Quote:
Monday, December 15, 2014
You are reading from the book The Language of Letting Go
Feelings
It's okay to have and feel our feelings - all of them.
Years into recovery, we may still be battling with ourselves about this issue. Of all the prohibitions we've lived with, this one is potentially the most damaging and the most long-lived.
Many of us needed to shut down the emotional part of ourselves to survive certain situations. We shut down the part of us that feels anger, sadness, fear, joy, and love. We may have turned off our sexual or sensual feelings too. Many of us lived in systems with people who refused to tolerate our emotions. We were shamed or reprimanded for expressing feelings, usually by people who were taught to repress their own.
But times have changed. It is okay now for us to acknowledge and accept our emotions. We don't need to allow our emotions to control us; neither do we need to allow our emotions to control us; neither do we need to rigidly repress our feelings. Our emotional center is a valuable part of us. It's connected to our physical well being, our thinking, and our spirituality.
Our feelings are also connected to that great gift, instinct. They enable us to give and receive love.
We are neither weak nor deficient for indulging in our feelings. It means we're becoming healthy and whole.
Today, I will allow myself to recognize and accept whatever feelings pass through me. Without shame, I will tune in to the emotional part of myself.
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Whenever I see the word feelings, I am reminded of the girl in treatment who kept asking me, "...but how do you feel?" She would lean in and get in my face, and I wanted to smash her and was really angry and told her, "If I knew, I wouldn't be here." I hated being confronted. She had been in treatment before and I didn't like the fact that she knew the ropes and had an advantage over me, and we had a battle going on that even carried over to the kitchen as to who was the best cook. I won out in the cooking department by popular conscenses, and people going back for seconds and she didn't like to admit that my tuna salad sandwiches with a little of the pickle juice in the mayo, didn't ruin lunch. She was very hard core and had done hard drugs and had been in jail and on the streets and yet there was a hard core within me, and we were two women who both hurt and had used people, places, and thing to ease that pain and didn't want to let go.