, it is only by allowing wholeness, healing, and maturation that inner child unmet needs can be achieved. If our inner children allow the integration into the whole, multi-faceted, self-knowing adult that we are naturally designed to blossom into, they get to become components of a sovereign person who loves life. This person understands that she is the main character in her own life and doesn’t need other people’s permission to be (unlike when we were kids), so each of our inner children gets to finally do all the things they never got to whole-heartedly. They just get to do them as an amalgamation of inner sovereign adults who are honest about who they are, what they like, and what they are truly feeling.
When you own the emotions you are feeling, many of which have been long held in your body and creating constriction, you are deciding to trust yourself and your capacity to handle distress. This decision to have faith in yourself finally allows you to assert that you are an adult who is safe NOW and who can handle life NOW (that you are no longer the helpless child trapped in your consciousness and body who didn’t actually have the external safety to handle intense emotions at the time). Your body then follows this cue and tells your nervous system to operate in states of safety rather than threat. So, what you are doing when you look openly at your emotions is shedding the obstacles preventing your innate states of harmony, joy, peace, love, and creativity. You are letting the natural harmoniously flows of your body do what they want to do rather than resist them. Our body does not want to flow in sadness, panic, anger, or shame: these states only occur if we try to control and run from ourselves.
When we look at repressed emotions, we also get to unburden our bodies of the pain and heaviness caused by [attempted] repression (we can’t really hide anything from ourselves; all we effectively accomplish when we try to do so is create monsters we think we need to run from). Each repressed emotion and traumatic memory is held somewhere in the body, causing stagnation, constriction, and a host of other health issues. When we try to block emotions and past experiences, we literally block blood and energy flow to the physical areas where they are housed, which is immediately reversed once we finally look at what we are trying to hide from ourselves. Unexpressed emotions have been determined to be the number one source of chronic pain and cancer. Recent research in the medical field has shown that mind-body symptoms related to the autonomic nervous system (e.g., chronic pain, rashes, and chemical sensitivity) are all the result of unprocessed memories and emotions; this research also shows that “effective” physical interventions (such as body work or chiropractics) are only the result of a placebo effect (https://unlearnyourpain.com). Basically, if you believe you are getting better at the hands of a safe person who says you will, you can finally stop resisting the healing your body naturally wants to provide you with (because we often believe that only others can save us). It was not the healer’s intervention you were long craving, but the safety and trust necessary to let go of resistance to healing. This is due to the phenomenon established in previous blogs that you can only heal if you feel ready and deserving — if you feel that you trust yourself. Sometimes, a healer can makes us feel safe at worthy enough that we finally feel permission to heal, outsourcing them as the trusted individual we don’t think we ourselves can be.
With practice, tuning into your emotions can become a daily practice that brings deep joy and confidence. To get there, we need to begin by purging long-held (or repressed) pain.
Option 1: Let Your Body Lead: Orient to why you are doing this: Because you deserve to be fully conscious and enjoy your life, not because there is something wrong with you. The more you do so in pursuit of freedom and joy, they more it will work. You are already a healed adult; you just need to let the past go. Now, lie down. Put your hands on your solar plexus, just below where your rib cages meet. This signals relaxation and can help the gut release — which is where we hold significant distress. Tune into your body. Notice areas of heaviness or pain. Breathe into these areas. You will encounter intense, painful emotions. Let them unwind, peak, and naturally reach their valley. Follow the urges to shake out tension, especially in the legs, where we hold unexpressed flight responses. Try to feel every part of you. Breathe through fear about what’s lurking there. Make sounds to let your trauma brain know there is a conscious you in charge. Remind it why you are doing this exercise. Hum. Make up chants and non-sensical songs: e.g., “wanna-woonee-aaa.” Just follow what wants to come out. This is how my chant tends to go. Maybe throw in some phrases to further soothe your inner children. Say, “ I am here now.” The “I” will shift into your conscious adult the more you shed and the more your inner children grow to trust this You, even if it is initially inner children speaking. Amazingly, though, opening up this channel does tend to let your most loving self through, as the children who usually block this resonance can relax into wanting a trusted guide to be with them. Similarly, play with breathing “I love you,” into the parts you are hydrating with your breath. Again, it may at first be an inner critic speaking who eagerly wants change to occur, but you can fake it until you make it here, and change is only possible when this part of you softens into believing all parts of you are lovable; the inner critic will come to realize nothing will happen until she relaxes her energy and shifts out of control, allowing the “I” speaking to be more and more loving.
Your body knows how to handle this and will guide you if you give it outlets. Know that no feeling will kill you, even if parts have long been trained to believe this to be the case. Breathe through the intense terror that this exercise is really dangerous. Breathe through anger at yourself for making this happen. Breathe through the desire to get up and do something else. These are just long held trauma responses. Everything that comes up is. When you are intuitively called to do this with movement (not anxiety-called in the middle of the exercises), try this on another occasion, not as a distraction, when paired with intense, fixed exercise like boxing with a bag or running on an elliptical.
Option 2: Let Your Intellect be Involved: As you do the above, try to put words to the emotion lurking there. In the beginning, emotional labeling may feel foreign, so you may need to run through a list until you find the one that feels right. For example, you may say, “I am feeling tightness in my shoulder. I think the emotion stored there is anger. More like envy. Actually, resentment. No, it’s panic. No, it’s more like fear. No, I think it’s sadness. No, it’s shame. That’s it.” You’ll know when you name the right emotion. Then, try to get to why. “I feel shame because….” Just free associate here. Speak whatever comes. Throw out guesses if words aren’t coming naturally at first. Sometimes, a part of us will remain in hiding at the beginning of the exercise, after a long period of believing it wasn’t allowed to express itself. But, once it understands that you are seriously here to listen to it, it will take the microphone from you and share what it has long yearned to unburden.
Once you open up these channels, you will release recent experiences as well as long repressed memories that were held in your body and fueling present experiences of shame [or whatever emotion comes up]. When you start free associating beliefs and experiences causing you to feel the identified emotion, you will enter a flow state that feels really good. The part of you who has been holding the repressed emotion gets to become fully conscious and release what has prevented it from integrating into your adult wholeness. Then, it can just be a content, satiated source of joy and flow within your body. It may even reveal itself to hold deep knowledge about what you uniquely are here to do on earth and what has been preventing you from moving forward or enjoying life. This is because once you admit to yourself what is happening under the surface, you won’t feel like you need to hide from yourself and the world anymore. The long held emotions will naturally release and you will feel more whole, grounded, confident and happy. Scanning through your body to find emotions you aren’t admitting to yourself will become a treasure hunt you look forward to. Not only will it allow you to release tension, but it will also help you understand more about who you are and your unique talents and interests you didn’t realize you were hiding behind negative emotion and pain wallpaper.
Ongoing Emotional Expression: Once you become more familiar with the exercise, you won’t need to scan your body to find hidden emotions, but you can just pull up, feel, and release emotions that need space whenever you have a moment alone in your day, such as while driving. “I am feeling really embarrassed coming out of that interaction because…” This prevents present negativity and self-doubt from creeping into your fascia and can also help you tap into old networks you have yet to uncover. If you don’t know what you are feeling, but you don’t have space for a body-oriented exercise, start with jealousy/resentment/bitterness/frustration/anger. When we are repressing aspects of our authenticity from ourselves or our true feelings, negative reactions towards others and the world around us are the keys to finding them. When you have a moment alone, free associate here. Start with “I can’t believe she had the audacity to do x just now,” or whatever recent experience allows you to tap into this negativity network. Then label to yourself the next reaction that feels related. Eventually, these reactions to other people will transition from “I am angry that they did x” to “I am angry that I am not allowing myself to do Y” to “I long to do Z but I am afraid of/ I don’t think I am allowed to do that because…” Allow this association continue until you not only release the anger and fear clouding your sense of reality but also find the strength to recover parts of yourself previously relegated to shame land. When we find ourselves bitter at the world or resentful of others, this means that parts of us are sending SOS signals to be recovered.
Unearth the Subconscious/Self-Consciousness and Take Charge of Your Life Throughout Your Day: The next step to becoming fully conscious is to try to put words to everything you are feeling and thinking behind the scenes as you move through your day. Part of this is ensuring that you articulate to yourself why you are doing everything you are doing and own your actions (as discussed in previous blogs). Another component is putting words to behaviors/habits you may be less consciously aware of and are trying to hide from yourself. Rather than shamefully reaching for more ice cream and trying to deny that you are doing so, for example, say “I am worried about what happened at my son’s school today and trying to comfort myself.” Try to find the right explanation until it feels intuitively right. You will get to a subconscious, unmet need that has long been compelling these disassociated actions. Such as “I am so afraid of getting in trouble or doing the wrong thing that I don’t want to have to look at this. I know it’s bad but I am so sick of being responsible and doing the right thing all the time. I am exhausted by life and feeling confident and proud of my actions feels impossible. It also feels like doing the right thing and not getting in trouble is impossible, so I would rather just give up.” There is an important part trying to protect you from burnout here. If it can make its fears known, it can feel listened to by an adult you, or become the adult it is looking for, and get its needs met without shame. This can be done in real time around other people as well. In the moment [in your head!] you may also say, “I am avoiding eye contact right now because I am envious that she feels comfortable wearing that outfit. I also fear she thinks I am inadequate in some way. I don’t think she would want to be friends with me so I am choosing to self-exclude rather than face rejection.” The more we allow ourselves to narrate the truth of what is going on in our subconscious, the more we release maladaptive thought networks and coping mechanisms. Once they become known, we can own them and choose to change. If we continue to deny that we have them, though, we can’t look at them clearly; in this case, the unexpressed emotions and needs take on a life of their own, grabbing the steering wheel whenever they can until they can finally release the belief that they are alone and stuck trying to survive in whatever way they can, even if they don’t like their methods.
Before bed, reflect on that day’s subconscious integration: Ask, “Where did I live from fear instead of truth? Where did I override my feelings to due to F.O.G? Where did I reclaim my voice, even imperfectly? What did I learn about myself?”
Eventually, emotional labeling may cease to be a private experience. You may even engage in more honest conversations with others that involve discussing what you are feeling and why, as you will no longer believe that you need to hide any part of yourself, and you will find yourself proud and excited to be a real human, not a performative doll.