THE FEAR OF FEELING: Part 1

Our emotional lives are very confusing. We need our emotions to tell us the meaning of the exchanges in our relationships. At the same time, we learn early on to hide those emotions to avoid disapproval or emotional distance. We bury beneath the surface of our experiences the very reactions we need to survive. In essence, we learn to be afraid of ourselves. In that sense, our emotions are like a treasure. We hide them to survive our childhoods, and spend a lifetime as adults trying to get them back.

It is interesting to note that we are often most affected as adults by the emotions we don't feel. Our defenses minimize or hide those emotions that cause us distress. This occurs when there is an experience that exposes a conflict between the emotions of our Natural Self and the Family Self. Since we all have been raised to experience disapproval when we get mad, we will experience high anxiety at the presence or mere threat of the exposure of our anger at someone. The flash of anger internally will quickly give way to fear. The fear will trigger the release of shame and guilt from the Family Self that reminds us of the need to hide our anger to avoid doing damage to a relationship. Unfortunately, it also robs us of the fuel to solve the problem that caused the anger to emerge in the first place.

There are different levels to the flash of anger. In some cases, the person truly never feels the anger. The defenses act so quickly that they literally can say that they don't feel angry. If their defense is to hide anger behind sadness, they will say that they are hurt and not angry. They literally do not feel the emotion that is below the surface of the sadness. They completely hide the mad behind the sad. If the defense is denial, they will only feel fear and not sadness. They will not feel the anger that is beneath the fear. Others can endure the presence of the anger for a brief period of time before the floodgates open and they experience the guilt and shame of breaking the family rules.

Others use distractions to prevent them from experiencing directly the emotions that are driving them. Sex, drugs, alcohol and gambling, when done to excess, are all means to numb ourselves from the feelings that are active within us. Each of these activities create pleasure and cause the release of tension, all healthy for the individual if they aren't looking to hide emotions from themselves. If these activities are driven by the need to not feel, they need to be overdone to suppress strong emotion. The person who smokes marijuana daily, the person who gets drunk on a regular basis, the person who spends money they can't afford to lose, the person who is driven to distraction by the pursuit of sex are using pleasures to hide from themselves. In each case, the pleasure keeps the fear of feeling at bay.