S1 EP52 – Allowing and Trusting Your Feelings
Episode Summary
Are you conscious of your own feelings? Do you find it challenging to be present in your body with your feelings? Do you judge yourself for your feelings instead of trusting them and taking loving action for yourself based on them? Is it hard for you to feel deep joy? Discover that keeping a lid on your pain also prevents you from experiencing your joy.
Transcript
Hi everyone. This is Dr. Margaret Paul with the inner bonding podcast. And today I want to talk about allowing and trusting your feelings. Did you grow up being taught that feeling and expressing your feelings is wrong or bad, especially your painful feelings. I often have the experience with my clients of hearing them apologize when they start to cry, they say, Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m getting emotional. It’s okay to cry. I tell them crying is a natural way of expressing feelings and releasing pain. And when they’re trying to be very quiet with their tears, I often say it’s okay to cry out loud and allow yourself to make noise.
So many people learn to muffle their tears because they weren’t allowed to cry. And it’s not just crying that a lot of people judge, you judge your anger, your jealousy, emptiness, anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, fear, loneliness, sadness, heartbreak, grief, or even your passion or your excitement. Do you believe that you’re supposed to stay just like on an even keel and that having our expressing feelings indicates that you’re not okay or that you’re being too vulnerable or too intense or too sensitive.
Our wound itself came into being to protect us from feelings that we could manage. The big existential, painful feelings of life, the loneliness, heartbreak, helplessness concerning others and events, sorrow, and grief. One of the ways our wounded self might’ve learned to protect us is to judge our feelings as bad or wrong. Your warning itself might be telling you that feeling your feelings makes you too vulnerable to being hurt or controlled by others. You might’ve heard don’t wear your heart on your sleeve.
I learned very early to put a lid on my feelings as a young child. I was ignored when I cried. I was told to calm down when I was intense or excited. My ma my narcissistic mother didn’t want me getting any attention from my father for my feelings, because she wanted all the attention. It was okay for her to cry or be angry, but not for me. My father at a very young age, he was, he was young when he had shut down to being emotionally expressive, other than sudden anger, he was rarely demonstrative with his feelings.
So he was not a role model for expressing feelings through years of therapy. I’ve finally learned to express some of my feelings, but it wasn’t until spirit brought his inner bonding that I finally understood that my feelings are not only the natural way to release pain and stress, but that they’re also my inner guidance. Not only are they not bad or wrong, all of them offer me vital information. We all know that our physically painful feelings let us know that something needs attending to regarding our physical body.
If you put your hand on a hot stove, the burning feeling immediately tells you to remove your hand. If you didn’t feel the pain, like if you had numbed your hand, you could badly burn your hand. So the instant pain is vitally important information for your well-being. The same is actually true of our emotional feelings. They let me know whether, whether I’m being loving or unloving to myself, they let me know whether others are being loving or unloving. To me. They let me know whether a situation is right or wrong for me, whether it’s good or bad for me, or whether it’s dangerous for me.
And they offer me a natural way to release my pain. You can’t receive the incredible guidance and release your feelings and get the information that you need. When you allow your wound itself to judge your feelings, instead of judging yourself for feeling angry, look inside to discover why your inner child might be angry at you. How are you abandoning yourself? How are you not taking loving care of yourself instead of judging your jealousy, explore what you’re telling yourself.
That’s causing you to feel insecure, explore your false beliefs about your worth and your lovability. Instead of judging yourself for crying, embrace your sadness or embrace feeling, moved with gratitude and compassion and an intention to learn allowing yourself the release that tears bring, instead of judging your anxiety or depression and trying to get rid of these feelings, open to learning about what you’re telling yourself and how you’re treating yourself. That’s causing these feelings instead of judging your emptiness and aloneness and covering up these feelings with various addictions, open to learning about what you’re doing, that’s creating your spiritual disconnection and what you need to do to reconnect because emptiness and aloneness indicate a lack of love inside.
And when you’re connected spiritually, then you can open and bring that love within, instead of judging your passion or excitement or intensity or joy because of a fear of rejection embrace these feelings is indications that you’re on the right track and that you’re taking lemon care of yourself. Then lovingly disengage from others. If they’re threatened by your expression of joy and other positive feelings, as I’ve often said, all feelings are informational and their natural expression through tears.
Laughter excitement releases unwanted stress from your body rather than acting out your feelings or repressing them, take the judgment off of them, opening to the invaluable information they have for you. And nature’s way of releasing stress and pain. The more you learn to attend to and listen to your feelings, the more you’re you’re going to learn to trust this powerful inner source of guidance. I hope you feel that it’s time to take the lid off your feelings so that you can feel joy in your life for a moment, go back to being a little child and remember an adult being unloving to you and adult parent or other caregiver teacher relative religious figure, or some other adult in authority, yells at you and adult invalidates you and adult ignores you and adult ridicules or judges or criticizes you an adult molests you an adult hits you beats.
You are physically harms you in some other way. An adult abandoned you and adult forces you to do things that you don’t want to do. And don’t use as you emotionally smothering you sucking the life out of you or any other violating harmful, abusive behavior. How did you feel if you really let yourself go back, you’re going to become aware of the deep heartbreak that was within your little body, the heartbreak that you could not allow yourself to feel at the time, because it was way too big to manage.
So you blocked it out in any number of ways and all those ways became part of your wound itself. You told yourself you were bad or wrong, that it was your fault. You were being harmed because you were unlovable or flawed or defective or inadequate or unworthy of love. You might’ve left your body and become focused in your mind, numb to your feelings. You turned to various addictions, fantasizing, daydreaming, food, and later to alcohol, drugs, sex, and other addictions. You might’ve become a good child, completely losing yourself and becoming what the adults wanted you to be.
Or you might’ve become like your abusers abusing others. When you could taking out your anger on others, the alive newness and the joy of your soul dimmed, and you forgot what it was like to be truly joyful. Now you can heal this with inner bonding right now. Go back to the heartbreak of childhood. Put your hand on your heart. Opening to spirit, inviting in love and compassion for your little heartbroken child. Find the kind caring, tender, and gentle place in your heart for your own heartbreak.
Become the loving parent to your child that you needed when you were a child, give your inner child, which is the feeling part of you. All the acceptance he or she is needing right now. Tell your inner child the truth from your heart, allowing spirit to speak through you saying my sweet little one. It wasn’t your fault. There was nothing wrong with you. You weren’t bad. The adults took their pain and woundedness out on you.
You were helpless over them. They didn’t know how to love. And so of course you were heartbroken. My wonderful little one. You deserve love then and you deserve love. Now. Spirit is always with us. Sustaining us and spirit was always with us, sustaining us. Then I’m here now. And I love you Go through as many memories as you can embracing the heartbreak with deep gentleness towards your inner child.
Each time the heartbreak starts to move through. You consciously release it to spirit. By opening to your authentic existential pain. You’re also opening your heart to your joy, your likeness, your passion for life and your ability to love, which after all is what makes life worth living. You can’t block out your painful feelings without also blocking out the wonderful feelings of life because they are in the same place in the heart.
This is why many people say that they never experience true joy. They can’t, unless they’re also open to their pain, but it’s not enough to embrace the heartbreak of the past. Now you need to learn to stay present in your body and embrace the pain in the present each day. Interactions with people and events may be heartbreaking. They may cause loneliness, grief, heartache, sadness, sorrow, and helpless over others. In situations. If you continue to protect against these existential painful feelings of life, you’re going to continue to keep your heart closed, which keeps the lid on your joy and your love and your passion, a liveliness on your personal power and emotional freedom.
You’re going to discover that embracing your existential pain of life is not nearly as hard as dealing with the wounded pain that you create with all your protections against your deeper pain, the pain, the wounded pain of anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, anger, aloneness, emptiness, or jealousy that you feel when you’re abandoning yourself in your effort to avoid your existential pain. As I said, the authentic pain of life and the joy of life live in the same place in the heart. When you compassionately embrace the pain, you open to the joy, that is your birthright.
Many of us grew up learning to mistrust our feelings. Don’t be ridiculous. My mother often said to me, when I asked her why she was angry, I’m not angry. She would say with anger in her voice, don’t be ridiculous. Was what I often heard in response to many of my feelings. So of course I learned to mistrust. My feelings took me many years of inner bonding work to regain trust in my feelings and many of my clients, when they start in her bonding, they don’t trust their feelings. My client, Sally consultant with me because she often found herself repulsed by her husband’s sexual advances.
She was confused because she loved him very much. And there were times when she was actually attracted to him. But most of the time she was turned off to him. Sally, I asked when Tim approaches you for sex. What’s his energy like almost at the time she said, I feel like he’s pulling on me and demanding something from me. It doesn’t feel loving. It feels needy. But when I say something about it to him, he tells me that’s my issue that he loves me and just wants to express his love. I get so confused. Sally has a hard time trusting her feelings because her mother was constantly invalidating her feelings as she was growing up.
She currently has the same problem with, with a neighbor. Seems to me, she told me that Chelsea is often suddenly judging my daughter in front of her yet. When I’ve said something to her, she makes me feel like it’s my issue, Sally. I asked you I’d have to trust and honor your feelings. What would you do differently with Tim Chelsea? Well, she thought a moment and then said, well, okay. I think I would stop being so tentative and stop judging myself and be firm with them. So what would you say to Tim when he’s needy with you? I asked, I would say Tim, I love you.
And I’m turned on to you when you come to me with your love, but not when you come to me with this empty needy energy, what would you say to Chelsea? I asked, say, Chelsea, it’s not okay to judge my daughter. If you keep doing this, I’m not going to spend time with you. And what would you say or do if they tried to make it your issue? Well, I think I would say this doesn’t feel good. And then walk away. How would you feel if you did this? I asked, well, I would feel great. Andrew drew has a similar issue with his wife, Susan, Andrew often feel Susan is being what he calls, not real.
There’s something about her. That’s often inauthentic. He told me like she’s being, being a certain way to get approval from me and others. I feel smothered by it and I shut down. Then she complains about my withdrawal and about my not wanting to have sex with her. But when I try to explain it to her, she gets angry and defensive and tells me that I have a problem with intimacy, Andrew. I said, you’re not trusting and honoring your feelings, which does create a problem with intimacy because you withdraw rather than speaking your truth. If you were totally to trust your feelings when Susan was being inauthentic and it was pulling on you for approval, would you speak you, you would speak your truth.
And in that moment instead of withdrawing, so isn’t, doesn’t know what she’s, when she’s being inauthentic and she doesn’t know what you’re talking about. When you tell her later after the fact, she’s just confused by your withdrawal. If you learn to trust your feelings and honor them by telling your truth in the moment, you’re likely going to see a lot of improvement in your relationship, through his devoted inner bonding practice. Andrew began to trust his own feelings and gain the courage. To be honest with Susan in the moment, he was very surprised to learn that Susan actually appreciated hearing his truth and their relationship did gradually improve.
As you know, if you’ve been practicing inner bonding, step one of inner bonding is becoming aware of your feelings and wanting responsibility for them. In some ways. This first step is the most challenging for many people. My client Patty had been doing in her money for over a year yet. She was still unable to stay conscious of her feelings. Even when she was aware of feeling any wounded feelings, she couldn’t come. She sh she would completely forget that it was her thoughts that were causing her pain. She would completely forget the intention to learn her resistance, to taking responsibility for her own feelings was running her life.
In previous sessions. She had also been resistant to exploring her resistance yet. She was now tired of being stuck. So she finally opened to learning about her resistance. So I said to her, there must be a very good reason that you’re so resistant to feeling your feelings. Are you willing to explore this? I had asked her this before, but I asked her again. Yes. She said, what comes to me is that when I was little, I was not allowed to feel my feelings. And if I did, I was punished. My parents had no empathy or compassion for my feelings and decided when I was little, that it was safer not to feel my feelings, except when I was with someone who was compassionate toward my feelings.
So I said, it sounds like you’re now making others responsible for whether or not you’re going to feel your feelings. There must be a good reason why you’re not willing to be that compassionate person now for your inner child, for your feeling self, what is your one is self believe about you doing it for yourself rather than waiting for someone else to do it. Hmm. Should I said, I think I believe that it feels good only when someone else is compassionate toward me. So I said, either you spend a lot of energy trying to get others to care about your feelings, or you just ignore your feelings and feel abandoned.
Yeah. I think that is what I do. It feels so good when someone else really gets me, really understands me and is compassionate with me, Patty. I said, have you ever really tried to get you to really understand you, your essence, your inner child, have you ever really opened to bringing the love and compassion or spirit into your heart for your own feelings? No. She said, well, this is what needs exploring. I said, you’ve been completely resistant to even trying to do this for yourself. And there must be a good reason. Are you willing to explore this?
I just don’t think it will feel as good. She said. So I said to her, the fact that you’re not even willing to try to see if that’s true, makes me think that the real issue is a control issue, that your wounded self is very devoted to having control over, getting others, to do it for you and to staying in a victim place. Obviously it’s been a lifelong project of your wound itself to get empathy, compassion, and understanding from others. And you often get angry or irritated when you don’t get what you want. Yes, she said, and I I’m actually tired of this.
I have a great loving adult in other areas of my life like financially Patty, would you go to your guidance and ask whether it’s accurate, that it feels better to get the compassion from someone else rather than give it to yourself? Patty had actually established a pretty good case connection with her higher guidance. Okay. She said, and there was a long pause while she listened to her guidance. My guidance, this is telling me that I would feel so much better if I took responsibility for my own feelings. She’s telling me that I will not be able to have a good relationship until I’m willing to do this.
That as long as I expect others to do it for me or that I just ignore my feelings, I’m going to feel alone and lonely. And I realize I’m feeling to my guidance. Wow. I can see that. I really don’t want to do this. I’m sure my guidance is right, but I so want someone else to do it for me, Patty. I said, this is a really great awareness this week, just that you consciously resist taking care of your feelings, do it on purpose to become more aware of this choice. Ironically, as a result of her willingness to consciously choose to abandon herself.
Patty is slowly beginning to take responsibility for her feelings. Now think about this for a moment and be honest with yourself. How often are you fully present in your body with your feelings? When I first started to practice inner bonding, 35 years ago, I was never in my body. I learned to be in my head and to be very tuned into other’s feelings, but not at all to my own. I thought that I was tuned into others and gave them what they needed. Then they would give me what I needed. Needless to say that didn’t work at all.
And I always ended up feeling alone and resentful that I was cooked giving so much and no one was giving back to me. So in spirit brought in her bonding to me and Erica, I realized that I had to learn to stay in my body. If I was going to be able to take responsibility for my own feelings. This was a huge task for me. I have, I of course learned many ways of not feeling my feelings to survive. The heartbreak of my childhood and these ways were deeply entrenched. I thought I wanted to be aware of my feelings, but I couldn’t seem to remember to remember to tune in how can I remember?
That’s what I asked myself at that time. Well, the first step is to want to, but even though I thought I really wanted to, it took me. It took me time of doing the best I could in my inner bonding practice to really want to once I really wanted to, then the many reminders that I use to tune in started to work such as sticky notes I had around my house and my car and rubber band around my wrist and a gadget called a motivator that I set to buzz I’d often, even then it took a long time, a lot more practice before I was able to stay mostly present in my body.
Then it took more time and practice before I really wanted responsibility for the feelings that I was now beginning to feel. Because even though I was starting to feel my feelings, I didn’t want to really know that I was the cause of the wounded ones. And then I was really responsible for managing the existential pain of life. I didn’t know that was my job. I still really wanted someone else to do it for me. As long as I wanted someone else to take responsibility for my feelings, it was still hard to stay present in my body. I was finally able to become more and more present.
Once I realized the freedom and the privilege of taking care of my own feelings. Now it took me a lot longer than it does most of my clients, because I really didn’t know what I was doing. Most of my clients can do it much more rapidly than I did Then about 25 years ago, the loneliness that I had so carefully avoided during my whole life finally surfaced. I not only learned to manage this feeling, but I learned about how much powerful information it had for me regarding what was happening between me and another person.
Being able to compassionately embrace my loneliness was another huge step in staying present in my body. But there were still times when I couldn’t stay present in my body. And I didn’t know what I was avoiding feeling. Then one day quite suddenly in the middle of a difficult interaction with someone, my heart felt like it shattered. It almost took my breath away. As I put my hands on my heart, I heard my guidance say to me, this is heartbreak. And also help us over the other person.
These are the deepest feelings that you’ve been avoiding all your life. Be very tender and gentle with yourself and it will be okay. There is much information in these feelings since then. I’ve been able to stay present in my body almost all the time, knowing how to manage loneliness, heartbreak, and helplessness over others has changed everything. For me, It’s been a long Process to learn, to be fully in step one of inner bonding. But again, as I said, I really didn’t know what I was doing, but I do hope that you hang into your inner bonding practice until step one becomes natural to you.
It’s so worth all the time and practice. And one of the things that will help you is taking my 30 day. Love yourself course. There’s, there’s a, a course. I’m going to be teaching over seven. It’s going to be the inner bonding process online. And if you want information about it, then register for my free seven day inner bonding course or for our newsletter. And you’ll get on our mailing list and you’ll receive notification of this course.
It’s called the power to joyfully. Love your life. The revolutionary inner bonding process for healing, freedom and vibrant love. The course is going to start on June 3rd for eight weeks. Once a week. This will be a very, very powerful experience for you in learning the inner bonding process. I send you my love and my blessings.
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