You have to feel it to heal it
What does the above idea really mean? Feeling your feelings is not necessarily the same as having a strong emotion. Intense emotionality, especially when it is reactive, can serve the same (unconscious) goal as showing no emotion at all. Both are effective ways to stay disconnected from deep down feelings that are so vulnerable that to go near them is essentially to break through a wall of inner prohibitions. Something in you is sure that there is no safe place to have “those” feelings; they are bad, wrong, dangerous.
A newborn baby is not divorced from her feelings. When a baby cries, or is happy, his entire body is expressing his undiluted feeling state; he is being his in-the-moment embodied baby self. The process of maturing requires learning
to manage and differentiate emotional states. If the developmental process goes well, if the baby/growing child gets enough help and support, she will gradually emerge as a person with the capacity to not just manage, but to
experience a wide range of feelings without needing to somehow escape.
The process of psychotherapy that I practice, that I was taught by valued teachers of my choosing over a long career, and that I have experienced myself, is one that links healing, personal growth, and inner development, to the capacity to feel. Feelings happen in our bodies. We inhabit bodies, are born into a body. To dare to feel means to take up full residence in this, my body.
With a full range of feelings comes a sense of vitality and aliveness. If we prefer to live in our minds or float above our bodies, it is always for serious, initially valid, protective reasons that we may or may not remember. It
takes courage to move closer to prohibited feelings. Baby steps are recommended. The mind, too, plays an important role; our minds have to move somehow toward more flexibility and new attitudes, and to make sense and meaning of this
irrational terrain. Psychotherapy should be a very safe space in which to practice and learn to access and tolerate what has been buried and stifled. It is never too late.
“Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious.
There can be no trans forming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.”
C.G. JUNG, Psychological Aspects of the Modern Archetype
“The primary focus of psychotherapy appears to be the integration
of affect, in all its forms,
with conscious awareness and cognition.”
LOUIS COZOLINO, The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy