Facing My Emotional Poison Brings Emotional Healing

The relationship between thoughts and feelings is interesting. Some thoughts evoke appropriate feelings and some don’t. It seems natural that negative thoughts are going to evoke negative emotions, right? I mean it’s pretty hard to be beaming with joy when we have a head filled with angry thoughts. The moment angry thoughts enter our consciousness, they are going to produce angry feelings.

But it doesn’t always work this way. For example, I directed a retreat recently where I managed to give my personal power away to a negative person. The retreat was actually going smoothly. Everyone was participating and everyone seemed to be “getting it,” except for this one person.

I had the sense that maybe this person was on the wrong track, and that seemed to be confirmed the next morning when he returned the book I’d recommended to our bookstore for a refund. Sometimes this happens. Occasionally, there will be a person who reads what they needed into a retreat description, instead of seeing what the retreat is really about. Then when reality hits, they’re miffed.

Or sometimes a person will have preconceived ideas about how the retreat should go. My retreat style is conversational and requires a good amount of input from participants because I believe everyone’s answers are inside of them. I can point them in the right direction, but they have to do the inner-work of discovering their own answers. Most people adjust well to this style, but on occasion I get the person who wanted to be lectured-at and expected that I would give them all of the right answers to instantly make their lives better.

Well, this retreatant seemed to be leaning in that direction. And for whatever reason, it caused me to feel like a failure. The feelings of shame and failure that rushed over me were severe—too severe to be tied to this one person and his lack of approval. So rationally, I knew that these feelings weren’t about this person.

The negative feelings that were devastating my insides were “touched-off” by this person, but they were really about many other things. They were old, buried feelings that probably went back as far as childhood. The more I thought about the feelings that were weighting me down, the more I started to consciously relate them to my father and to a nun who was my eighth grade teacher. As a child, I had experienced great shame at their hands. I don’t doubt that they both thought they were helping me, but they were really destroying me from within with their “good” intentions, and they did much to erode my self-worth.

Unfortunately, no matter how I rationally reassured myself that I had no reason to be feeling the way that I did, the feelings of shame didn’t stop. I used positive affirmations, I reinforced myself with all of the positive feedback that was coming from the other participants who were on my retreat and yet my negative extremely painful feelings remained. They haunted me for days.

All of the positive thoughts across the entire Universe were not enough to evoke positive feelings. And so I realized that these shameful, negative, horrible feelings needed to have their say—and I allowed them to have it. I accepted my feelings, gave them to my Higher Power and I walked with them simply allowing them to say all they needed to say until they had exhausted themselves.

And eventually they did exhaust themselves and they evaporated, leaving my body at peace. Although I think it’s important at times like this to maintain positive thinking in order to maintain some type of balance, I don’t think it’s a good idea to try and “medicate” away bad feelings with positive thoughts. When difficult feelings arise, it’s important to face them. But it’s equally important to face them with the positive attitude that they are here to help us, to free us from the past.

When we allow the feelings to be experienced fully, we do free ourselves from them and so we do become healthier, stronger people because we are no longer weighted down by them.

Everything has been positive since I allowed myself to face these difficult feelings. Today alone I’ve received positive feedback from relatives and friends of some of the participants who were on the same retreat. These people came forward to tell me how that retreat had brought tremendous healing to their loved ones. And, as painful as it was, it brought tremendous healing to me, too.