“Ah, don’t feel sad…” “Don’t feel that way…” “Don’t feel guilty….” Commonly, and often, we’re told not to feel something.
To that I say STOP. Feel it.
It’s okay to feel it. You’re not going to melt, it WILL stop, you won’t kill anyone with your anger (unless you use violence).
Just now, someone told me that she was told that she shouldn’t feel guilty over something. I told her to go ahead and feel guilty. And. Let’s look at what the guilt is saying to her.
What is the message of the guilt? Is it saying that she’s not allowed to want? Not allowed to do something?
So I owned the guilt, and, the self talk that I would have if feeling the guilt as she watched me doing it. “I’m feeling guilty…I’m wrong for liking this, for wanting that, I mean, who the hell do I think I am (she let out a laugh when I said that).” Ah, she had body reaction, (the body’s truth naturally showing up) at that point of who the hell she thinks she is.
So…what about that statement brought that up? As it turns out, the “guilt” was the messenger of a deeper held belief that she wasn’t allowed to do something, else she would be defined and labeled as “all that, conceited, full of herself.”
Let’s look where this takes us…we looked at the messages that she recieved from her parents, or her mom, or her grandmother? (This all good information to find what’s beneath the guilt). Let’s look that the context of THEIR culture and what it was like for them, and let’s have a look to see if THEIR context fits YOUR context, today.
In this actually pretty brief conversation, she realized that her guilt came from unspoken as well as spoken messages from the women in her family that were lies that didn’t really pertain to her. All of this happened because someone ALLOWED her to feel guilty.
The guilt was reminding her of the messages that she recieved that WERE applicable to the people providing the messages, but, upon challenging those beliefs, she concluded that those beliefs not only weren’t HERS, but the didn’t fit for her in her life.
All of this occurred in a brief conversation in which she was allowed to feel, was encouraged to follow the beliefs beneath the feeling, was encouraged to CHALLENGE the beliefs beneath the feeling, and taking full ownership of herself and HER experiences rather than taking on other people’s ideas and beliefs.
So I’m offering to you this idea, that FEELING IT is going to actually HELP you, not harm you.
What I hope I’ve given here is a sort of a map of how to work within the thoughts and feelings that we all have.
So the next time someone tells you, “Oh, don’t feel that way,” look at them and let them know that “Yeah, I AM allowed to feel this. Thanks for your concern” and follow the map of where/what that feeling is trying to tell you.
Here’s to owning your feelings! ~Jim