Sitting with it

So many times in my life I have run from painful emotions, turning to unhealthy coping skills. The hardest teaching I have ever been given is to “sit with the feelings and navigate through to find the root cause and the truth of this particular painful feeling”. The interesting thing about my emotions and feelings I have to ask myself more times than not is, what am I so afraid of feeling? What is it that I don’t want to experience and why is it so scary to me?

We could navigate back to my childhood, where I felt like I didn’t have a voice, or to the abusive boyfriend who never comforted me when I was sad, or maybe to the Christian faith I was raised in that told me anger was wrong.

Needless to say I never learned how to sit with the emotion or let out my feelings and now as an adult who is in recovery from substances that allow for complete numbing out of emotions, this is a brand new experience.

Sometimes when I experience emotions I have to look at the question of “who do I think is involved with the painful emotion” “what happened before I experienced this emotion” and what am I doing to accept the emotion/feeling and be kind to myself.

So often for me simply investigating and giving myself space to feel whatever is present helps. Accepting that my angry, sad, self deprecating feelings are just like all feelings and emotions they will come and they will go.

I get lost in this process of thinking “this will always be this way unless I do something to get myself out of it” this always creates so much more suffering and pain that really needed to happen. However it is also a good learning lesson for me to sit and look at how I could of reacted to myself differently.

When I practice breaking down my feelings they become less scary, when I accept that it’s okay to feel this way I start to heal.