I used a lot of things to hide my feelings, to numb them, or to distract myself from feeling what I was feeling. I would even go so far as to do things that would make me feel sick purposely to distract myself from feelings I didn’t’ want to have. I harmed myself. Anything I could do to not feel, or to feel something else other than what I was feeling. I used any outside thing I could grab to shut off my feelings. Back then, I didn’t see it that way, I just labeled it as ‘treating’ myself, or rewarding myself after a tough day, or, maybe I was deliberately harming myself because I thought I deserved it, but I never would have acknowledged that I was hiding from my feelings, or stuffing them down. In reality though, I didn’t want to feel anything, good, bad, or otherwise, I just wanted to be numb.
It makes me sad to think about the years I lived like that, because today I am full of feelings, and I’m not afraid of them. My feelings tell me today what’s going on and what I need to work on. If I’m hiding from my feelings today that means I need to roll up my sleeves and get to work because if I am living as my authentic self and I’m trying to hide my feelings with outside things, I’ve lost my authenticity. Look, we can all use things to alter our moods. We use food, drink, and a various assortment to of things, not all bad either, to make us feel a certain way. And it’s OK if we just need a little pick-me-up, but when it becomes a way of life, a way to avoid our true feelings and maybe the place we find ourselves, that’s when it becomes a problem. And typically, we can only avoid our real life, and feelings, for so long before we end up hitting a wall. I know I did. And I was very lucky to have survived the crash.
It takes living in rigorous honesty to catch those moments when we try to dodge our feelings, or hide behind something else so we don’t feel them. For me, I had to take away all of those things I used to hide behind. All of them. That was terrifying. Because when the feelings came up, and oh, they did, I had nothing to grab for and I had to feel them. And, not feeling them for so long I didn’t know how to feel them, they overwhelmed me, scared me, and seemed to change ever few minutes. It just felt like a tsunami of feelings coming at me and I was standing on the beach, alone, without a life jacket. But I survived. There were some scary times, but I made it through. I had a lot of help from friends and others, like myself, who were also new to feeling their feelings, so we learned to feel them together, and found a lot of support in one another as we all learned how to feel for the first time.
Today I focus mainly on the good, but the bad also gives me useful information, they tell me when I need to bump up my self-care, they tell me when I owe someone an apology or an amends, they tell me when there is more work to do in an area I might have felt I had put to bed. And, they also allow me to feel love, and know I deserve to feel it, and they show me love in more ways I ever could have imagined, because I have to allow yourself to feel love in order to find it. Feelings today don’t scare me, they’re not always what I want to feel, but I have the power today to change those feelings, to reconcile what is going on, and to seek out why I’m feeling the way I am. I don’t hide my feelings today, I allow myself to feel them and then ask myself what they’re telling me, and if there’s some more I can be doing, or, something I can do better, I set out to do that, and, that, is a great feeling. SLAY on!
SLAY OF THE DAY: Do you allow yourself to feel? Or do you avoid your feelings? How do you avoid your feelings? What do you use to hide your feelings? How has this been a problem in the past? How is it a problem today? How you can stop using what you do to avoid your feelings and allow yourself to feel them? Are you afraid to feel them? What are you afraid will happen? Are these real fears, based in fact, or are you anticipating something from your past, or just living in fear in general? Were you, or are you, told you cannot have feelings? How does that make you feel? You are allowed to have feelings SLAYER, we all are. It’s about finding the right way to process and express them, but you are always aloud to feel, and should feel. When we numb, or hide, our feelings we are not in-tune with how we’re doing and what needs to be addressed, so we’re out of balance, trying to put on a band-aid over a wound that cannot be fixed with a simple fix. Do the work, allow yourself to feel and stop using outside things to numb those feelings that are trying to tell you something, that information may just what you need to take you to the place you’ve always wanted to go, a place where you can be your true self, and a place of love.
S – self L – love A – appreciate Y – you
State Of Slay™ 