Are you denying a part of you the right to be seen or heard?
For this blog post I want to share with you an excerpt from my Straight Talk About Anger tele-class:
When we shut down any emotion, we deny ourselves, and our bodies the right to be seen and heard.
If I am denying myself the right to feel angry or the right to feel sadness, or the right to feel joy, or the right to feel whatever it is, then I am doing to myself what was done to me long ago. Ask yourself what part of your feeling body are you denying the right to be heard or seen. Feel it. Then ask, ok – where is this really coming from?
Is it coming from the belief that children are to be seen and not heard? Or don’t cry, suck it up. All the things that we were told that taught us at an early age to shut down our ability to feel.
Our ability to feel whatever that emotion is, is directly related to our ability to experience life fully.
And when I say experience life I don’t just mean the hard parts of life, I mean the great parts of life: the passion, the creativity, the place that makes you feel fully thriving and alive. And when we allow that place within us to be heard, to be felt into, and to be expressed, then we actually allow ourselves to heal a little more, and to reclaim more of our personal power.
And every time we do that for ourselves, that is love.
When you express yourself- all parts of yourself – the anger, the grief, the sadness, the joy, the excitement, and everything in-between, then you can really feel alive. Because then you become connected to a much deeper part of yourself, you connect more deeply with others, and you can experience life in a completely different way.
To find out more about this Tele-series and my complimentary call that dive into this deeper please go to: www.StraighTalkAboutAnger.com
You Matter and You Have Value. Allowing yourself to feel your emotions, allows you to show up and be fully In Touch In Life.
Tags: anger, belief, expression, feeling body, love
Posted in Anger, Healing, Trauma Resolution | 1 Comment »
Are You Living in Survival Mode?
(Note*this blog post is part of an excerpt from my Straight Talk About Anger tele-series)
When I went to boarding school when I was younger, I ended up going through experiences in my life that shut me completely down to healing.
What I mean by that is that I went into survival mode. Many times when we go into survival mode we shut down our feelings, because to feel means to feel pain. And when the body goes into survival mode, it shuts down the mechanism to not only feel pain, it also shuts down the mechanism to feel joy.
As I grew older what I realized is that my numbing out was my way of survival. But there becomes a time in our live where we don’t want to live from a place of survival mode any longer, because the danger and the fear is no longer in front of us, it is only within us.
Often this isn’t a conscious thing – but our body gives you really important clues.
If you have ever been pulled over for speeding, then you know this really well. The very sound of the sirens sends your heart racing.. and why? Because of your past experiences of receiving a ticket, your body has integrated this experience (a form of trauma) and your body is reacting out of survival mode in the face of the danger of a ticket.
So the question then becomes, are you LIVING out of survival mode? 
Because there is a distinction with LIVING out of survival mode. When you consistently re-act to situations with the same behaviors such as shutting down, becoming angry, avoidance, brushing feelings or situations under the rug, etc. then the question you may want to ask is.. do you want to live that way?
If you are living out of survival mode (and I was for quite some time through my own anger), there is something really important to recognize. It is not your fault. Each one of us has a survival mode that was created at a time that we needed to cope with a traumatic experience. It was necessary at that time to create a way to deal with whatever we were facing. The thing is this survival mode may not be serving you anymore.
In order to face life, Awareness is the first step. So I challenge you to really ask yourself:
“ where have I been living in survival mode in my life?” Please let me know by commenting below. I'd really like to hear.
Tags: anger, fear, numb, survival mode, trauma
Posted in Healing, Trauma Resolution | 2 Comments »