8. How to transform powerlessness fear using Simple Truths
Hi precious Bud! I wanted you to know I think you’re being very courageous looking within yourself for your answers to discover your own authenticity. Especially because our culture teaches us to turn away from the feelings we’re afraid to feel about ourselves. To turn away from our own insides. Essentially we’re taught to turn away from our own authenticity. That’s so weird isn’t it? To realize that we’ve all been pretty much taught to have some feelings inside of us that we are so afraid to feel that we spend our whole lives trying to stay out of situations that might bring them up. You can sense how these feelings require us to spend our valuable time and energy on trying to prevent something from happening instead of creating what we want to happen. Let’s jump into our exploration for today by visiting today’s question.
Today’s Question:
How do we transform those feelings we have that don’t feel good inside so we don’t have keep avoiding them or reactively acting them out?
Most people don’t quite realize how much trouble we all have with feeling our feelings. Our FOOs (family of origins) have had to figure this whole feelings thing out on their own. The way most people have learned to be with their feelings is by using defensive strategies to regulate them instead of their Essence qualities. For example, your trained-in People Pleaser will try to control feelings by being super-agreeable, super-available, super-yes, and super-anger avoidant. Your Protector defensive strategies will work hard for you to try and limit your feeling bad about yourself and how well your doing compared to someone else, by trying to control yourself, others, and outcomes. Your Punisher defensive strategies will try to keep you doing what you should be doing according to someone else’s standards or by shoulding you into doing and saying things that allegedly will keep you from feeling bad about yourself.
All of this valuable time and energy spent trying to not feel our powerlessness fears! And, after all this effort we still have the powerlessness fear inside of us waiting to be activated again. That means we keep feeling it over and over even though we’re working so hard to mot feel it.
Let’s do something that works with feelings! Validations and Simple Truths bring Essencey energy to our feelings so our feelings are experienced as Valid. Did you know that feelings can trigger, flourish, and settle in 6 seconds if they are Validated? That’s all our feelings need, is to know that they have value so we value them. Once valued and understood, they move on through, Yeahoooooo! No more feeling shame for days or weeks. No more feeling insecure or intensely uncomfortable in certain social situations. No more disconnecting from the very part of ourselves that allow us to feel deeply connected.
Here’s some Simple Truths and Validations for you to have the experience of transforming right here, right now. In order to have the full experience, you can speak these out loud to yourself and then take a moment to notice how your inner body responds. Don’t skip the moment where you notice how your body responds. I know it feels foreign and different from how we were taught to feel our feelings, and yet it is a vital part of the transformation process. It’s like stepping to the side of your experience, noticing body sensations of feelings, so you can view them from a bit of a distance, taking care of them instead of getting swept up into them.
Simple Truths Validate feelings by meeting them with Essencey open-energy and awareness instead of defensive strategies resistant and tightening-against energy. Validations are Simple Truths yet sometimes have a specific format, Yes, we were trained to believe…or The truth about us is.
Validation: Yes we were trained to believe that our feelings are who we are and that our who-we-are feelings are not worthy of being validated and understood from loving kindness.
your torso or a constricting and closing feeling. Also notice, what happens when you notice these sensations without any need to judge them, just attempt to understand them as Valid.
Simple Truth: I’m realizing our feelings were often met by our caretaker’s defensive strategies and not their Essence.
Notice how your body responds. If you tighten up, no worries, that’s the part of you that was trained to believe that it’s unwanted or doesn’t belong here. See if you can give this part of you a different greeting this time than what it received before from defensive strategies. If you open up when you hear this truth, make a note of how your body responds to hearing the truth. We can feel openness emerging from within our chest when we hear the truth.
Simple Truth: I’m putting together how when our parents contracted from their free-flowing Essencey energy into their guarded defensive strategies, we misunderstood this to mean that we were unworthy of being met with Essence/Love.
Notice how your body responds. Your looking within your chest throat and belly mainly. If sadness comes up. Validate that sadness is the appropriate response to getting in touch with an emotional need that went unmet in you. See if you can get a feeling of stepping right next to the sadness and being very understanding of it. You’re learning to briefly separate from the sadness to be able to take care of it in the moment.
Validating Truth: The truth about our feelings is they were always valuable and worthy of interest and attention, especially when our caretaker’s defensive strategies couldn’t give this caring to us.
Notice how your body responds. You may be surprised by how much you can feel your body responding inside to your words of truth. Or, just as easily, you may have trouble feeling the body sensations that are happening within your body. All good, my dearest friendly human. I couldn’t feel too much of my inner body sensations at first either. Stay with it and in no time at all you’re sensing systems inside will start to function again the way they were always suppose to.
Today we explored how to transform the very feelings that we were taught we couldn’t tolerate inside. In the process you learned how to begin to cultivate a voice inside that can guide you lovingly through your feelings. Your feelings are authentic. Yet, some of them were trained-in to confuse you about what’s true about you. In order for you to step more deeply into your authenticity, you’re going to want to authenticate your feelings whenever they emerge. You learned to authenticate your feelings by Validating them instead of acting them out or stuffing them down through defensive strategies.
Next time, let’s explore about emotional unmet needs and how they turn into powerlessness beliefs. You can then express your needs more accurately and specifically in your relationships. We’ll also explore how to meet these unmet needs internally within yourself first, so you’re not coming at your relationships with your full emotional history of un-met-ness each time a need in you goes unmet. Meaning, we’ll explore how to activate other people’s Essence instead of their defensive strategies while your getting your needs met. See you soon Love bug.
