Week 59 - Feeling all my feelings
This past week was my last one in New York and it was wonderful. I got to spend time with my Costa Rica bestie, Ana, AND I got to see an author I am OBSESSED with who happened to be in New York launching his new book that I have been dying to read. The one, the only, Gabor Maté.
He’s most known for 3 things:
His views on ADHD
Addiction
And compassionate inquiry (learning to be and observe ourselves with compassion vs judgement)
His latest book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture, is one I’ve been eagerly anticipating for 3 reasons:
One of the biggest challenges my clients all have is feeling like they are NOT normal and that being normal would lead to being much happier.
Coming from the competitive tech sales culture, there were so many instances where I thought the culture was completely insane but then I felt crazy for being the one to think that because everyone else seemed to believe in the culture and I was the outsider.
Gabor finally explained what I had always felt but didn’t have the evidence for: that our culture and society is complete insane and toxic and yet we think WE are the problem.
So today I’d like to share some of my favourite lessons from Gabor and what I took away from his talk that I got to attend in person this week.
Buckle up as we dive in!
Authenticity vs Attachment
He writes about our universal struggle and need for both authenticity and attachment.
In this case, authenticity meaning the freedom to feel all of your emotions. Which I think is very different than what our mainstream overused and misunderstand definition of authenticity is. In the Oxford dictionary it says authenticity is the quality of being authentic. What a NON definition, jeez. So then what is the definition of authentic? It says, “of undisputed origin; genuine.” To me, genuine and “freedom to feel all of your emotions” are quite different. The latter being much more descriptive.
Attachment on the other hand in this instance means the desire to connect.
As a specie, we will not survive if we do not have an adult to take care of us out of the womb. We are COMPLETELY vulnerable when we come into this world. Far more than any other animal on this planet. So we need connection for survival physically, but we also need it emotionally as well. We need to feel loved, protected and safe.
OK so we have a need to feel all of our feelings and a need to connect.
BUT. Every single living being on this planet has the same experience that I’m about to describe. And this experience is the reason we all feel not enough, judge ourselves and have a heavy load of self-hatred built into us.
As young children, there were many moments were you felt certain feelings, like anger, sadness, frustration, etc. and when you expressed them, your parent or adult figure told you to stop in some way. You know, “big girls don’t cry” or “boys don’t cry” period. Or if you threw a tantrum, often times children are ignored because world renowned parenting experts say to only reengage with the child when they have returned back to normal from their rage and upset.
So what happened in these moments? A child is experiencing feelings, and they are told to stop or they are ignored.
So what does the child learn in that moment? It’s not ok or safe to experience or express these types of feelings, so I must SUPPRESS them in order to keep my connection to my parent intact.
Meaning, if I suppress how I feel, I will be accepted. MEANING, I am not acceptable AS I AM.
Enter a lifetime of self-judgement, hatred and imposter syndrome!
We’re all acting like imposters because we learned in childhood that it’s not safe to express ourselves freely. Be who they want us to be and we’ll be accepted. And being accepted means I’ll have connections to others. I won’t be alone (ie I won’t die).
🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯 —> if this isn’t you right now, congrats that you already figured this out! But when I heard this I was like HOOOOOOOOOLLLLLY shit this explains LITERALLY EVERYTHING.
It explains why we all feel not good enough, why we all self-sabotage, why vulnerability is the scariest thing in the whole world for most people, and why we are SO disconnected from each other because we’ve been disconnected from our true selves for the majority of our lives.
Damn.
Trauma
This type of experience I just described is what they call little ’t’ trauma. Big ’T’ Trauma being something really severe that happened to you (sexual, physical, emotional abuse). And if you didn’t experience big T in childhood you now as an adult will inevitable say “I had a good childhood!” Which is true BUT what we’ve never understood is how detrimental all the little ’t’ trauma actually is. And if we didn’t have Big T Trauma we often feel like we’re not allowed to have issues later in life, that what we went through can’t possibly merit bigger mental health challenges later in life.
But here is the thing. And this is what I took from his talk last week and another 🤯 moment.
Big T trauma is something that happened to you. Which is awful and horrible and should never have happened.
Little t trauma is all the things that DIDN’T happen to you. All the moments where you needed love and comfort and you were met with a “suck it up”. It’s all the moments of what we didn’t get that we actually needed. It’s a childhood of unmet needs. Which creates an adulthood of overworking, over pleasing, and over perfecting to numb our pain of our actual needs not being met. The need to be seen, heard and accepted as exactly who we are, without having to produce something, or create something, or be someone else to get acceptance.
Ooooof!
That’s literally how I feel writing this. It’s so good, and so heavy all at once. There is no deeper pain in the world than suppressing who we really are, and yet we all do it every day to get a little sprinkle of external validation to keep us going.
Ok so what do we do?? Well that’s literally the mission I’m on! Helping people get out of their own way. But the way to do that is to stop being the one who denies their feelings and hides themselves for fear of rejection. I’m on a quest to help people learn to human again, or maybe for the first time.
And that starts with meeting that core need that we all have: having the freedom to feel all of our emotions.
Allowing OURSELVES to feel all our emotions first and foremost. If we can’t feel them and accept their presence, we don’t stand a chance believing anyone else will.
So my dear friends, here is my inquiry for you this week:
What feelings do you not let yourself feel? What feelings do you judge yourself for having?
Grab your journal and get to it! This is the start of your healing!
I’ll be journaling myself on this this week, and will share more next week.
Until then, wishing you all a more self-compassionate week 💜
