Dear Sophie,
Please help me if at all possible.
I know I have some emotional blocks somewhere that I can’t clear up on my own. I have tried and for some reason I just can’t do it.
Another empath has helped open up whatever gates that are closed and I could FEEL some things again. I don’t know exactly what is going on, but I know on a certain level that an empath is what I need to be able to feel alive again.
I’m tired of my emotions and actions being on autopilot and just feeling nothing all of the time.
The only real feelings I can feel at times is being neutral (to an extent), some anger, and a kind of sadness.
Where is that feeling of love, of pure selflessness, understanding and devotion that I want to feel again? For some reason, I can only feel those things while I am connected to an empath.
Please, if you can, teach me how to feel again. 🙁
Can’t feel…
Dear Can’t feel,
I know exactly what you feel… pun intended.
It’s never that you don’t feel, it’s that there is a buffer between you and your feelings: you don’t experience your own feelings. You don’t FEEL the feelings that are naturally there.
Your relationship is as if there were a windowpane between you and the feeling. For example: There is a strong wind and drizzling rain at the moment outside. I can see it. If I make an effort, I can imagine what it would feel like standing in that cold wetness… but I really don’t feel anything. It is the same with non-feelers. They can see it but cannot feel it. They are not present to their feelings.
I used to be like you. To some degree I still am.
I remember as a little girl, sitting on the toilet, my feet dangling, wondering how other people knew they had to pee… or that they were hungry or thirsty. I didn’t know.
At best I found myself on the toilet in time to pee. At worst I found myself with wet underwear. I was seriously underweight, and dehydrated all the time. I felt nothing.
How did that happen?
I can only speculate, because, of course, I wasn’t observing myself at the time. I was busy being a child, finding my way in the world.
But I can speculate: I had my wires crossed and overwhelmed, so I shut down.
My mom didn’t want to have me, but she did. So our relationship was a mirror of her inner struggle: natural dislike and human decency. If you have ever had that inner struggle, I don’t envy you.
You sense the emotions that your mother did not express, and at the same time you feel a hug, or beating or see their fake smile… very confusing.
Non-verbal clues guide you more than words.
In my family, a Holocaust survivor family, both parents working, being loud, rambunctious, happy, laughing wasn’t welcome. Talking, asking questions wasn’t welcome. Asking for anything wasn’t welcome.
But if you got sick… you were taken care of.
Crying, being afraid was also frowned upon. “I’ll give you a reason to cry if you don’t stop crying now!”
Even today, when I feel someone’s feelings, which is most of the time, the first words that come out of my mouth are “I don’t feel well” which would be an indication of illness… because without looking, every bad emotion tells me I am sick…
You can be empathic, with an acute sense of another’s feeling, but not a true empath, more like a dog, responding to facial expression, body language. You could feel the gap between what was shown and what wasn’t, and it didn’t even have to do anything with you: it was all them.
People fake all the time, especially they fake well-being, joy, happiness, competence, confidence, authority, etc.
And the child shuts down the confusing ambiguity. Many people shut down. A few go full blown schizophrenic. I have known a few… I even had one client. She had no distinctions in her feelings.
It could be that you were subjected to abuse that set you up with a dilemma: tell or not tell. Whether you told or not, whether the reaction was positive or blaming, it could have been confusing.
In certain societies, if you are a woman, you are automatically to blame. Irish (Catholic?), Muslim, women are secondary citizens with no personal rights. But in almost all societies children ARE the minority with no rights to be themselves, to be natural, to express anything much…
What is there to do?
Definitely not what you are asking for. That is giving away your power to some other person… empath or no empath… you want to feel your feelings again.
You want to become normal again. Innocent. Someone who can feel and be guided by those feelings.
The problem is: you want to feel good feelings… But if and when you suppress anything, you suppress it all. The good, the bad, the ugly.
If you grew up that only nice-nice was allowed, because you live in the Bible Belt, or your mother was an overworked nurse, or some other morally abusive environment you are really screwed… you have no guidance feelings because all guidance feelings are unpleasant.
If you grew up with musicians, for example, that needed you to be quiet, your loud side was not allowed, and you resorted to live your life in silence.
If you grew up with a perfectionist parent, you were not allowed to make mistakes. Any. So you never learned the discomfort of being a beginner, a learner. Only mistakes allow you to learn anything.
If your mother was more interested in how you look to other and what “shame” you bring on her… you are really screwed…
Releasing your ability to feel will result in feeling all the feelings that you were punished for… and it is scary… really scary.
But, because you don’t know what feelings feel like, you are now doubly screwed: you have five basic feelings that you can name, and you cover up, substitute everything with those…
You need to learn what feelings feel like, and observe them without acting on them.
What YOU call feelings are actually not simple feelings: they are societally mandated “marker feelings”… they arise from words.
- Words have different power in a society that calls everything it doesn’t like wrong. The society we live in. The wrongness makes nearly every word awaken a bad feeling… but the feeling here comes from the societal meaning, not from your body, not from your soul, not from YOU. Not from reality
- In an alternative reality, people don’t call everything wrong, everything they don’t like or don’t want. They tell the truth: I don’t like this, I don’t want that. So words do not create those strong feelings we call emotions.
We can tell the truth. We can call a spade a spade. We can call abuse abuse, we can call beatings beatings, we can tell that our parent didn’t love us if they didn’t, or that we didn’t love them if we didn’t.
If you are really willing to expose yourself to the feelings you have been suppressing, you may want to immerse yourself in my training program where I teach and guide and train people to see nothing wrong.
Warning:
Without that ability to see reality, without that power to call a spade a spade, without the ability to see that in reality there is nothing ever wrong, nothing is ever missing, re-awakening the feelings is dangerous.
But here is what you can do to feel again:
The methodology I propose is the following: instead of wanting to feel everything again, and get overwhelmed, start with what you CAN feel.
The methodology is called the “ball of yarn method.”
- You find an end of the yarn that you can see. Hunger, anger, fear, impatience, frustration. Any of those. Whatever you know you feel.
Here comes the hard part.
- Say “Welcome” to the feeling.
- Stay present.
- Get curious.
- Observe it without having to do anything about it, as long as you can. This will also increase your Twitchy Little Bastard score.
This will increase your capacity to stay with any feeling without reacting to it.
Do it with every feeling you can feel. Do it every time and as long as you can afford to do it.
DO NOT EXPECT OTHERS TO CHANGE! DO NOT EXPECT THE FEELINGS TO CHANGE! Do not force anything. Do it as a spiritual practice. Or will-power exercise.
You will start to feel more and more. The feelings will get released, or unblocked by your ego only as fast as you can handle it.
When you can stay “not twitchy” with your staple feelings, add envy, jealousy, greed, hate, spite, vengeance… the prohibited feelings, one by one.
You can use the list of Bach Flower feelings as a guide. You’ll be surprised that you have a lot of unexpressed, never experienced emotional intelligence that can feel feelings you don’t know what they feel like.
And yet, you can experience them. Slowly add new feelings. One by one.
It took me a decade or more… But of course I learned every feeling… I wasn’t just satisfied with a few…
You can use my energy video… you have to watch the video for you to learn anything.
It is scary. So if you need it, and I say you’ll need it, use the Heaven on Earth remedy while you are learning to feel and identify feelings.
Get Heaven on Earth in a bottle shipped to your doorI spent a whole day feeling fear, dread, terror… and I survived…
In the meantime, come to the connection classes. They are recorded, but feel live… The energies in the calls are live. You’ll get tools there that will support you.
You have suppressed the negative feelings. But you can’t just suppress one thing: you suppress one, you suppress all… Once you allow your negative feelings to be, without flinching or blinking or acting, your positive feelings will start to come up. Don’t act on them either… feelings are feelings: all valuable. Love all your feelings like a good mother loves all her children. It’s all good.
And get your Heaven on Earth Bach Flower Energies in a bottle (all the Bach Flower Remedies in energy format). It will accelerate the process. But it will not eliminate it.
Get Heaven on Earth in a bottle shipped to your door
