Monday, November 10, 2014

Putting our Feelings in the Right Context

Dear J,

You probably thought I forgot about you. I have wanted to write you for the longest time to thank you for your emotional honest letter. And ask your permission to publish it in my blog; anonymously of course. 

Things at my work have calm down and are back to normal, but I am staying busy as ever! Thank you for asking.

I think you have come farther than you think. Just because you have not completely freed yourself and not able to make some decisions and take risks in life, it doesn’t mean you can’t be compassionate towards others. I felt your compassion and I felt understood by you and that was real. In spite of all, you are living an independent life and that alone is huge and you should be proud of that!

It brought tears to my eyes reading your words: “As I think, the main reason, that I am able to resonate to your feelings as a child, is the result of your own honest work to really FEEL (with the support of Alice Miller) and then being able to describe it as compassionate  as you did in your book. Since I try to write something about myself, I feel more and more how demanding this is and how big your effort must have been, to make your book possible”

This is one of the best compliments anyone could give me. I hope it keeps helping you to feel and articulate it into words, and please feel free to share them with me.

I am sorry you were misguided by a therapist with false promises of salvation and you fell into total dependency with her again, like you were as a small child. Every time you run into a person that promises to help you break free run the other way. At the end no one can really save us, because no one can feel for us the painful repressed emotions of the child we once were; only we can do that with the support of true enlightened witness that is not afraid to tell us the truth, because without truth, true liberation is never possible.

Don’t worry about making your mother your scapegoat, your focus and concerns should be with child within you and help her express and feel her authentic feelings, that she had to repress because your mother could not bear it, and other helping witnesses were not available to you at the time. Create distance between you and your mother while you going through your painful feelings, so you have the freedom and safe space to feel without restrictions, feeling our feelings in privacy with the support of a helping witness like Alice Miller’s books will not hurt anyone and will liberate you.

I too use to be very sensitive and absorb the disowned repressed feelings of the people around me and that is why I use to spend a lot of time alone to protect myself from others repression. I am still very sensitive, but the only difference now is that I am much better distinguishing which feelings belong to me and which ones belong to those around me and I don’t take in the feelings of other people anymore, so it freed me to take risks and go out into the world.

You said that you tried to answer the question of the worksheets in my book: what the worst thing that could happen if you faced the fears of your childhood. To the child you once were was life threaten and you wanted to kill yourself, but the adult in you now can witness and feel these feelings of the child you once were and no one gets hurt. Feelings alone will not hurt anyone, only actions can hurt us and others. Your internalized mother will die inside of you and this will be liberating. And you might be able to talk to your mother later on if want to from an adult perspective and no longer dependent on her and afraid of her, like a little child and you decide when, how and how much time you want to spend with her, if any. You will be in charge of your life not her.

You said one of your older brothers is adopted and he is slightly disabled. I am just curious what caused his disability and how old he was when he was adopted and if you know the reasons why he was given up for adoption and the reasons why your parents decide to adopt a child?

Also in your last letter you mentioned that your mother breastfed you for about four weeks and to your mother was a big deal, because she only breastfed your brothers for two weeks. Can you imagine what might have felt like for the baby you once were to lose the mother’s breast at such young age, when you were not ready to do so, this could be one of the roots of your anxieties and why you have a hard time to let go and you are so afraid of taking risks and making decisions, because it triggers the fears and anxieties of the baby you once were when she lost her mother’s breasts. This is a big loss for a baby. Once you feel these fears and anxieties within the context of your infancy, they should subside and you become free to take risks and make decisions in life. 

You asked if Brigitte Oriol knows about my book. Yes she does and I think she seen it, but she doesn’t know English, so she can’t read it for herself until it’s translated into French.

Wishing you strength and courage to get through the feelings of the child you once were and I am sorry it took me so long to answer your letter.

Hugs,
Sylvie

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