Inner Peace

Inner peace begins the moment you choose not to allow another person or event to control your emotions.  Danish Ahmed's photo.



Unlocking emotions is a slow process. What was interesting to me was that the first emotion KavinCoach worked on getting me to feel was anger. This started in the very earliest sessions.  It took a few weeks for KavinCoach to get me to talk to him about anything other than my intended expectations to learn how to communicate better.  I didn't talk about my past because I didn't remember.  I didn't talk about my past to anyone; I wasn't picking on KavinCoach.  I noticed in the sessions that when he talked to me I sometimes felt upset but I would make the emotion disappear.  I remember during one session he had said somethings that were really starting to upset me.  I knew I was there to get help and to me anger would not be helpful.  I don't remember exactly what we were talking about but KavinCoach suddenly blurted out, "Where did it go?"  I was totally bewildered by his out burst.  I asked him, "Where did what go?"
"You were getting angry," he pointed out.
I agreed with him.
"But now you are not angry.  You are not suppressing your anger, there is no tension in your face.  The emotion is totally gone."
I agreed again.  I explained that I felt since he was trying to help me it wasn't fair to get upset.  He finally revealed he was trying to get me to be angry.  He then asked a question that at the time I thought was just rhetorical but later I realized he might actually want to know, "How do you do that?"

I didn't understand that my ability to make anger or any other emotion vanish was unusual.  I thought anybody could, so I felt puzzled by people claiming doing something because they were in the grips of an emotion.  I felt some emotions so I didn't feel like there was no emotion at all but I had a much higher level of dissociation.  As a teenager, my hero was Mr. Spock from Star Trek.  I felt that his totally logical approach to everything made sense.   Through a series of life experiences I put more and more distance between me and my emotions.  From the time I was a teenager until I started counseling, I could count on one hand the number of times I had cried.  Now, I value those that can cry and share their emotion.   I work at being able to control my emotions rather than dissociating on auto-pilot.  By eliminating anger, I eliminated my ability to reach the emotions behind the anger.  So those emotions festered and fermented into a boiling mass that was finally unmasked under KavinCoach's vigilance to get me to feel what I feel.