HOW FEELING ALL OF YOUR FEELINGS MAKES YOU FREE

Most of my clients are weighed down by something. I am weighed down by things. When we describe our sadness, anxiety, tortuous decisions, fraught relationships…. we could be saying “I want to be free.”

What do we want to be free of?

The weight.

The rumination.

The fear.

The lack of safety.

The constant vigilance.

All of this felt in the body and impacting every part of our lives.

The spirals downward. The worn tracks in mind and heart and body that go nowhere good.

Healing is a complex topic - there are all kinds of ways into these tracks.

One important one is letting yourself have all your feelings.

There is probably at least one thing you don’t want to feel.

If I suggest it you will recoil, rationalize, resist.

This is the way through. This is the feeling that the well-worn track is avoiding.

You learned somehow somewhere not to show this one.

This one is private, vulnerable, yours alone.

Often we don’t even know it’s there. We just know we’re stuck.

When we slow down and track our feelings we can usually feel a little bump in the road.

We can feel the moment when we choose to jump over or around the feeling we don’t want to feel in favour of a more well-known path.

You could think of this like a blocked drain. Opening up a feeling lets the water flow freely again. It’s smelly but it’s necessary.

Feelings moving is healthy. It isn’t easy - feelings are hard to bear - but you’ll have so much energy. So much access to yourself.

You’ll be a living breathing system.

It’s the start that’s the hardest part.

It feels like you could never do or feel whatever it is that is coming up.

This can be one of the very powerful things about therapy. It is a place where the thing you are pushing away might be shown to you. It may be the only way you come to see that there is something else out there in the sea that is you.

Left alone, we may believe there is no option - the way we are is just how we are. In relationship we can be offered a different perspective.

And therapy is a place where you might consider making a different choice. To consider feeling the feeling, thinking the thought, experiencing the memory - it is a place where something new can happen.

And in this newness, we are changed. Physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually.

So much talking.

So much happening.

So much opening up.

I can’t believe how energized I feel.