Alcoholism Support Group
Alcoholism is the continued consumption of alcoholic beverages, even when it is negatively affecting your health, work, relationships and life. If you think alcohol is causing you to lose control, it's time to seek help. Our group is a safe place to vent, check in, get back up if you fall, and reach sobriety.
Feeling Feelings
Many times we experience feelings that feel uncomfortable, habitual, and overwhelming. Often these feelings do not resolve easily. When the intensity of a feeling makes us uncomfortable we look for what we can "do" to get rid of the feeling. What we "do"
is try to fix the feeling (to return to homeostasis), or we distract from the feeling
(get busy, mood alter, shop, eat, anger/blame etc.).
When a feeling is intense and overwhelming it is likely rooted in an incomplete feeling from childhood. Incomplete feelings happened because as children we did not have the tools to completely feel our feelings. When we had an intense feeling as a child, we had a sense of overwhelm. In order to avoid feeling overwhelmed or swallowed by the intensity of the feeling, we found some way to avoid the feeling. Once successful at avoiding the feeling, we practice avoiding feelings throughout our lives. Avoiding feelings leaves us operating largely from our intellect. (This is like trying to play tennis with one arm tied to our back.
It creates an imbalance and leaves us handicapped on so many levels).
Here is a new possible scenario on feeling feelings: When feelings arise in us, if we stay with the feeling, we can trace that feeling to an intense energy that is felt in our bodies (this is the intense energy that we have gotten so good at avoiding). We can learn to complete the feeling by feeling into the core of this intense energy in our body, until it naturally dissolves on its own. This process is an efficient and rapid way of completing old and new feelings. Completing or resolving any feeling allows for freed energy, leaving us more peaceful, enlivened, and fulfilled
Many times we experience feelings that feel uncomfortable, habitual, and overwhelming. Often these feelings do not resolve easily. When the intensity of a feeling makes us uncomfortable we look for what we can "do" to get rid of the feeling. What we "do"
is try to fix the feeling (to return to homeostasis), or we distract from the feeling
(get busy, mood alter, shop, eat, anger/blame etc.).
When a feeling is intense and overwhelming it is likely rooted in an incomplete feeling from childhood. Incomplete feelings happened because as children we did not have the tools to completely feel our feelings. When we had an intense feeling as a child, we had a sense of overwhelm. In order to avoid feeling overwhelmed or swallowed by the intensity of the feeling, we found some way to avoid the feeling. Once successful at avoiding the feeling, we practice avoiding feelings throughout our lives. Avoiding feelings leaves us operating largely from our intellect. (This is like trying to play tennis with one arm tied to our back.
It creates an imbalance and leaves us handicapped on so many levels).
Here is a new possible scenario on feeling feelings: When feelings arise in us, if we stay with the feeling, we can trace that feeling to an intense energy that is felt in our bodies (this is the intense energy that we have gotten so good at avoiding). We can learn to complete the feeling by feeling into the core of this intense energy in our body, until it naturally dissolves on its own. This process is an efficient and rapid way of completing old and new feelings. Completing or resolving any feeling allows for freed energy, leaving us more peaceful, enlivened, and fulfilled
Billy
I also strongly believe that our sedentary life and chemical laced food provides a very poor back drop in which to process feelings.
Try to split wood for an hour and stay pissed off over some minor issue!
I am a kid again and full of all the wide eyed wonder that goes with it and I'm lovin every minute of my self & world discovery.
Learning to feel instead of drowning emotions is not always easy, but it beats the hell out of the alternative. Here's to growing & learning & feeling.... :)
Maybe this means that when I'm in my 70's, I'll feel like a 30 year old. Wonder if I'll be a cougar??? lol! :)
It's where the body and mind meet.
The emotion you feel right now is nothing more than the relative state of your mind at this moment.
If you want to do something useful with your feelings, try keeping your attention on the feeling as it sits within your body.
Do not keep your attention on thought as that will not give you as true a picture of your state of mind at this moment.
The mind can rationalise the body won't.
As you keep your attention on the feeling, don't do anything, your attention is enough to help to transform any emotion.
The punchline is that I am 70 now, and in recovery I've done what I wanted to do when I grew up the first time. I love this quote from Joseph Campbell and it's been my mantra in sobriety all along: "The privilege of a lifetime, the goal of the hero journey is knowing who you are... Do you remember what you did as a child that created timelessness, that made you forget time? There lies the myth to live by."
Billy
Agreed, and I can't think of an ego trip that's more demoralizing in the long run than the game of "more spiritual than thou." I also love this quote from Thomas Merton, the Christian monk who wrote two books on Zen: "Who said Zen? Wash out your mouth if you said Zen. If you see a meditation going by, shoot it."
Can't dwell there.
I should add too that experiencing these emotions-facing them head on without fear, is exhilarating for me. Oh my heck, they won't kill me?! Wow, I am so relieved.
I have been waiting for more to be revealed and it has. I've had this "feeling" triggered by the relationship with my significant other, (or lack of relationship), and it is so very painful.
I can seperate the feelings from the past trauma of my childhood and my current relationships today because of my work with the 12 steps over the years of recovering. In 1988, in the beginning of my recovery, these feeling ran my life and ruined my relationships.
Today they make my relationships difficult until I pull it apart and look at the pieces, feel the feeling and ask myself questions. What am I really feeling? Am I angry with my spouse? Or, is my spouse behaving in a way that threatens my security as it was threatened when I was a child and being abused by those people around me?
It is my firm belief that we create relationships in our present to heal those relationships of the past. (As author Harvel Hendrickssays in his book and healing program, "Getting the Love You/We Want) These current relationships can either be healing or destroy and there isn't much grey area between.
If I am diligent with being honest with myself and willing to dig deeper than the surface of certain feelings, willing to really feel them through to the memory of the traumatic event they are connected to in my past, and I seperate them from my today I can see where I may be "over-reacting" to the events or people in my today. I can begin to heal the hurts of past relationships or events but only if I am willing to feel them all the way through to the other side.
This does not mean I wasn't abused or traumatized. It simply means those events and resulting feelings and inefficeint belief systems created by those feelings do not have to dictate how I will experience my world today.
It is not an easy process, and has taken great courage on my part to really do the work of feeling. Life is not much fun when we cut ourselves off from our feelings. Feelings are one of the things that makes us human and creates such a colorful and amazing life to live.
When I cut myself off from my painful or traumatic feelings, I inevitably cut myself off from all the enjoyment feel good feelings too. This is called, "NUMB" in my world, and is what I used alcohol to help me continue to do for all the years of my life until recovery.
I still fight it today but not near as long as I did in the past. I do not create as much destruction to have to clean up after in my today either.
In the past I was not aware of this feeling that's being triggered in my relaationship today. It is such an intensely fearfull and traumatic associated feeling that I used to have to run away from whomever I was in relationship with in the past. It creates the fight/flight response in me and run is usually how I would try to save myself from the certain destruction this feeling creates in me.
It is old abandonment events which created it in the first place. As a child I could not deal with it. Today I can heal from it with the help and reliance of the Power Greater than myself, which I found in the process of the 12 steps. And the help of my good friends in recovery trudging this path to happy destiny with me.
I am still in the middle of the feeling the feeling right now. It bubbles up inside and creates the most intense fear and pain that I don't want to look at it, I just want to run. So, last night and again today I just stood there crying intensely fearfull saying over and over to myself," I just want to run, I just want to run, I just want to run."
It helps me immensely to accept exactly where I am at each moment in time, moment by moment. It helps if you want to find a solution to know what the problem is first. I cannot change anything I do not first accept as being exactly what it is. I cannot move on to the next part of recovery until I do what is in front of me.
I was abandoned and I want to run, is where I am at this moment. God and the process will take me on to the next part of the process when I am finished with where I am now.
I do trust the process today.
I am afraid of this feeling. But, I will feel it today so that it will not have the power to hurt me and destroy the quality of my life now or in the future.
Feeling are not facts. But they do create reality and belief systems and they can destroy a person and their life if they are not paid attention to. So, maybe they are even more important that facts. God gave them to us just as he did the ability to think and reason, they must be at least as important as the others.
Thanks, Uncle Baldy, for helping me look at this instead of stuffing it once again for later. I miss you and wish your shoulder was here for me cry on while I walk thru this one, again. I really thought I was done with this one, it is such a core of the core issue. But I guess we are never really finished with some of this stuff. Progress not perfection.
Thanks for making it safe for me to be me and feel the feelings through to my healing and recovery.
In Love, Light, Truth, & Service
"Stubborn" TerrieAnn
Sometimes life has thrown me a hard ball. But I just keep practicing trusting the process.... Feelings nothing more than feelings....
It's how I acquire faith.
"Real power comes when we stop holding others responsible for our pain and we take responsibility for all our feelings. Today, I will surrender to my feelings, even the emotionally painful ones. Instead of acting in haste, or attempting to punish someone, I will be vulnerable enough to feel my feelings." From The Language of Letting Go".
Great post Billy, enjoyed reading the replies. Ha, Binary, classic... Feelings... nothing more than feelings....
person centred therepy to be precise.I have found it benefitial and a lot of the sessions involve me talking about "my feeling's" In person centred therepy the cliant,me in this case does 98% of the talking
quite like sharing at a meeting really. one of the observations my councilor has made is I apear to have developed an avoidance strategy when I cant cope with dificult situations or intense feelings.
So staying with a feeling might be an interesting experiment for me if indeed i can stay with it
Slightly off the point but it's surprising how when talking to a therapist I realise how influanced by the programme I am.
simple stuff like "keeping it in the day" acceptance and other aa philosophy's are now quite deeply enbeded in my thought process
Interesting thread and reply's