Feelings are for feeling

“I almost died because of the tears I didn't cry”.

I read in the last chapter of a book I finished this week.

It's a tale about a knight who gets stuck in his own armour. As a consequence, he lives disconnected from himself, while his armour slowly pushes away the people he loves the most.

Then, when the pain of losing those he loved became too intense, he decided to remove the armor so he could get close to them again. But now the armor is stuck.

He tries everything, but nothing works. Now, he can barely feed himself because the helmet is also stuck on his face. He realizes he is dying slowly.

On the verge of losing hope, he embarks on a journey to find some magical help to remove the armour. In the woods, he encounters Merlin, the wizard, who guides him on the "path of truth", the only way he can free himself from all the iron that keeps him separated from life. But Merlin can't accompany him, because this path can only be traveled alone, he explains.

Along the "path of truth," he must pass through three castles: the castle of silence, the castle of knowledge, and the castle of daring. At each castle, he learns lessons about himself, about who he is and who he is not (or who he thought he had to be).

In the castle of silence, he is forced to confront his pain, his discomfort, and to recognize his light and his shadows, which he has denied for so long. Once he comes into contact with the parts of himself he fears most, he is freed from the castle, as a secret door appears, leading him to continue his journey.

In the castle of knowledge, he discovered the power of knowing himself deeply and how to love himself. In this castle, he realized that he wore the armor mainly to separate himself from his feelings. He didn't know how to feel.

He was scared that if he expressed his true feelings, people would not appreciate him, leading him to live his entire life trying to please others. His life was built on proving how kind, good, and loving he was. But in the castle of knowing, he discovered that he didn't need to prove anything. He was kind, good, and loving. As he discovered his own truth, he found his way out of the castle of knowing and continued his journey.

In the third castle, the castle of daring, he encounters his greatest challenge. He has to face the dragon of fear and doubt. He is challenged and put to the test to see if he is living according to his own truth, or if he is still living in patterns of disconnection, trying to prove himself.

At each castle he visited, parts of his armor were detaching from his body. Despite the hardships he faced, he felt lighter, more alive, and more connected without carrying all the weight of the metal armor.

As he reached the end of the path of truth at the top of a mountain, he was challenged once more when he tripped over a rock and hung over an abyss. There was no way up; he had to let go of the rock and trust the unknown.

Letting go of the rock he was clinging to meant letting go of all the things he "knew" in life. Who he thought he was, who he thought he wasn't. His beliefs, what he thought to be true, and all he thought to be false. His judgments, and everything he considered as good or bad.

He hesitated, as fear grew inside him. If he released his hand from the rock, he would certainly fall, and he could die. But then he had an insight: wasn't he already dying in the state he was in? He decided to trust life and the unknown.

And then, when he released his grip on the rock, something surprising happened... he started to fall upwards towards the top of the mountain, completing the "path of truth."

The rest of the armor fell completely apart, and he...

well, I won't tell you the entire story, right? I have to leave something out to spark your curiosity :)

Armors

We all wear armors.

The armor we wear symbolizes two things:

1. The masks we present to the world, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are in an attempt to feel worthy, loved, and a sense of belonging - but these disconnect us from truly feeling inherently worthy, loved, and a sense of belonging.

2. The disconnection with ourselves and the rigid walls we create inwardly to avoid feeling our feelings.

The two are absolutely interconnected.

• Because we don't feel our feelings, we haven't learned to validate ourselves.

• Because we learned not to trust ourselves (our feelings), we don't feel worthy, loved, or that we belong, so we search for validation outside ourselves, in others.

• Because we learned we can't trust ourselves to be loved and worthy, we act in ways we believe will earn us love and worthiness from others. Many times, acting in these ways means betraying ourselves and our feelings, which we've learned is okay because that's the only way others will like us.

The irony of it all is that when we go through life wearing masks of who we think we should be to be appreciated and loved, it's exactly what keeps us separate from our own truth, and from the things and people that really add meaning to our lives.

Feelings

I was about to begin this section with a "lecture" on what feelings are. However, instead of discussing the concept of feelings, I believe it's more productive to start with how the experience of feeling feels.

It sucks.

Feeling good feelings, warm feelings, happy feelings, generally brings a sense of “uow, life is the best thing ever invented by God/universe".

But when feelings don't feel so good? What do we do with them?

Well, Glennon, you were not alone. I also used to suppress my uncomfortable feelings and suck it up. In some ways, this made me live life disconnected from myself. For a long time, I lived as an adaptation of myself in an attempt to avoid feeling painful emotions - which also made me feel bad in many ways. You know the usual… people pleasing, making my needs less important, seeking external validation, etc. These were my armors.

Now, after thousands of hours and money invested in therapy, books, and real-life practice, I've come to accept (most of the time) that all feelings are for feeling. It doesn't make it any easier to feel the pain when it comes, but I've noticed a strange thing: even when I allow myself to feel feelings that sometimes feel like a part of my body was ripped off and I was left bleeding.. I also feel whole. Because I'm being truthful to myself.

And I would rather feel the pain and be whole, than numb it and feel empty.

Yes, at the end of the day, we only have these two choices. The possibility of them not coming is totally off the table - if you're human.

Now, back to the easy part.. Let’s talk about feelings (instead of feeling them)

Feelings are the sensations of how emotions manifest in our bodies.

Feelings are energy.

Energy needs to be moved and released to be transformed.

No baby is born without the ability to feel. Have you ever seen a baby who is disconnected from their body, their needs, their feelings, and expression?

See, our ability to feel is directly related to our ability to express who we really are in the world. It allows us to stand up for ourselves, communicate our needs, and love ourselves.

So, if every baby is born knowing how to feel everything and be themselves, why do some of us lose this ability, given that we were all babies at one point?

Perhaps it has to do with the fact that at some point in our development, we were taught that feeling was dangerous. When a caregiver is unable to deal with their own feelings, they may suppress any emotional information that comes from others, threatening the very attachment a child needs to survive.

As a child, crying was one of the ways my body used to regulate itself in face of overwhelming bodily sensations. A frequent reaction I would get from my dad was “Stop crying, or I will give you a good reason to cry". He didn't know how to feel the feelings.

A child won't know it's safe to feel and express herself… if it's not safe to feel and express herself.

Dissociation

We love the warm sensations of positive emotions, but very few of us were taught to feel the pain of distressing emotions. The pressure on the chest, the accelerating heart, the discomfort at the top of the stomach. It hurts; the physical pain is real. Or even the not knowing what's there, but just knowing that it's really uncomfortable.

So, what do we do? We suppress the uncomfortable feelings.

We numb ourselves with alcohol, drugs, Netflix, scrolling through Instagram... anything but feeling our bodies. When we suppress and numb our feelings, instead of letting energy flow through us to be discharged and released, we interrupt its flow, making us stuck in our own pain.

Just like the knight got stuck in his own armor.

“Numbness keep ourselves from becoming” - Glennon Doyle

Feelings as a compass for who we are

If you are not able to feel, you can't see yourself completely. Dissociation brings with it an altered self-perception. The knight didn't know how to feel, therefore he didn't see himself as whole. The distorted perception of himself, that he wasn't enough, made him live life as if he had to prove himself every step of the way.

When we don't know how to deal with our emotions and feelings, we get stuck in a rational world. In the rational world, we don't know who we are; we know who we're told we should be.

When we suppress our feelings because we're scared of feeling them, we live life not with the goal of experiencing life, but we live life in constant attempt to avoid feeling uncomfortable feelings. We live such in a way to be good, until we don't know who we are anymore.

I've learned that not feeling our feelings is the same as abandoning ourselves. We are literally dismissing and invalidating who we are.

My goal is to stop abandoning myself.

How to feel (all) the feelings

Warning: feeling your feelings will make life (at times) less efficient and less convenient. As it is supposed to be.

You can't just keep doing life at 2x speed and just hope feelings will go away. No. Feelings need to be seen. They require attention, energy, and release. Feeling your feelings is like caring for your inner child. You can't give attention to a child while you're cleaning the house, sending emails, or talking on the phone. You need to stop everything you're doing and be with her. It's the same with ourselves.

Here's how it works for me:

1. I usually sit somewhere I feel safe by myself in silence.

2. Then I start noticing all the sensations in my body.. how's my breathing, if I feel any part of my body compressed, if there's pain, where is the pain…

3. If I can identify the emotion, I name it out loud, “I feel sad”, “I'm so angry", or if I can't name it, I just say whatever comes out loud… “I hate this thing I'm feeling..".

4. I let it out in any way it asks to move. Sometimes I cry for however long it asks to be cried. Sometimes I scream in the pillow. Sometimes I record voice notes cursing, that will be later deleted. Sometimes I write. Sometimes I just lay in bed not really doing anything but feeling it all.

Most of the time, after I sit with myself and feel the emotions, their intensity diminishes as energy is released. But I don't do it to stop feeling the emotion. I do it so I can be whole.

There are also feelings that don't just come for a pit stop; they stay for days, weeks, and months. I'm learning to integrate them into my life, instead of numbing them away. I'm learning that becoming who I am means bringing all parts of me to the game, even if it makes life a little less efficient.

I'm learning that to live the fulfilling life I want for myself, there can't be any armor around me, neither mine nor others'.

Life is better lived skin to skin.

With love,

Nat

P.S.: If you have any thoughts, questions, or just feel like sharing your experience, please do! The point of all this is to create conversations from which we can grow together.