Healing the Feeling.
People are often threatened and confused by feelings, especially supposed negative feelings. Only yesterday I was told that feelings are for the weak, this is a dangerous perspective to take because the only conclusion to draw from this premise is that feelings are to be banned unless you wish to be shamed. Their dad was in the military which might have something to do with it. However, most of us are not currently in the military, so that is a topic for a different time.
Shaming emotion is problematic for a variety of reasons and I will attempt to explain why. On the whole, negative emotion points to our unmet needs and positive emotion points to our met needs. If we aren’t in touch with our emotions we don’t know what we like or don’t like and are prone to being led by an unhealed past. For instance, emotion tends to sit on a time-line, and the emotion felt may not always be appropriate to the present moment. For instance, what if every time someone smelt bleach they flew into a panic and then froze? Well you might think they are trying to get out of cleaning the toilet bowl and be appropriately annoyed. But you might be wrong. What if that person had repeat historical experiences of being beaten up, nose to the floor of a freshly bleached bathroom. A past memory can create an incongruent and incompatible relationship with the here and now.
We need to become well acquainted with our emotions. We need to know our emotions and why we are feeling them. This kind of emotion is called an emotional flashback. Pete Walker coined this phrase and wrote some invaluable material on CPTSD that I highly recommend; he has posted a lot of great content on his website: pete-walker.com. When you recognise that your emotion isn’t a good fit to the here and now, enquiry, not shame is crucial. Let’s put you in the position of the person who has the panic. You don’t want to be having an argument about cleaning the toilet bowl, you want to be supporting yourself with access to the correct context and compassionately, not diving into a high stakes domestic argument;
emotion can be straightforward if we clear it of the detritus from the past. If I can recognise that cleaning the toilet bowl isn’t such a threat to my safety, if I can remember how much my partner loves a clean toilet bowl, and how much happier I am when they are happy, I might clean it and now we both feel happy. Simples.
