Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash
When I was a little girl, I had always suppressed and numbed my feelings. My reality was too chaotic to handle on my own, so I zoned out and lived in my own reality (or my own imagination). I didn’t feel safe in my environment, nor did I feel safe in my own body.
I’ve come a long way. A bit late, but now I am more in tune with my body. I allow myself to feel my emotions fully—that’s how I process them (even if I struggle to identify and understand my feelings at times).
Instead of avoiding discomfort, I allow myself to FEEL anger, guilt and shame (not just sadness all the time). I’ve learned that it’s OK to feel angry and express that, to be honest and real and have my needs met. After all, the goal is not to feel “positive” emotions all the time but to be human and imperfect and feel everything.
Therapy has taught me to observe and sit with my feelings. What started with just talking through my present problems with my therapist turned into diving deeper into my past and processing decades’ worth of suppressed emotions.
Yet, therapy is hard. Everything that I had avoided in the past comes back to bite me in the ass, and now I have to face it head-on and peel back layers of unresolved pain and trauma. So, why am I writing this? Because this is a part of my healing journey, and I know I’m not the only one in therapy committed to the process of releasing old, stuck energy and bringing about newfound change and optimism for the future.
Since the pandemic, I’ve been feeling a lot of heaviness in my body. I’ve been slowly releasing these heavy feelings by doing everything I could to heal and uplift myself, and lately, I feel a lot of the tightness in my chest and throat coming up again. While I’m more self-aware, I’m also more triggered from day to day, and it’s harder to ignore.
Dealing with my triggers has always been really difficult. I notice what comes up but drive myself crazy, trying to understand why I feel this way and what it means. How can I fix it? What can I do?
I used to think that whatever triggers me isn’t good for me. But that’s not the case at all. Most relationships are triggering, so it’s normal for triggers to come up from time to time and under different circumstances and events. Your triggers are telling you what you need at the moment and what you still need to heal from. And sometimes you don’t need to analyze the shit out of everything but know that old wounds will come up because healing is not linear.
So, when the “negative” emotions and triggers come up—you actually don’t need to do anything but observe and sit with it. That’s so wild, right?
Immediately, I would want to do something, anything, to flip the thought, distract myself, “fix” the problem and do something that makes me feel good. But that’s where I’m not processing my emotions and instead slapping on a bandaid and avoiding it altogether.
Even though this journey has been so challenging, I know that I would rather be more conscious and take accountability for my own reality than live it on autopilot. My past does not dictate my future, and I am becoming a more empowered version of myself every single day.
I hope this blog brings awareness to mental health and the journey of someone who is working on themselves and their transformation through therapy and other healing modalities. For those of you who are on this journey with me, you are not alone. Here’s to #selfhealers and brave souls!