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Illusion of Control
The original wound, which I will discuss a little later, had the effect of creating a Spiritually hostile condition on this planet. That Spiritually hostile condition then became a cause with many consequences.
One of the most devastating of these consequences, or effects, was that human beings began to express emotions in destructive ways. Because the channel between Spiritual Self and human self was disrupted by planetary condition, the human ego began to develop the belief that it was separate from other humans and from the Source. This belief in separation made violence possible.
The violence, caused by the false belief, meant that humans could no longer enjoy a free-flowing emotional process. As a consequence, emotionally-repressive environments evolved in the social systems on this planet. Human beings were forced to adopt defense systems that included the belief that emotions were negative and had to be suppressed and controlled. This was necessary in order for human beings to live together in communities that would insure the survival of the human race.
It is not necessary any longer! And it is dysfunctional.
The act of suppressing emotions was always dysfunctional in its effect on the emotional, mental, and Spiritual health of the individual being. It was only functional in terms of physical survival of the species.
We now have clearer access to Spiritual healing energy and guidance which allows us to become aligned with Truth so that emotions will not be expressed in destructive ways. We have the tools, knowledge, and guidance to allow emotional healing to take place, to allow the individual to enjoy the flow of healthy emotional process.
Quote from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
The reality of the dynamics of emotional energy is that the more we try to control and deny it based upon an intellectual paradigm that is reversed to Love, the more likely it is to manifest at the worst times and in the most destructive manner.
Emotions are a vital part of our being. To suppress emotions is dysfunctional - it does not work. Any time we are trying to maintain emotional control out of our damaged ego programming - that is based upon separation, shame about being human, and fear - we are doing damage to our being. With any closed system, rather it be the engine of your car or your own being, neglecting and denying the importance of one aspect of the internal dynamic will cause damage - kind like what will happen when you run your car without oil. The system will break down.
Emotional honesty is absolutely vital to the health of the being. Denying, distorting, and blocking our emotions in reaction to false beliefs and dishonest attitudes causes emotional and mental disease. This emotional and mental disease causes physical, biological imbalance which produces physical disease.
Quote from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
Emotional energy cannot just disappear, it can transform but it can't disappear. One of the causes of violence in the human experience is the human survival mechanism that allows human beings to transform the energy of fear or pain into anger.
"One of the basic survival mechanism of human beings in the hostile environment that was manifested on this planet . . . . . . . was the ability to turn the lower vibrational emotional energies of fear, sadness, hurt, shame, etc., into anger. . . . . . . . anger is a higher vibrational emotional energy and therefore carries more energy mass. In other words, anger feels strong and powerful, while sadness, fear, etc., do not. In order to survive, human beings had the capacity to turn fear into anger to fight off threats to safety.
[This ability is functional in terms of survival but dysfunctional in terms of emotional balance and human interaction. It is one of the residues of survival programming - an important tool when reacting to the sudden presence of a saber-toothed tiger - that causes males (and some females) who are emotionally crippled because of societal dysfunction and emotional dishonesty, to act out violently.)" - Attack on America: A Spiritual Healing Perspective Chapter 4
This transformation of the excruciating pain of our broken hearts and wounded souls - and the fear of more wounding - into anger is more prevalent with men because men have traditionally been taught that anger is the only acceptable emotion for a real man. So, it is more often men who "go postal" and act out in anger in a variety of manifestations from road rage to domestic violence.
Repressed emotions explode outward in violence and war, in carnage and rape. We are raping the planet we live on, we are raping ourselves. Any emotional explosion outward in an act of violence is an act of violence against Self.
Quote from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
Women, who have traditionally been taught that anger is not acceptable, tend to turn anger back in on themselves. This is of course a generalization - and one that is changing as the societal role models for masculine and feminine change.
In this society, in a general sense, the men have been traditionally taught to be primarily aggressive, the "John Wayne" syndrome, while women have been taught to be self-sacrificing and passive. But that is a generalization; it is entirely possible that you came from a home where your mother was John Wayne and your father was the self-sacrificing martyr.
Quote from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
Codependency is an emotional defense system which was adapted by our damaged egos to try to maintain emotional control. The ego fights ferociously to maintain control because it got the message that our survival depended upon that illusion of control. It is an illusion because in the long term that defense system is self destructive - and actually is the greater threat to our survival. Our codependent defense system will kill us eventually unless we start changing that ego programming and learn how to release the emotional energy in a healthy way.
Though a certain percentage of the population does at some point reach a point of critical mass and manifest that repressed emotional energy in an external explosion - most of us turn it back on ourselves.
Repressed emotions implode, explode inward to cause the system to become dysfunctional. In the individual being this manifests as disease - emotional, mental, and physical disease. In larger systems, in families, in societies, that dysfunction manifests as child abuse and incest, as crime and poverty, homelessness and pollution.
Quote from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
Depression and anxiety disorders, environmental illness and post traumatic stress disorder, self mutilation and obesity, cancer and Alzheimer's Disease, are some of the effects of our dysfunctional attempts to control emotions.
It is possible to have some control over our emotions that is functional - that does work in terms of the health of our being. That control does not entail suppressing and denying the emotions - damming the energy. It involves honoring and respecting the emotional component of our being.
By changing our relationship with our own emotions through changing the attitudes, definitions, and beliefs - the intellectual paradigm that we are allowing to define our life experience - to one that is aligned with Love and ONENESS rather than separation and fear, we can start to achieve some emotional honesty and balance.
The first step in changing our relationship with our emotions, is to recognize and admit that we are not in control of this life business. We are powerless to control life out of our ego - because it is not possible for us to control life period. We can have some control over some aspects of our life by owning our power as the co-creator of our human experience, but we are not in control of life - we are not writing the script here.
We need to let go of the illusion that it is possible to control life and open up to - remember - that there is a Higher Power, a Universal Source Energy, that is in control. Recognizing our powerlessness and surrendering the illusion of control allows us to align with the Higher Power so that we an start to learn to have some Loving control over our emotions. That Loving control over our emotions will allow us to release the energy in a healing growth framework that will take the power away from the repressed emotional energy from our past in a gradual, healthy grieving process.
The more we align ourselves attitudinally with Spiritual Self instead of ego self, the more we can open up to releasing this energy as a good thing, as a healing, Loving thing to do for ourselves. The more willing we become to surrender to allowing the emotional energy to flow, the easier it becomes to own this grief that is ours, to own our self and our emotional wounds. We are not in control - there is a Loving Higher Power who is in control.
The feeling of being out of control is terrifying to our egos. It is our ego programming and it's efforts to control that are killing us - spiritually, emotionally, mentally and physically. By learning to let go of our illusion of control we can start to open up to Love - and start having faith that the Force is with us and will not give us more than we can handle.
We also have a built in safety valve. Our nose gets plugged up and we have to stop to blow our nose. We can cry and sob until a certain point and then we have to blow our noses. We can then cry and sob some more - but it is never going to get too out of control just because of our physical reality. The effect is that this deep grieving comes out in short bursts. Each time we do some deep grieving about a specific issue, we are releasing some of the pent up energy. The next time we touch on that issue, it will have less power than the time before. Eventually, we will heal that specific wound enough so that there is not enough repressed energy left to produce sobs.
A Parents Nightmare
As an example of how this process works, I had the opportunity some years ago to work with a woman in her seventies who was living her life in a very controlled and isolated manner. She had a whole lifetime of grief issues she was suppressing, but there was one issue - as it often the case - that was the key to unlocking the rest of the issues.
This woman, some twenty years earlier, had experienced an incredibly traumatic life event. Her daughter had been murdered by a serial killer. She had been awakened at 3 or 4 in the morning with the worst kind of phone call a parent can imagine.
When I began working with her, she could not - and would not - even talk about this issue because it was too painful for her. As we worked through other grief issues from her childhood and early life, we gradually moved closer to focusing on this specific issue.
Once we did start to open up this wound, she experienced wrenching grief in reliving that event. But in any one session of that grief group she was in, the actual deep grieving part of the process - the sobbing and crying and snot running out of the nose portion - only lasted a short time. Typically, the deepest sobbing and crying may last 5 to 10 minutes - to be followed by a series of aftershocks like an earthquake, gradually getting less intense as we process through the feelings.
We are never given more than we can handle - though it can certainly feel like it. Opening up to those wounds does not cause us - as I felt would happen to me - to be locked in a rubber room the rest of our life crying.
Of course, in an emotionally dishonest society, it can cause people who have not done their grief work to want desperately to get you under control - with drugs usually, and possibly with institutionalization. That is one of the reasons it is so helpful to have a counselor / therapist / healer to facilitate the work that has worked through their own issues so that the explosive release of the deep grief does not terrify them into shaming you, or giving the message that you are doing something wrong.
Someone who has not done her/his own emotionally healing grief work cannot guide you through yours. Or as John Bradshaw put it in his excellent PBS series on reclaiming the inner child, "No one can lead you somewhere that they haven't been."
Quote from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
The deep grieving can sometimes be almost like an exorcism in the release of the pent up energy, and can lead into areas such as past lives - so it is important to have someone who is open minded and not afraid of the grief to help you through your process. It is very scary stuff - but the process is unfolding perfectly and your Higher Power will provide the help you need at the time you need it. (This does not necessarily mean at the time you think you need it - part of the process is trusting our Higher Selves, our intuition to guide us - and being willing to do our part in the process, which includes taking action to align with recovery and being willing to plunge into the unknown.)
This woman went through perhaps half a dozen sessions of the really deep intense grieving, each time taking a little more power away from the issue - releasing a little more of the pent up energy.
The grieving included owning her anger at her daughter for abandoning her. (As I said in Chapter 1 of my online book, grief is about us, about our loss - it is not really about the other person, or how the other person died.) And owning her anger at God for allowing such things to happen. It also included letting go of the guilt that she was carrying because her of codependence. With any issue we blame ourselves because of our childhood wounding, because of the toxic shame from childhood that programmed us to feel like "bad" things happen us because something is wrong with us. It was because she had done some healing of that toxic shame that she was able to start dealing with this issue. She had started to change the subconscious programming from childhood that had given her the message that if her life was anything other than "happily ever after" it was somehow her fault. That in turn, allowed her to let go of the false beliefs and unhealthy guilt that told her she should have, or could have, done something to prevent her daughters death.
What eventually started happening was that the woman could remember good things about her daughter. Because she was no longer denying and avoiding the grief, she was able to start owning how much she loved her daughter in a healthy way with clearer vision. She started to allow herself to own the good memories that were the gift of having shared a relationship with the Soul that had inhabited her daughters body vehicle.
The memory was still painful, and will probably bring tears to her eyes and a catch in her throat almost every time thoughts of her daughter rise in her consciousness. Our wounds don't go away. We don't heal an issue and never feel pain around it again. What we do is release the grief so that we are not avoiding and denying part of our reality because of our terror of the pent up energy. By being willing to do the grief work we get to reclaim our life experiences in a more Loving, healing, and forgiving framework - change our relationship with life events because we are not allowing the grief to dictate and define our lives any more.
When I said at the beginning of my online book that Dan Rather could have been a role model for others by allowing himself to own his grief - actually sobbing and crying - I was talking about a few moments of emotional honesty, not hours of it. Allowing ourselves to own the grief does not cause us to lose control - it causes us to feel like we are losing control for a few moments.
By learning to allow ourselves to release that pent up pressurized energy in a healing context, we can be empowered to stop letting the past dictate our lives today.
