Facing Feelings: This is How We Take Our Power Back

Sometimes the aching inside is so intense that it feels like I’m drowning in sadness and despair. In that moment, I realize there’s a dagger inside that has been shredding my heart and bleeding my soul for countless years. And that dagger is a childhood experience of having my self-worth destroyed by an adult.

The dagger twists relentlessly inside of me. It feels like there’s no hope. There’s nothing left to cling to, not even God. Everything has failed me. I’m gasping for inner-air, but there is none. I cry to God one more time, but I’m getting tired of this. “What is this feeling tied to?” I scream. “What happened that so destroyed my soul? I don’t remember. Help me to know what it is and to heal it!!!”

Silence. I feel some relief from having expressed my feelings out-loud. But the overwhelming sadness is still haunting me. The past fades to black and I’m ready to give up on tomorrow. Still, I go about preparing for my day, knowing that if I allow these horrible feelings to play-out, they will exhaust themselves and I will feel better.

This is how my day began. It’s begun this way many times over the years. Even though twenty years of recovery has made things better, I still suffer from devastating feelings that I can’t identify with any one particular experience in my life. But I do know that I have a wounded inner-child who is still suffering from being led to believe that he was unlovable and unworthy of human dignity.

As I write this, those overwhelming feelings have already exhausted themselves and I feel better for having faced them and allowed them to simply be. Recovery has taught me to face the feelings, whereas addiction had taught me to medicate them back into their hiding place. Either way, the feelings disappear, but here’s the difference: When we face the feelings, they have the space to release and exhaust themselves out of our systems. When we medicate them, we simply stuff them back down inside of ourselves.

I don’t know exactly what experience in my past life caused these feelings to surface this morning. But I do know this: Because I allowed them to be present and exhaust themselves I will never face those exact same feelings about that exact same experience again. They are gone. If I had medicated them with some addictive behavior, like eating lots of sugar or shopping, I would have simply forced them back down inside of me. And eventually, they would have returned to haunt me over and over again.

In the long run, it’s better to face the feelings, allow them to be there and allow them to exhaust themselves. This is how we take our power back.