Facing Our Feelings

“In order to protect our emotional wounds, and because of our fear of being hurt, humans create something very sophisticated in the mind: a big denial system…We put up these barriers for protection, to keep other people away.”

Don Miguel Ruiz, The Mastery of Love

We can be in recovery for many years and wonder if we are ever going to get relationships right. Most of us have been so emotionally stunted and unavailable for so long that we have developed an intense drive for intimacy NOW. We are deflated inside and desperate to be touched, cuddled and passionate to the 100^th degree. We bounce between being depressed and being anxious about our inability to have intimacy with another person.

So let’s honestly look at ourselves for a moment. If we did indeed emotionally shutdown as children, we long ago lost touch with our vast realm of God-given emotions. We have most likely spent our entire lives in-touch with two feelings: numbness and anger. If feelings of real intimacy bit us, we wouldn’t know it. We are too numb to experience true intimate feelings.

As a result we swing to extremes. We know the extreme of feeling nothing (numb) and we know the extreme of feeling intense (anger). This then leads us to confuse intensity with intimacy. When we addictively “fall in love” with a toxic person, we are feeling the intensity of our deepest desires for instant intimacy. We barely know the person before we are living their life for them and engaged in immediate sexual relations with this person—sexual relations that should come after months (or longer) of truly getting to know this person through the true intimacy of being emotionally available to each other.

This is the problem, so what’s the solution? We need to understand “me.” We need to understand that we are indeed emotionally frozen, that we do swing emotionally to the extremes and that we do confuse intensity with intimacy. We also need to understand that when we are feeling “intense” feelings for someone, those feelings are all about toxic attraction. They are a warning sign that we have attached our hearts to one more toxic person and we are wanting him/her to rescue us.

Another red flag is the need for immediate physical intimacy with someone we barely know. We don’t know anything about their background, who they really are, if they carry sexually transmitted diseases, etc. All we know is an intense inner-need to achieve ultimate physical ecstasy with them because we mistakenly believe it will cure us of our abysmal inner-emptiness. And we often also mistakenly believe that it will ceremonially guarantee that this person is indeed our long sought after Mr. or Ms. Right.

Once we can begin to understand the fallacy behind our thinking, we can begin to put the brakes on our out-of-control intense feelings of needing to be rescued by another person. We can understand the fact that all of our immediate attractions to certain people are toxic, based in addictive patterns of behavior.

We can then take the focus off of these toxic people and place it on ourselves. Our focus needs to be on understanding and fixing ourselves. We will never have healthy relationships with others until we do the necessary self-work to unfreeze our emotions. We need to do the work of recovering our full range of feelings. This means we have to stop running from them by medicating them away with attachments to toxic people, or cookies, or shopping or alcohol or whatever. Those attachments keep us numb. Facing the feelings brings them back to life. And we will never have true intimacy until we are able to be emotionally vulnerable and honest—with ourselves and others.