Seubert The Courage to Feel

A Practical Guide to the Power and Freedom of Emotional Honesty
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-950057-36-8
Verlag: Unhooked Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 210 Seiten

Many people live partial lives, keeping their vitality under emotional mufflers and living life without ever feeling like an adult. The Courage to Feel delivers a pragmatic, creative, and inspiring four-step path to emotional mastery and freedom that explores the hidden wealth of guidance and wisdom available through our emotions. Each chapter includes anecdotes, applications, and exercises to anchor the teachings along with the charming allegory of Simon the Turtle who must leave his shell to follow his heart is woven throughout the book. Based on the author's 25+ years of experience with thousands of clients, this book will launch you on a journey that leads to personal freedom, happier marriages, improved work relationships, and deeper spirituality.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Seubert, Andrew

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1 We Have Feelings Because…? MANY OF US ARE HANDICAPPED without knowing it. We enter the race to go the distance only to realize that we’ve left one of our legs at the starting line. We wonder why we never finish, why the race seems so much harder than we expected or had hoped for. We have survived as a species and travel through life because we have various ways of knowing, an advantage that has enabled us to outlive, overcome and, at times, abuse other forms of life. We gather information with our thinking mind, our body intuition, our creative intuition, and our emotional repertoire. To ignore any of these, particularly the mind or the emotions, is to run the race with one leg at best. The intent of this book is to inspire and teach you how to become an expert about yourself, primarily your emotional system. Nothing less than that. In later chapters, I will be more specific as to how feelings work, what they do for us and what to do with them since this is a “hands-on” book. For now, I would focus on the barriers: the fears, the shame and, at times, the disdain many of us associate with a “show of feelings” and being “ruled by emotions.” Despite the growing pool of information about the damage we suffer by neglecting our emotions, most people would rather ignore, deny, or surgically remove the pesky and painful things. Courage is not a quality typically associated with emotions. Men, in particular, seem to be genetically and culturally damned when it comes to these “touchy feely” things that get in the way of getting a job done, relaxing on a fishing boat or tennis court, or hanging out with a spouse without having to talk or relate. One of the greatest stigmas men face is that it is soft, weak, and unmanly to feel, much less to show emotions. This attitude is deeply embedded in corporate and business cultures, precisely the places where men have to prove their worth on a daily basis. Underneath the strutting and the peacocking, men are often afraid to feel. Unquestioned shame and perceived inadequacy drive them down endless corridors of work and career. Ignored sadness sets them up for callousness and depression. The fear of intimacy, of relational closeness beyond orgasm, leads to a loneliness and disconnection that are often buried in busyness and other addictions. Brendan is an old friend, a prince among men, many would say. He’s your classic nice guy. So nice that at times I’d like to piss him off just to see if anyone is home, to see if there’s an edge and not just a butter knife. He wants so much to be good—rather, to be seen as good. A good boy. Above all else, he fears reprimand, disapproval, and is even more terrified of hurting someone else. Conflict is not his strong suit. He learned all of this from his father, a businessman loved by all in their community, a small, rural town in upstate New York. His father would always be out there, in full plumage, greeting everyone, checking in on each person’s health and home life. But he would bury his head in the sand at the first sign of disagreement. Brendan inherited this legacy, so much so that the very thought of disagreeing, of not receiving the championship ring of acceptance, would stir up a boiling pot of fear and shame. He sits across from me now in my living room, amiable, agreeable, unable to tell me or his wife why he feels unconnected to most people, why he can’t tell his children he loves them, or say he’s angry when he is used and abused at work or bring himself to attend the memorial service of a beloved, elderly woman he has known since childhood. Over the years, he has come to fear embarrassment, the guilt and shame of offending anyone, and the fear of fear itself. The inability to face these emotions and the beliefs that feed them keep Brendan from truly leaving home thirty years after departing from his parents’ house for college. These days he takes on the work of two, sometimes three, people at the job since his company began to downsize. He’s afraid to speak up about the overload and appear not up to the task, but hardly notices the fear and the sense of inadequacy, since he’s either working without a pause or coming home and drinking to decompress. After the first of several evening drinks, he begins to crash, gets irritable and leaves the kids to “the wife.” He heads to a separate room, numbing his frustrations with the television and one more vodka. If he were able to notice what his emotional guidance was telling him, his job and his home life would be quite different. Conditioning and fear of feelings, however, are not limited to men, but are very much a part of how women deal with emotions as well. A woman may feel more (the genetic piece) and may express more (the conditioned piece), but the restrictions often come in the form of which feelings are tolerable. The fear of guilt, for example, can render a woman incapable of taking care of herself. The fear of feeling or showing anger can turn her into a doormat. Brendan’s wife, Gail, works outside the home, and then picks up their two children from after-school care. She received her emotional training by osmosis from her mother who orbited around her father’s workaholism and angry depression. On a typical day, tired herself, she sees Brendan walk through the front door with nothing left for her or the kids. She watches the vodka disappear from the bottle and a dark cloud settle over her husband’s head. “How was your day?” she ventures. “The same as always. Same old shit…” “Want to talk about it?” “What the hell good is that going to do?” he asks, the irritability rising. His wife is becoming a target for his anger to hang on. Through all of this, a stockpile of emotion is building inside of Gail. There is anger of her own, hurt, loneliness, very little of which she allows herself to notice, much in the tradition of her mother. Most of the time, she cries quietly when the children aren’t looking and after Brendan has left the room. Months later, Brendan visits me again. “I don’t get it!” he tells me. “She just, out of the clear blue, tells me she’s wanting a divorce.” “Did she ever talk to you about why she was unhappy?” “She says she did, but I don’t remember anything like that. I just think she’s losing it.” In my private practice, I have heard this story so many times. The pressures of contemporary life, particularly with both adults in a family needing to work, create personal depletion and interpersonal distance. The emotions that might have served as warning signals and motivators for balanced change are ignored, denied, and buried. The eventual price is painfully high. These quandaries usually have their origins earlier in life, where we are first thrust into relationships with family and, later, with teachers, schoolmates, and report cards. We and our children enter the world with its maze of events and storm of cultural influences without being taught how to use our innate compass, the guidance of the emotional radar with which we were born. Children teased repeatedly withdraw into depression or assault, not knowing how to recognize, tolerate and deal with the emotional signals that arise. Like a slap across the face, shame is, as author Jodi Picoult writes, a “five-fingered word” that easily catalyzes depression, anxiety, or their opposite, aggression. Our youth have become greater and greater consumers of mood medication and perpetrators of shooting sprees. Cynthia is a talented, attractive fourteen-year-old, adopted shortly after birth. She has more of a muscular physique than a model’s stick figure. Her biological father appeared at her home when she was seven. Drunk and insisting that he be able to take his daughter back, he was, instead, taken away by the police. Not long after, her adoptive father left home with their twenty-something babysitter. Cynthia learned very early in life not to feel. It was simply intolerable. Her pretty face took on a scowl as she restricted her eating, focusing more and more on her weight. Insisting she was fat and, therefore, bad, and ugly, she began to numb out the ups and downs of adolescent life with alcohol or by sliding a razor blade across her forearm. She had to be perfect for the boys, yet she avoided them, creating more loneliness and depression. If Cynthia had learned about the power of healthy grief and toxic shame, things might have been quite different. Without the ability to listen to the messages of her grief and the false beliefs driving her shame, without the energy of her feelings to make life worth living, she had to resort to an addictive existence to get her through the anxiety of her days and the depression of her long nights. On a racial level, insult and injury harbored over generations explodes into genocide. Anxieties and fears not faced, or understood, isolate us, or push us over the edge of paranoid violence. As long as we are not emotionally clear, we really have not limped very far beyond...