Emotional Symphony

One of the major parts of my counseling was to get me to feel emotions.  I made jokes about myself like "You hurt my feeling, all one of them."  I remember talking to KavinCoach and he would say stuff that would start to bug me then I would get real calm.  One day he burst out, "How do you do that?" 

I looked at him puzzled.  "Do what?'

"You were getting angry," he explained, "and then you made it go completely away.  There is no tension in your face or any indication that you were even slightly upset."

I'm still puzzled, "Yea, so what?" 

I truly didn't understand the big deal about making my emotions vanish.  Dissociation is a powerful survival tool but sadly cuts me off from connection with people and myself.  My counselor knew from years of experience that the easiest emotion to trigger is anger.   It follows fear, hurt and frustration plus it is fairly recognizable.  I believe this session was around the time he declared I was an emotional moron.  I could make anger disappear so quickly, I had no time to acknowledge it, process it or consider why I felt it in the first place.  Yes, my counselor worked very hard to piss me off.  And yes he finally succeeded.  In fact, I believe he sat as far away from me as the room allowed to stay out of reach when me and my anger finally connected.  One day, I walked into the session and in a singsongy voice declared "KavinCoach.....I found it."  I dubbed it Lake RAGE....years of anger stuffed down unacknowledged, unprocessed, and in my opinion unwanted.  Took me a LLLLLOOOOONNNNNNGGGG time to understand the value of allowing myself to feel angry.  Anger is a secondary emotion.  Before anger comes hurt, fear and frustration.  Eventually, KavinCoach helped me to identify and process many negative emotions.  He often explained to me that the purpose of dealing with the negative emotions is cleaning out all my emotional wounds.  Once I allowed the 'bad' emotions then happiness and joy will creep in on their own.  After years of work....yes, I measure progress in years not months or weeks, I was sitting in rush hour traffic minding my own business when I was filled with the most awesome feeling of happiness.  It was very cool.  With integration, came a cacophony of emotions.  After many more years, I finally understand that full living comes with a symphony of emotions and I am the director.  If I turn my back on my emotions the wild ones can get way out of hand.  I need to connect with how I feel and why every day.  I have to work at it every day.  I am up to the challenge and it is so worth it. 

Still waters lay deep

Turbulent emotions