Knocking Down Walls

Some of the strongest bricks in the walls of an agoraphobic's prison are created by our shame and fear of sharing our feelings. It's a behavior pattern that I don't recommend to others. It is soul killing. Most of us in this world have been raised with the belief that there are "good feelings" and "bad feelings" and that we are supposed to mince our way through life glowing with love and happiness. When anger or sorrow darkens our door we look around for someone to blame. Depending on our natural inclinations it is either our self or the other guy and often it's both. In our society, someone has to be to blame if we are having a negative emotion. Even those of us who are inclined to blame the other guy for our feelings usually also blame ourselves. He or she may be a villain, we tell ourselves, but where is our moral fiber if we have let them drive us to such a negative state. Well, our moral fiber is fine. Our souls are in tact. The idea that there are good and bad feelings is an untruth which has been pounded into our heads for generations. Please hear me. To feel is to be human. Feeling is like breathing. To be happy, to be angry, to be sad, to be silly, to be joyful - these are all just colors in the spectrum of human emotion. To not experience them all is impossible and to pretend not to robs life of its truth and its flavor. Oddly the more that we try to repress our so-called negative feelings, the more tightly they glue themselves to us and the more likely we are to act out on them, to pin them - almost literally - on the other person, kind of like trying to shake scotch tape off your finger by rubbing it off onto someone else's shirt. Now that's just bad manners.

What does this have to do with talking about what has happened, though? Well, I guess what I'm trying to say is that our coping mechanisms for dealing with anger and grief, our "training" (for most of us) needs to be overridden and replaced. If tough, seasoned firemen can sit down and cry without shame, well maybe the rest of us should take a lesson from their book right now. Maybe we should sit down with our

Go To Page: 1 2 3

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic