I talk a lot about the feelings I experienced. Feelings are the experience. Emotions are the life source of existence. They are our identity. They are the essence of those we love… the things we love. Emotions are everything.
They move and guide, steer and direct us through life, pulling and pushing at us. “Go here.” “Stop there.” “Don’t do it!” “Get out!” “That’s right.” “You’ve got this.” Keep going.” “This one.”
Emotions are the navigator.
Dissociation is the process of disconnecting from our emotions.
When we dissociate, we disconnect from our guide.
My therapist fought for me. Hard.
I threw every logical argument at her and she matched me.
“Emotions have no purpose. They are illogical and useless.”
“Your emotions are a part of you.”
“They hurt me! I don’t want them.”
It wasn’t her argument that won me over. She didn’t have the words to best me. She tried. It was my trust in her. That was her last card.
“I need you to trust the process.”
She had me there.
“Give it a chance. Try. But don’t just half-ass this. I need you to give this everything you’ve got. Whole heart in.”
I wasn’t fighting for liberation. I wasn’t fighting for peace. I was fighting for safety. I had one firm belief, one that I still battle to this day: I am unloveable. Love is not for me. This is about me accepting my loneliness and solitude.
That’s the real fight I’m battling inside myself.
The fairy tale inside us all hopes for love. Desires it.
I think, that is why I’m holding onto my Number #1. Because so long as I hold onto him, I can believe there is love for me in this world. But let him go. Give him up and walk away… And this argument, this war that I started in 2015 with my then-husband and my therapist, that love is not for me… And I’m terrified I’ll be right. My Number #1 is my hope that there is love for me. Because deep down, I still don’t believe it.
I’m studying Buddhism now. I’m learning about Detachment. And it’s just one more argument that supports my core, gut feeling: That love is not for me. It’s simply something I cannot have. I am meant to be alone.
I was happiest when I was alone. I was free. That’s another problem I have. I still associate love with prison. In my mind, they are inseparable. To desire and crave something so deeply that I pine and long for it… and I can’t have it. I feel like, all my life has just been the pursuit of love.
***
So I trusted my therapist. I agreed to give this my all and trust the process. Now that is something I still hold tight to today. I do trust the process. Not the system. The process. There is a difference.
What I needed her to say to me that day, what she needed to say to me to best me in that argument was that emotions are simply messages from our subconscious… our Id. Messages that tell us where to go, what to do, and if something is harming our psyche. But we aren’t taught to read emotions.
Society teaches us to shut them down, push them away, and suppress them.
Abusers punish us for expressing objection and our emotions.
Parents punish us, especially boys, for crying.
Emotions simply have not been tolerated in our society. And, as a result, the education on how to manage them and use them, understand them and interpret them is non-existent. And this… this is the problem.
This realization became painfully apparent to me at this point in my therapy.
I was a mess. My therapy was like mental triage. Just stop the bleeding and get that under control. My emotional suffering was off the charts.
It wasn’t until recently, going back on those early days, that I came to fully understand what I needed, where I was, and what was happening to me.
Imagine you’ve suffered from a burn wound. And you are unconscious, it’s that severe. Suddenly, mid-burn therapy, you wake up and you feel all the pain. The medical staff scrambles to decrease your pain. It becomes a race.
This is therapy. And the race is Comfort vs. Pain.
I began a project that year to understand and analyze every emotion. Pain eluded me. I couldn’t understand what it was. It would take me seven years to finally understand pain.
Pain is simply discomfort.
You can have comfort and discomfort at the same time. Too much comfort, and we don’t grow. We regress (we call this the Comfort Zone). Add a little bit of discomfort, and we increase our tolerance for discomfort, we push ourselves to grow, and we flourish. But too much discomfort, or too much discomfort too soon, and pain begins.
Yesterday, I was in physical therapy for my back, and they put electrodes on my back.
“Tell me when it hurts,” they said.
Having this knowledge, I was able to mind the discomfort and could communicate to them the moment the discomfort turned to pain. I thought about my studies on emotional discomfort and pain. What if we could do the same experiment of turning up the volume on emotional discomfort, marking the exact moment when that discomfort turns to pain.
What if we all become so mindful about our discomfort to the point of pain, that we can advocate for ourselves and act to protect ourselves from further emotional harm?
Emotional suffering, pain, is just that. It is neglected and ignored emotional discomfort.
The strange thing is, you can have both comfort and discomfort at the same time. That is the common problem people have with self-care. They use self-care to increase their comfort, but are not mindful about decreasing their discomfort. And then they wonder why their self-care isn’t working. Why they still feel tired and exhausted.
Living in Dissociation for so long was like I could take up each emotion, categorize it, then put it in a box and leave it there safely far away from me. I had 32 years of emotions saved up. Stepping out of Dissociation was like all those emotions came at me at once. And they did. I felt everything.
During those early months of trauma, that is when I realized that everything I saved up, everything that had been done to me… I finally saw the true horror of it. And seeing that horror, accepting that horror, instilled the largest barrier between my abusers and my self. Which mean, seeing that horror finally severed me from my family and set me down a path that would guarantee any future reconciliation.