I’ve struggled with managing my emotions. I was a tender and emotional boy. I remember being upset about things and crying from my feelings being hurt. When my parents were getting a divorce and through their messy separation I cried. I didn’t want them to split up.
I’d seen my parents fight like cats and dogs. There was tense conflict with power games and yelling. It was often and I never saw them come to a mature understanding about their differences. This trained my mind to believe this was how it was.
I’d been called a cry baby or at times even a girl because I felt deeply and was overwhelmed by what I experienced in my body with my emotions. After years, other incidents trained me to push that stuff down into myself and suppress that soft, tender side until it was gone.
What did make it’s way to the surface was anger and plenty of it. I lashed out, acted up, and did what I could to get people to leave me alone. I was afraid that if I was going to be me and anyone was around I’d be ridiculed and made wrong for feeling.
The lashing out was effective in destroying connections which was what part of me needed so I could try to figure out what the hell was going on. I didn’t know I was an introvert. I didn’t know that I yearned for deep connections. The madness that was my home during formative years was more than I could handle as a sensitive boy.
From this, I simply felt I was destined to a life of reckless, dangerous anger. That anger helped me to feel some sense of power in an environment where I felt powerless and hopeless for anything other than what I’d been experiencing.
Then anger became the enemy too. I felt shame. After living so long in fear and anger I’d created a pattern of living in the part of my brain that was focused on surviving.
Since I was struggling so much to control how I expressed my feelings the solution I came up with was to stop experiencing them. It seemed a smart plan and was effective too so that I could stop being so destructive and ruining relationships and opportunities.
I began to recognize the new problem was that I couldn’t feel anything. I struggled to find the ever elusive “true happiness” and love was barely a distant fantasy. I told myself that it just wasn’t for me.
After years of suppressing when I took the lid back off of the container I’d been stuffing my feelings into I was overwhelmed. I had to learn about governing myself at times and others I would let the powerful sensations wash over me. I learned that I wasn’t going to break if I didn’t act out or pull the rip cord on the intensity of my emotions.
I found the difference between experiencing my emotions and expressing them. I learned to manage myself in a powerful experience.
Robert Frost said,”The only way out is through.” There’s no magic pill. There’s no shortcut. So that’s what I’ve been doing. Feeling my feelings and learning when and how to express them in a way that keeps me in alignment with the legacy I want to leave behind.
At some point I found the courage to try forgiving myself for my past transgressions. I’m choosing to live the life I want in spite of the past I’ve lived. I’ve been punishing myself for things that happened as a child a lot less.
Each moment I see that I have the option to live in balance with the world around me and defeating the enemy within myself is only done by experiencing love, peace, and joy in spite of the part of me telling whispering in my ear that I don’t deserve it.
The opportunity:
Where in life are you stuffing your feelings and being numb?
When do your emotions come bursting out of you uncontrollably?
What do you think would happen if you simply sat with your intense emotions without expressing them in unhealthy ways?
Thanks for your time, have a great day!