The downside of being good learners is that as children we become strategic in order to gain the love we need. Whole parts of us become walled off and we learn to give our parents what they want, rather than being real with what we are really thinking and feeling. This behavior is survival-based, but at a certain point, it will work against you when you begin to seek your own relationships. You cannot be in relationship if you don’t have access to your own feelings. This is the narcissistic dilemma.  If your parents were incapable of acknowledging, accepting and mirroring your feelings back to you, then you never develop the capacity to relate to yourself, much less to another human being. An emotional fusion takes place where the other’s feelings are experienced like an assault on your character and goodness. This is a very vulnerable place to be, because you are at the whim of other peoples’ moods and perceptions.  This is not a grounded or safe place to be, because you are so easily knocked off balance by what other people think or say.

So, what is the cure?  This therapist believes that the answer is first being in a healthy relationship with your self.  The more you can connect with your emotional parts, the more you will develop the capacity to be in relationship with someone else. In an allopathic medical model, this idea might seem more than a little counter-intuitive.  Modern psychiatry looks at depression and anxiety as diseases to be medicated and rubbed out.  These emotions are by no means pleasant, and in extreme cases cause great suffering.

The message we are getting from medical authorities, however, is not much different from what you may have gotten from your parents.  Your anxiety is bad.  Your depressive side is bad.  You’re aggression is unacceptable. Parts of you are not okay and you need medication to get rid of them. This pathology-based model gives us the message that we are not okay. What if the reason we become deeply anxious and stay in that place is because we continue to deny or want to reject these parts of us?  Feelings are kind of like little children.  If you don’t acknowledge them and hold them with compassion, they don’t go away, they get louder.  The more you ignore them, the more intense they will get. 

The cognitive piece here is not to reframe your emotional experience into some positive frame, but to own it, and defuse your adult self from the infantile emotions that can run your life. By honoring your feelings in this way, they will become your friend, and not the enemy. Feelings are signals that something isn’t right.  By learning to honor them, they will become your compass for action in every sphere of your life. In this process you will shift from being motivated from a place of fear and contraction, to operating from a place of self-love and compassion.  In essence, you become your protector and best friend, and this allows you to be open and authentic in a new way.