FOR ME
This is good reading - about the inner you / me.
Not composed by me but by
*
One
of the most important challenges of growing up with your emotions
under-responded to by your parents (Childhood Emotional Neglect, or CEN)
is that you then enter adulthood without the essential knowledge of
what to do with your emotions.
If your parents had noticed and named
what you were feeling; if they had talked with you about your intense
child emotions, they would have automatically been teaching you that
your feelings are real, are important, and can be managed.
And just as
importantly, their “emotion coaching” would have taught you some vital
emotion skills for your life.
Everyone has intense emotions from time
to time. I have discovered that even the people who experience
themselves as emotionally empty or numb due to Childhood Emotional
Neglect (CEN) actually do have moments of strong feelings at various
times.
The 4 Emotion Skills For Dealing With A Difficult Feeling
- Identifying your emotion
One of the
hardest questions you can ask yourself is “What am I feeling right now?”
Yet there is a sort of resolving magic, like a salve, that happens with
any emotion as soon as you put it into words.
- Accepting your emotion
If you grew up with CEN, there’s a good chance you have a tendency to judge and criticize your own feelings. “I shouldn’t feel
angry/hurt/sad/afraid,” or pretty much any other emotion. But this way
of judging something that is biologically wired into you, and outside of
your control is a tremendous waste of energy as well as damaging to
your self-esteem. Accepting what you feel must happen before you can
manage the feeling.
- Understanding your emotion
The next step
after putting what you are feeling into words and accepting it is to
try to understand your feeling. Why are you feeling this emotion? What
is the cause? Is this feeling old or new or a mixture of both? Is it
attached to a particular situation or person?
- Deciding what to do with your emotion
Your emotions
are a message from your body. So each time you identify that you are
feeling an emotion, it’s important to quickly ask yourself some
questions. First, is this feeling telling me to do something? And
second, should I do it?
Honoring vs. Indulging
The first three skills above are all
about honoring your emotion.
Honoring an emotion involves sitting with
it, accepting it and trying to understand it.
For some emotions, going
through the process of honoring it is enough to make it tolerable.
But some emotions carry messages so
powerful that they push you toward action.
And for these, Step 4 becomes
an absolute necessity.
If you fail to follow through with Step 4, these
feelings will keep revisiting you until you either attend properly to
them or follow their directive.
And their directive may be the absolute
wrong thing for you.
So Stage 4 is, in some ways, the most
important. It’s the difference between indulging your emotion and using
it in a healthy and productive way.
Rachel Goes Through Step 4
Rachel has processed her emotion, and
realized that the feeling she is experiencing is anger and that she’s
feeling it toward her fiancé Toby for forgetting to pick her up from the
train.
Rachel asks herself if this anger is
telling her to do something. “It’s telling me to yell at Toby. I want to
tell him he’s inconsiderate and selfish.”
“Should I do that?” Rachel asked
herself. “Does Toby deserve that?” As she considers this question,
Rachel thinks about Toby. Has he left me stranded before? Is he
generally a selfish person? Am I worried about this happening again?
As with most emotions, Rachel’s answer
is complex. Early in their relationship, Toby was thoughtless and
careless, and they had multiple fights about that. But Toby had listened
and grown, and for a solid two years he had been reliable and caring
and devoted to her. The likely reason he forgot today is that he had a
stressful job interview that didn’t go well.
Rachel realizes that much of her anger
about Toby’s mistake was old anger left over from the early years.
Yet
she notices that this realization is not enough to make the feeling go
away.
I need to tell Toby that his mistake
upset me, and reminded me of the past. But I need to do it with care
because this time it was an honest mistake. And Toby has earned my
understanding.
In Summary
In truth, learning these four emotion
skills and using them can change the course of your life. When you learn
how to process your feelings in this way, you are finally connecting to
a font of natural energy and direction that erupts from your deepest
self.
You are also healing your Childhood Emotional Neglect.
Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN) can be a subtle experience in your
childhood so it can be difficult to know if you have it. To find out, Take The Emotional Neglect Test. It’s free.