I was really desperate. I needed someone to help me and I was told these things:
Your feelings won’t kill you.
You don’t have to act on your feelings-you just need to feel them.
Feelings come-Feelings go, they pass like a wave. They rise and they fall.
Feelings are just feelings-they aren’t facts.
You have to feel to heal.
The most shocking thing I was told was that I couldn’t think and feel at the same time.
All of this sounded like a foreign language to me!
At the time I had no idea that I didn’t feel or that I didn’t know the difference between thoughts or feelings. To me, it seemed like I was feeling, but really I was just thinking about my feelings. I was thinking to escape from my feelings! This was so unbelievable to learn this about myself!
So since I wanted to heal more than anything, I had to learn to feel my feelings instead of think about my feelings! This took time, practice and diligence with myself.
It is very common for people to try to escape their feelings.
Some of the things we do to escape from feeling is to use drugs, alcohol, food, sex, work, shopping, helping others, thinking or just staying busy. Even getting lost in religious activity can be a problem. Worrying and thinking are much more socially acceptable than drugs and alcohol, though, but they can be just as detrimental to the ones doing it.
We try and control the uncontrollable by thinking. We what-if or should ourselves into mental torment!
Many of the things we do to escape feelings can be used for good or bad, but even when they are good we can use them so much that they can cause destruction and destroy our lives and the people who love us.
I realized that spending my time trying to figure everything out kept me from feeling, since I was living in my head. If I was lost in the world of, “what-if” or “I should have”, or “what-if I shouldn’t have” or “what-if they should have” or “what-if they shouldn’t have”, then I was thinking obsessively and if I was thinking, then I wasn’t feeling. If I wasn’t feeling, then I wasn’t healing. Instead, I was being tormented by my own head.
I had a lot of pain in my life and living in the thoughts about my pain kept me in bondage and self-pity. Feeling sorry for myself was not a feeling, it was a thought, and those thoughts were keeping me stuck and making me sick.
Feeling sad is different. Sadness is a feeling and feeling the feeling of sadness helps with grieving. Grieving is necessary to help us heal. Grieving encompasses a lot more than just grief when someone dies. Grieving needs to be done whenever we have expectations that were not met. When people let us down. When something we dreamed would happen does not happen. Whenever we lose something no matter how insignificant it might seem, we need to acknowledge that loss and pain to ourselves and to God. When we have disappointment in life acknowledging it to ourselves and God is very healing.
So I decided that I was done with beating myself up and creating torment in my head, and I finally allowed myself to feel my feelings instead of run from them. I began the process of healing. No matter how uncomfortable my feelings were, I got comfortable with the uncomfortableness. I made feelings my friends. If I had to feel to heal, then feelings were my friends!
I allowed myself to grieve my losses instead of denying or running from them. I allowed myself to feel sad. Feeling sad was just a feeling. It didn’t kill me. The feeling would pass after I let myself feel it. My feelings began to come back with much less punch. Certain really painful experiences I had gone through became much easier to remember. The memories didn’t hurt anymore.
The process of making friends with my feelings helped me to get better.
It was wonderful to just let myself feel, stay in the moment and not escape into thinking. Jesus lives inside of me so I was sharing my feelings with Him. It was a wonderful thing! I stayed in the moment with a feeling, knowing in that moment that He and I were sharing it together. I breathed a sigh of relief. Peace, healing and intimacy with the Lord came instead of mental torment. It was amazing!