For many people, it is hard to make sense of the world. Children often fail or underperform in mainstream education systems. Teachers burn out, parents become frustrated and eventually want a diagnosis. It is understandable that both teachers and parents push for something to explain their children’s poor performance.
Unfortunately, the diagnosis is often a cover for a deeper issue and yet children are labelled for the rest of their lives. This label is devasting for children as they grow into adulthood. As adults they find it difficult to define themselves in any other way. Later in life they might share their journey with a therapist and come to the realisation they still limit themselves with this label.
One important, often overlooked, issue is common among people who cannot make sense of their worlds – they suppress their feelings. As children they were often punished or dismissed for expressing emotion. Common phrases that parents use are: “Don’t come out of your room until you have a smile on your face”; “It’s not that bad, cheer up”; “There are so many children in the world who have it worse than you so don’t complain”. These kids have no permission to feel. This type of rhetoric is invalidating people’s experiences and making their concerns seem trivial and they feel dismissed.
When people feel dismissed, they often feel like they don’t matter, or they are not valuable. These feelings often impact people’s confidence. People don’t feel safe to speak up at home, at school, at work, playing sport, everywhere. However, when you face yourself, it is a sense taking charge of your life. You are in control of your responses, and no one has the right to tell you what you should and shouldn’t believe. In a free world, you make your own decisions.
The Next Step
The barriers to feeling free are the infinite ways we deceive ourselves. The most difficult obstacles to self-deception, self-denial, suppression, dissociation is realising you are caught in this unconscious pattern. The first step is to want to improve yourself. The second step is to recognize that you are deceiving yourself. How do you do that? Start with paying attention to the decisions you make, the food you eat, the liquids you consume, the feedback you get from those you trust, the behaviour of your children. By now, you might feel overwhelmed with facing the decisions you make and what you didn’t realise about yourself in everyday life. This is normal when you start a major project in becoming the best version of yourself.
The third step is being willing to feel your emotions. At first you may not know what emotions feel like. At this point, it is often easier to feel sensations in your body. For example, you might feel tightness in your chest, an ache in your stomach, or realise you are holding your breath as you are reading this blog. When your loved one criticises you, you may not notice that it hurts and dismiss it to continue with your day. At work you may not realise how much offense you took when a colleague says something nasty and dismisses it by saying “only joking”. These everyday experiences can leave you feeling tired, flat, irritable, snappy, and/or short with people who have nothing to do with these earlier experiences. You may go to bed and have a restless sleep and not know the reason and continue being grumpy the next day. Imagine this type of daily experience over twenty years. You could end up suppressed and sick.
The fourth step is feeling an emotion such as anxiety. How do you know if you are experiencing anxiety? Some of the indicators might be that you speak fast, feel restless, fidgety, can’t sit still, always on the go, got a million things to do, find it difficult to slow down or ruminating causing a restless sleep. This is how anxiety can present. Just let these experiences happen and notice what is going on inside yourself. You may feel your heartbeat increase or your leg shaking under the table while you are having a coffee with a friend. Just notice these behaviours. Next time you notice these behaviours happening in the moment, you will recognise this as anxiety This is a great move toward developing self-awareness.
The fifth step is being in your body and becoming aware of yourself and your behaviours in everyday life. Once you are in your body, a whole new world opens. There is no time for you to be bored, you are so surprised at the actions and behaviours that you exhibit every day without realising it. It can become a fascinating experience of new discoveries every moment.
Feeling Emotion
Feeling emotions and sensations in your body can be quite tricky when you are not used to this activity. For some children, it takes a huge amount of effort to engage with other children in a seemingly normal activity. These children can feel depleted and exhausted when they are encouraged to participate in these social demands. These children are often forgotten, labelled or misdiagnosed. These children are one of the main reasons it is so important to help people to feel emotion and come back into their bodies to communicate.
This is just the beginning of starting to feel something after so many years of unconsciously wandering through life hoping for the best. Although most people still believe negative emotion is bad and needs treatment, another perspective is that episodic uncomfortable emotion is normal. People can challenge the long-held assumption that ‘negative’ emotion should be treated. In contrast, people can choose to seek information to begin their journey on a road of self-discovery and use emotion as a form of communication within themselves. The benefits of feeling emotion guides us to a life of purpose and meaning.