Managing emotions

My most important desire, my most pressing need, is to manage my own feelings. It is to avoid feeling, or suppress feeling, fear and anger. I did not know what my feelings were, and when I got in touch with them around 2000, I found they were rage and terror.

I wanted to join a practice in the country, after my Dip.LP, seeking to hide away, wanting a dark, cool, harbour. I little thought it was a riotous prison that I sought, and ended up in, and indeed the partner I worked for did end up in prison for pinching £700,000 from the clients. Since then, I have probably worked below my natural capacity, though anyone looking at my CV to date would hesitate to employ me for a more onerous job. I have done the work I have done because I have been desperate to feel that I am doing something useful (and so justify my existence) and have sought to avoid anger and fear. Feeling those feelings has been too threatening to me.

This is a survival mechanism which I developed in early childhood, a self-protection mechanism which indeed protected me at that time, but is counter-productive now. Then, expressing fear or anger was a threat to my existence, it deeply upset my mother.

I do not really blame my mother. I remember weeping uncontrollably aged about nine, with my mother looking on in perplexity. She really did not get it, because she was a product of her time, starting nursing training during world war two: among the nursing techniques she learned were bleeding and cupping. She inherited her need to control from her parents, just as I have inherited it from her. Deuteronomy 5:9:

I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.

It helps to realise that this is descriptive, not prescriptive: not a condemning God, but just the way things are.

So my task, now, prescribed by Claudia Black, is to bring my loss to consciousness, feel the anger and grief and pain, and move through them. As she says in “Changing Course”, I have not gone through the healthy healing process of DABDA and so must bring the feelings to mind before mourning and letting go. I mourn my loss. As a baby I was entitled to proper care, including having my feelings heard and validated, and not having that has deeply hurt me.

I am so excited about this. It feels like the right move at the right time, and I am encouraged by Monday’s Wisbit popping into my inbox:

There been times when I thought I couldn’t last for long
But now I think I’m able to carry on
It’s been a long, been a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will

And it frightens me. And it hurts.