Feelings Are My Friends

   Feelings are my friends. Say it over and over. Make it your daily mantra. We humans have been blessed by God with a myriad of feelings— all of which are present to help us process life and grow into healthy mental and emotional states. Yet, many of us learn at a very young age to avoid our feelings at all costs. We learn to run from them or to turn them off completely. Either way we end up become emotional pressure-cookers.

   Emotionally unavailable people are left feeling nothing but an underlying numbness or shame-based anxiety. Sooner or later suppressed feelings cause us to explode into anger. This anger always ensures that shame will raise its ugly head and stare us in the eyes. And if we are unable to face this shame, we will run from the shame and into the arms of our addiction of choice.

   What most of us fail to understand is that every time we are greeted by an uncomfortable feeling, like shame or guilt, we anxiously reach for the fire-extinguisher (alcohol, drugs, cookies, credit cards, poker chips, etc.) instead of facing the fire of the feeling.

   Each and every feeling we experience is a gift from God. So we need to welcome them all and treat them all with proper respect. Feelings have much to tell us. Guilt tells us that we have made a mistake that has hurt someone else. It prompts us to take responsibility for our behavior. We can then make amends and return to feeling peaceful.

   Likewise, shame tells us that we are not accepting and loving ourselves very well. It prompts us to look at those parts of ourselves that we feel uncomfortable with, to embrace them, accept them and love them. Once we do, we feel contentment and happiness being in our own skin. We are called by shame to learn to love those things about ourselves that we cannot change.

   Yet most of us were never taught that feelings are our friends. Instead, we’ve learned to avoid them, not realizing that the alternative to stuffing feelings is addiction. Addiction is easy. It offers instant relief from our uncomfortable feelings. But the relief it provides is simply a Band-Aid.

   Once we get beyond the emotional high that is falsely produced by addictive acting-out, we are once again faced with our self-loathing and our very uncomfortable feelings, which encourage us to addictively act-out again. Worse yet, every time we act out, we want more. For the alcoholic, it doesn’t take long before one drink isn’t enough. Before long one drink is too many and 100 drinks are not enough. For the food addict, one cookie leads to two cookies, two cookies leads to three cookies, and three cookies leads to half a bag of cookies as the emotional pain becomes more and more difficult to drown.

    So instead of drowning our feelings we need to honor them. Feelings are sent to us from Beyond to clean us out and prepare us for some new delight. But we’ll never discover that new delight if we keep drowning our emotions through addictive acting-out.

   Once we learn to face and become comfortable with our feelings, we will no longer have a need to emotionally medicate them away. We’ll be able to let go of our addictive acting-out and take our personal power back from the addictions that have really done nothing more than make us miserable.

   So let’s stop pretending we are Darth Vader. We are not mechanical; we are emotional. And it’s emotions that help us to be vibrant, clear-headed and fully alive. Emotions provide human life with rainbows.

PRAYER: God grant me the ability to welcome, embrace and honor all of the many guests who enter my inner-guesthouse.  Provide me with the grace to be patient with myself and those “guests” who make me uncomfortable. I will focus on believing that they are present to provide me with a new delight in the near future, and I will choose to be grateful for them. Amen.