How to Process Uncomfortable Emotions Caused by Childhood Emotional Neglect Part 5

It's so important we understand that we have a huge disconnect to how we feel because in childhood nobody ever checked in with how we felt. Because of this we become out of focus and obsessed with trying to please our mother and father.

Drawing The Line:

I believe to a great extent that all of us struggle with trying to figure out where to draw the line between pleasing our parents and pleasing ourselves. Where does that line get blurred? 

If we progress through the natural stages of emotional development, we have a much easier time learning where that line is. If mom or dad became intrusive then we were able to say that they were being a little intrusive and asked them to respect our space. If mom and dad were healthy then they would respect the boundary, but if they weren’t healthy then they would berate us and go over that line even further.

Why It’s Difficult to Feel Our Feelings:

It's essential that we understand why we have such a difficult time feeling our feelings. So many of us are very intellectual because we're out of focus. Remember that intellect represents things that we can control; our environment. This is all about growing up and taking responsibility for how we feel and learning how to finally say this is what happened in my past, this is why I have this programming. Now, what am I going to do about it?

At the end of the day, we have to figure out how to feel, honor that and begin making life choices that are in our best interests. We are now responsible for what happens to us next and 

“we become the deliberate creators of our own lives; we don't have to blame anybody else.”

You don't have to blame people for why you’re not getting to where you need to be. You need to be willing to take total responsibility for what's happening in your life. In order to do that, you need to learn how to feel your feelings so you can get out of your head and tune into the self but before we do that we need to understand the process. 

Integrating Mind, Body & Essence: 

I want you to understand that we have the mind, the body and the self; the essence of us represents our spirit. (For those of you that have an issue with the word ‘spirit’ you can just change it to the self or the essence that's you, your feelings and/or your vibrations.)

I believe that the body and the self are more divinely or naturally connected and they are one. The essence of us is always sending signals to the body, but the brain isn’t always listening. So you can feel anxiety, hate your husband, hate being domestically abused, and your body will feel that, but the mind will keep you stuck. No matter what the body's saying, your mind can end up justifying why you’re staying where you are. 

“We have to learn to integrate all three aspects of us.”

The easiest way to learn how to integrate and become one mind, body and soul is to begin with how we feel. So how does your body feel when you’re around this person? How do you feel? Do you feel anxious? Well, then listen to that cue, and you can ask yourself why you feel anxious later, but that's going to come from the mind. Now the mind has been tainted by dysfunctional programming. You need to trust your body first until you can get this stuff straightened out in your head, and then you'll have an easier way of moving forward.

If you begin trusting how you and your body feel first, you can then start learning how to process that information through your mind. One of the clients I had this morning has a tremendous amount of anxiety and frustration in the job she's in, and it's been that way for a while. I asked her what kind of job would she thrive in, and she went right into it! So what I tried to help her understand was that the anxiety she was feeling in her body every day going to work was trying to tell her that she wasn’t happy where she was, and it would serve her well to start paying attention to that. 

“Think about what your anxiety is trying to tell you. It means something.”

I believe it's the way our essence gets to tell us we are in a job we don’t like and we don't belong there. How else can our spirit, our true self communicate to us except through the emotional body, except through things like anxiety, frustration and anger? Our innate self is trying to send us signals, and our brain will ignore them because we've been taught to be out of focus and superficial, to put more faith in money and in what other people think we should do; that's all the illusion of the mind. 

The mind, based on outside information that has nothing to do with what the innate self is telling us we should do. The mind is telling us that we should be pharmacists or that we should be computer analysts. Now, am I saying that everybody should go and quit their day job? No! You have to support your children.

I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t want to quit my day job. I would write at 2:30 in the morning or when I got home from work. I was smart about it. I knew I had to save money, I had to support my family, but at the same time, I began to follow my bliss when I could, and that just brought great levity to my life because I felt like I was moving. At least I was creating a forward-moving momentum in a direction that I knew would ultimately bring me to a much happier place. I could never have imagined that this is the place that it would get me to, that I would have this much abundance and this much love and light. I just kept following my bliss little by little. 

So if you want to be a writer, then write! I don't care if you have to wake up at 2:30 in the morning; stop making excuses. If you want to be a writer, start a blog, write a chapter a day,  go on the internet, and research it.

If you want to be a dancer, start with a dance class, start a dance blog, write about it online, join online communities, watch youtube videos, post your youtube videos. 

Honoring How YOU Feel:

I’m not saying if you're an accountant, quit your job; I’m saying start doing things! 

“Start honoring how you feel. Start honoring your essence.”

Your body is telling you something, and your essence is telling you that you're in the wrong place with anxiety or in the right place with peace and harmony. The goal is to accept how we feel and then decide. 

“The goal is to learn how to accept what the body feels, to feel it, to honor it.”

Then you can decide with a cognitive, thinking mind with the prefrontal cortex; we start deciding what we want to do about the way we feel. It’s about learning to understand that divine guidance is our essence speaking to us through the body. 

If I had been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder when I was younger, I think that would have just been a label placed on me. If the people who were diagnosing me did not consider why I felt anxiety, then my mind would have attached a negative label to it. Now I know, looking back, all of my weird coping skills and all of my anxiety was telling me something. 

I went to nursing school, and I excelled because I was a super-achiever seeking validation outside of self. That was my motivation because I didn't know where the hell to get it within me. I didn't know that I was supposed to be listening to myself; I didn't know that it was okay to want to be a writer and pursue that in college, I didn't know.

Those of you who have read my book The Road Back to Me, know this story, and it all goes back to being an ACLA, trying to get daddy's validation and never getting it. So my diagnosis would have been inappropriate because the reality is I was moving in the wrong direction, my essence had a calling, and I knew it. I knew when I was seven that I wanted to be a writer, and so my essence was constantly sending me those signals. When I was in nursing school, I would get stomach cramps and all sorts of panic attacks, and that was all a signal.

Had I listened to my body, I wouldn't have suffered these little minI nervous breakdowns; I wouldn't have had the panic and craziness that overwhelmed me for so much of my life and made me think that there really was something wrong with me. Had I learned to listen to the anxiety, honor it and get into alignment with what I really wanted, I could have saved myself so much turmoil so dear ones:

“The goal is the integration of the mind, body, and soul.” 

The further your body and mind are, the less your mind accepts what your body's saying. You have to understand that this big rift between your mind and your body results from being raised by people who didn't do a very good job of teaching you to honor how you feel. It's time for us to use our mind and start validating what we feel like.

To find out more about how you can learn to process these difficult emotions, watch this video on my YouTube Channel, where I dive into each aspect you should know about that can aid you in your recovery.

You can also check out the rest of my website www.lisaaromano.com for some more resources, as well as my 12-Week Breakthrough Program and Codependency Quiz.