Negotiating the journey to a home called, “Feelings”

It’s all too easy for people like me to say, “You must feel your feelings.” For many people, not just some, this can be a terrifying, confusing, and even an unknowable reality—at least it seems that way.

Feeling feelings can be a monumental challenge to those bearing trauma within their personal biosphere. Let’s never challenge such a concept, nor deny it, without respecting the concept.

The moment we think anyone’s claim to themselves is incredulous we call them a liar about the best thing they know; (that last word, “know,” being the operative word).

In other words, we CANNOT deny a person their perception over their own experience. Such a thing, though it is done with confoundingly horrific regularity—and never eviller than when done by professionals who should know better—is a despicable abuse that redoubles the trauma a person feels.

The road map trauma creates in the personal biosphere is an unknowable reality, fragmented in so many different ways, where the crumbs of our experience potentially disappeared long ago from the places we could have dropped them. Many people do not know their way back to feeling-for-healing places.

All we often have left over are the fragmentations of our reactionary feelings, which are often the evidences we have of the brokenness of our map.

That being what it is, we make use of the presence of all our feelings, as we accept each and every one for what they individually are, and for what they individually hold, as heartrending cues and clues, for the journey ahead.

Some feelings, terrifying as they are, and not always for known or even rational reasons, hold the key to a door to what we would call home, if only we knew what home looked and felt like. If only we knew we could trust it.

With any semblance of the concept of safety for that place called home, we’re motivated to walk there under our own will. But there are also blockers and frustrations along the way. It will take all the tenacity we have to embark, to continue, to arrive at the various milestones of the felt experience.

To find a trusted (and trustworthy) confidant for the journey would seem essential—more than one; a therapist, a peer group, friends no less(!!), a mentor or two, a pastor. For the trepidatious and sometimes lonely journey we require companions; some to rest with, others with which to walk the long stretches, and others again who will feed us precious morsels of spiritual food to revive us for each leg of the expedition.

Negotiating the journey to a home called, “Feelings,” can seem a gargantuan task. Into such a “night sea journey,” where the depths of death are at times entreated, we encounter feelings resembling experiences we’d prefer to deny. The more we trust ourselves to enter pain, the more we may discover the adventure disguised within it. The more we may descend as Christ did, the more as Christ rose, may we experience that grace.

Yet we don’t imagine how much courage it will take until we’re there, committed on the path!

Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash