I just got done watching the coaching replay I missed from the 6th. And between the woman whose parents were divorced and the mom having feelings about her daughter, I realized that after 6 months in Scholars, I’m missing the piece of feeling the feelings and allowing them to be there without rushing to change them or the thoughts causing them.
And I hate it. I do feel like I live in my head wanting to intellectualize everything and be a higher evolved being and just skip the human part. After the call I sat with my body for a while and identified fear. And I realize what’s causing that is thoughts about the past.
For several years it was multiple traumatic experiences, assault, custody battles, social workers, police, sexual assault, moving, illness, near death experience during childbirth, sudden death of friends….
So for 2 years now…. nothing horrible has happened. Life’s actually been pretty good. The only dramatic thing that happened was a tree falling on our parked car during a storm and to me, that was totally manageable compared to the way things used to be. Replace a windshield, don’t park under tall trees during storm season… ok, done.
I realize this fear, sadness, terror is the main thing I buffer against, and the main thing I tune out from. I do not let myself feel it, even though I feel like it’s totally habitual at this point, like my brain is looking for the next crisis and trying to protect against it.
My husband and I have been talking about making some new changes in our life, that could be amazingly positive, but I think that emotion that’s still driving is at odds with these changes, like… hey… we finally got to a place where we’re ok, Change…. NOTHING. Not even the bedspread that came with our furnished rental because… that’s a silly thing to worry about when we’re just trying to survive, except we’re not at the moment, I could totally replace the bedspread to one I like, we could get into planning a new chapter, we could make changes. I’m so resistant.
I was trying to intellectualize and NLP my way out of this, but… do I need to just allow myself to feel sad and scared and grieve? And for how long? I think so much happened, I didn’t feel I had time for a lot of these emotions. And I also wonder if they’re still there…. or maybe I just think they’re still there and need to be dealt with, or is it just thoughts of the past that need to go and the emotions go…
I think I’m unclear on how long to feel an emotion before working to change the thoughts if you’re not used to feeling feelings,
P.S. I’m so glad when you talked about 50/50 negative positive on the acceptance podcast that you included boredom, frustration, etc as the negative. I was thinking negative was just grief pain and fear. I can totally handle embarrassment, boredom, inconvenience and frustration. Does that mean I’d feel closer to 70/30?
