Sadness will not determine your life. What will determine your life are your attempts not to feel the sadness. What will determine your life are your attempts to compensate for the sadness by not feeling it, by developing coping mechanisms that keep you from allowing you to experience yourself the way you really are. That’s what will determine your life.
If you don’t want your life to be determined by what happened, allow yourself to feel exactly what’s there.
Developmental trauma happens when there isn’t space for us to feel what we feel. The fact is, there was never space in your life for you to feel what you felt. There was nobody there to hold you; your mother wasn’t there to hold you. She was too busy trying to soothe her own pain.
You never developed that space, or at least you never allowed that space to be there. Your fear is that if you have those emotions you’ll be controlled by them, but it’s your attempts not to feel those emotions that are controlling you. There is nothing guaranteed to bring up those emotions more than a relationship is. Do you want to feel everything that you never wanted to feel? Get into a relationship.
If you can recognize that it’s there and just hold that part of you, allow for it, and not be ashamed of it, it’s not going to drive you. It’s only going to drive you when you deny it; when you try and compensate for it.
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so so true, I get this completely.
Thank you Garbor, I am attending to this practise of allowing myself to feel sadness and grief, it seems to need a lot of time…………….a lifetime? your thougths please.
Yes this has been a long time lesson. Denying, masking or running from pain ( often intense) in order to get rid of it, doesn’t work in the long run. The hardest thing to do is sit still with the pain, lovingly and non judgmentally. But when I do it builds up courage and breaks down the fear of the emotional or physical pain. Then and only then can I understand, accept and embrace my true self (essence). Then peace and serenity can grow….. james
beautifully stated, thank you James.