If The Eyes Had No Tears, The Soul Would Have No Rainbow

Little girl inside of me, I’m surprised you are still there, patiently waiting for me to see how much you need my care. Little girl your tears are felt, they fall across my face and all of that pain you’ve been dealt, I wish I could erase...Little girl I‘m going to hear all of the things you need from me and from now on I’ll hold you near with love eternally.

                              Anonymous, Stepping Stones to Recovery

Recovery is very much about learning to own your feelings. We all have emotions and every one of them is necessary. There are no good or bad feelings. Those are judgments we’ve made. Truth is every feeling you experience is essential.

Feelings exist for our benefit. Every feeling is present for your benefit. Every feeling provides some form of healing. This is why it’s so important that we stop running from the feelings that we find more difficult to face.

Feelings we are often uncomfortable with include betrayal, abandonment, hurt, fear, anger, anxiety, shame, sadness and guilt. Yet each one is present because it has something to tell us about ourselves. For example, we may be feeling anxious and not even know why. That’s OK. We need to allow the feeling to be present and we need to learn to walk with it.

No one likes to feel anxious, but if we do, there’s a good reason for it. Something from the past may have worked its way up into our subconscious awareness, and because of this we are feeling anxiety even though we consciously don’t know why.

We don’t need to know why. We just need to be aware of the anxiety, name it and then accept it. We need to say “It’s OK to be anxious. The anxiety is here to heal me and so I will walk with it, being conscious of it, but not fighting it. I will allow the anxiety to pass through me in its own way and time, and I will be healed by it.”

We need to follow this practice with every difficult feeling. Once we embrace the feeling, once we allow ourselves to be OK with the feeling, we take our power back and own it. We own the feeling. The feeling no longer owns us. And so we are much less likely to run after some means of medicating the feeling away, like sugar, shopping, sex or any other form of compulsively acting-out.

If the feeling is especially strong, we may need to sit with it for a while. Sometimes sadness can be so great that we have to surrender it to our Higher Power and ask for help in processing it. First we need to acknowledge that we want to feel the sadness and be healed by it. Then we need to give ourselves the space and environment to be healed by it.

We may need to put some very sad music in the Stereo to help bring the sadness fully to the surface. Next we may need to sit at a desk where we can place our heads down or we may need to fully lay down. Once we are comfortable, we need to call on our Higher Power and then be willing to sit or lay still until we begin to feel the sadness lifting.

Once we feel the sadness evaporating, we can lift our heads up or sit up. The more we feel the sadness lifting, the more we can lift ourselves up physically until we are ready to go about our day again-- free of the sadness and of the past that caused this sadness.

In these types of situations, what we are really feeling is an unfelt-feeling from the past. Something bad happened and we weren’t ready to feel fully. So we suppressed our feelings and we stuffed them deep down inside of us. These are the many feelings that we have been addictively medicating for many years. The sooner we can face them and release them, the sooner we will be emotionally healthy.

So allow your feelings to work for you. Embrace them. Remember if the eyes had no tears, the soul would have no rainbow!