Writing Your Feelings
I’ve had my share of triggers. They drag old, impacted feelings to the surface, often kicking and screaming. As hard as some seem to face, those feelings need to be dragged out into the harsh light of day where their fearsomeness can be exposed, and proven groundless.
Over the years, I’ve tried to leave all the impacted feelings I carried where I thought they belonged, but it only made them clamor louder, rattle a few chains, and sometimes even invade my dreams. eventually, I learned writing was the key to unlocking the boxes, and facing the feelings once and for all.
I won’t say I always heed my own advice. There are times I allow a trigger to keep annoying me like the fly that somehow got into the house, and buzzes around your head, eluding all efforts to remove it. Even the spider in the kitchen window refuses to help. Perhaps she knows this is one fly I need to deal with on my own, if only to clear yet another deep-seated feeling that long ago outlived its usefulness.
Eventually, I realize the trigger won’t stop eliciting reactions, and even ineffective attempts to justify those reactions prove useless until I open a door I’ve been dreading to see the monster I’m imagining was never there in the first place. My colorful, and overactive imagination has built it up into something of draconian proportions. When I finally open the door, I’ll find a lizard, and a tiny, garden-variety one at that. So what was the big fuss?
Stop Perpetuating Familial Wounds
Years of conditioning, and often painful admonitions to keep my feelings to myself make unpacking everything I stuffed down challenging, at best, and downright terrifying, at worst. As a child, showing my feelings, be they anger, frustration, sadness, or even excessive joy resulted in my parent of choice withdrawing his attention and love until I buried feelings which made him uncomfortable. In retrospect, he’d been conditioned to keep his feelings on such a short tether, he was uncomfortable, and perhaps a little envious around people who were still able to emote.
For a child, withdrawal of parental love is probably one of the most effective, and cruelest forms of negative conditioning imaginable. I suspect both my parents experienced it, and believe it’s what led, at least in part, to both of their suicides. Conversely, learning to unpack decades of unexpressed feelings is a huge part of what’s given me, not only the will to live out my life for as long as I’m given, but to live it to the fullest, messy emotions and all.
Sadly, I imitated what I’d been taught. I’m ashamed of the times I simply shut down instead of helping my daughters work through their own feelings of anger, hurt, and frustration. Along the way, I also failed to show them that writing was an effective, if solitary way to air those feelings, and refrain from adding one more messy package to the growing pile of unexpressed emotions.
Sharing is Caring
As I unpack my own putrid mess of emotional sewage, I’m learning to share some of the writing instead of keeping it all to myself in hopes my sometimes treacherous journey will help others understand feelings are natural, and even necessary. Stuffing them down, and refusing to face them…not so much.
It’s not always easy to look yourself in the mirror and see your unfiltered self. All too often, you use filters inflicted on you by other broken, unhappy people. Noticing all your real, and imagined flaws isn’t the way to face, and eradicate feelings which have long outlived their usefulness.
Instead, it perpetuates all the negative thoughts, and justifies keeping all the pain, trauma, and broken parts to yourself. Nothing is more damaging than ignoring all your beautiful, wonderful, unique, imperfect parts, or seeing them as the flaws they aren’t.
Masking Your Feelings Kills Possibilities
When you learn to wear a mask of false perfection for the outside world, you continue to see yourself breaking apart when you’re alone. You slather more mortar on the cracks, and create thicker, heavier masks and walls to keep the pieces together, and hidden from prying eyes. You cast yourself adrift in stormy seas where sunlight never penetrates the angry clouds, and pelting rain.
Childish dreams of possibilities sink beneath the roiling waves with nary a whimper. Denying the feelings is also a denial of the life you could make if you stopped trying to meet someone else’s expectations: if you stopped believing only by stuffing your emotions down were you worthy of love.
Writing about the anger, the pain, the hurt, and the loneliness taught me the feelings were never meant to be denied; that doing so didn’t bring the love I needed, but further isolated me from anyone capable of giving it. Only by shattering the tower I’d erected to keep myself safe; only by sharing my feelings; my fears; my brokenness could I ever allow myself to be loved, and to give all the love I’d buried inside those stuffed down feelings.
Therapy is Rarely Pretty
You might find this painful to read. In fact, you may have stopped reading several paragraphs ago. But if you’ve made it this far, it’s because something resonates. You, too have stuffed feelings down, believing it was the only way you’d find love. I hope you recognize how tragically wrong it is to feign perfection, and pretend not to feel.
Writing is, and always will be my therapy of choice, but it’s not for everyone. Unpacking the feelings, and learning to live a full, happy, emotional, imperfect life isn’t something you can do alone, much less, in a vacuum. Whatever therapy you choose, or find along the way, it will be the right one for you.
Tear down the walls. Feel the feelings. Acknowledge the triggers. Above all, love that perfectly imperfect person in the mirror with every bit of your heart! Loving yourself is the first step towards letting in the people who were meant to love you without conditions or expectations. Those who require you to stuff down your feelings are too broken themselves to love you the way you deserve.
About the Author
Sheri Conaway is a Holistic Ghostwriter, and an advocate for cats and mental health. Sheri 
believes in the Laws of Attraction, but only if you are a participant rather than just an observer. Her mission is to Make Vulnerable Beautiful and help entrepreneurs touch the souls of their readers and clients so they can increase their impact and their income.
If you’d like to have her write for you, please visit her Hire Me page for more information. You can also find her on Facebook Sheri Levenstein-Conaway Author.
Be sure to watch this space for news of the upcoming releases of ” Rebuilding After Suicide” and “Sasha’s Journey”.
