if you have been taught to disconnect from your feelings and have been taught that your feelings are wrong, it becomes almost impossible to recognize or give credence to what you are actually feeling. If you have been taught that someone elses feelings are valid and important but yours aren't, then steps have to be taklen to learn to recognize what you are feeling without disassociating from your emotions and feelings. If you have been raised in an abusive family or group, or organization, individual feeligs are largely ignored or repressed so the person(s) in control can maintain their dominance. Children from abusive families or organizations, like cults, are taught to adopt the belief system of their leaders while having their own doubts , fears and feelings repressed. It becomes very difficult, virtually impossible for the adult child of those environments to grow up and see themselves as a separate individual, and even more difficult to grow into their own individuality and devfelope the confidence to disagree with the belief system that they have been taught.
It takes a very strong individual to stand up to repressive families and organizations especially when that is all that is known, and when that is all that is accepted by the individual's family or organization.

Well said, Learned.

My cousin was told,
over and over:

Never trust your feelings.


When he told me this piece
about his child, he followed up
by saying:

I will probably never recover.

I'm happy to say, that was close
to ten years ago, and he seems
to be doing okay in at least, his
external life.

Hamzah ---- I suggest that you
begin by not looking at any of
your emotions as unacceptable.
In fact, not one single emotion
that a person can have is anything
alien. There's a reason for every
emotion we have and we're
ENTITLED to EVERY emotion
that we have.

Also, I suggest that you might
benefit from finding a counselor
or therapist with whom to begin
processing your "struggle."

No one's life is easy. There's
almost always someting
rocking our boat. A healhty,
functional psyche is great
ballast to keep in the bottom
of our boat so that we don't
get rocked around so much.
Working with a great counselor
can help us move toward
developing that kind of psyche.

Sending you hugs and
healing prayers. Take
good care.

Yea that happens to a lot of people.
Journalling and talking to a counselor can help.

I was one of those that was taught to never have my own thoughts and feelings. In fact if I dared show or feel an emotion as a child it was instantly met with severe punishment.

I was 29 when I learned to feel. It was frightening, many times I begged my counselor to have me locked up because all these foreign feelings came flooding out at often inappropriate times. The reason it was overly harder than normal was because I was VERY determined and flew through everything in counseling and ready for the next task ahead. My counselor told me many times that I needed to slow down, and I refused to.

These feelings and thoughts can be quite frightening but they are necessary. The best advice I can give you is to just take the ride, hang on, don't fight it or push it (like I did), and just sorta, kinda, observe what you are thinking and feeling. You can take your lifetime to sort them out if you want, there is no rush, and sorting later can be enlightening. The first step is to just allow them to come uninterrupted, it is a lot easier that way.

I know what it is like and I will be keeping you in my prayers.