IV. Stuffing our feelings causes disease.
The cycle of not feeling and stashing and moving on takes hold of us. Since we rarely get to come back and feel the feelings that we stuffed, we begin to feel stuffed. Things start to happen in our lives that we can’t control - our health declines, pain arises, arthritis sets in, we get chronic bronchitis from a cold. Yes, of course we could take the view that we just got a cold and it got stuck. We can make all sorts of reasons for it - we were worn out by pushing hard to co
III. If we could stop acting as though feelings are a side aspect of human experience, rather than t
When my kids were tiny, I was struggling hugely with depression and didn’t know it. This manifested as rage and the rage got directed at everyone in my life, and especially at my husband and my older child. I hated myself for this, but also couldn’t find the magic key to make it stop. So I enrolled in Non Violent Communication classes because I thought it would fix this aspect of myself that I was struggling with and hating. But the NVC classes missed the essential piece for
II. Bodies and feelings are central to healing. We aren’t alive without them.
We have forgotten how to feel deeply. And, it’s likely even worse than that, since it’s not just a matter of forgetting. We have created systems to live within, and have family histories of behaviour, that actively squash the feelings out of us. It is okay to feel your feelings. It makes you human to feel your feelings. It makes you human to be in a body, feeling feelings. My belief here is that underneath almost everything that people are struggling with, whether it looks em
I. Humans Are Soft-Bodied, Feeling Creatures
Humans are soft-bodied, feeling creatures. We have guts on our insides and we know they’re really vulnerable. Our skeletons do not cover us all over. We learn to protect our insides - physically and emotionally - at an early age. It doesn’t take too many experiences of rejection or dismissal or other hard-to-process physical/emotional experiences for us to begin behaving as though we had a tough exoskeleton all around, fending off the world if we think it’s going to hurt us,
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