Portia:
I mean staying in my own emotions... while interacting with others. Permitting myself to feel and be emotional - and naturally, to express that too. Ordinarily, I distance my emotions in favor of sitting in my observing self, watching, listening, gauging others... and leaning toward intellectual processes and "presentation" to achieve mutual understanding.... instead of just being & feeling... (s'pose this was a survival skill in my FOO...)
I suppose we shift from one place to the other within ourselves, depending on the situation, unnoticed, a lot. Recently, I've become aware of this tendency in me because it's changing - and I think that's a good thing. Of course, this is a sort of a residual personality side effect, from emotional abuse and there is still a lot of fear attached to being in that emotional place, for me. Especially when I'm feeling the stronger emotions of anger, deep grief, or love. More and more, though, I'm seeing that I can be "there" without anything "bad" happening... there really isn't anything to be afraid of - other people DO understand.
Yes, people still try to tone down my intensity and encourage me through my awkwardness as I try out this ability - since I've not had a lot of practice! But no one's denying me the right to be emotional or making fun of me... or saying I'm "crazy" for being so intense about things. I'm still sorting out why other people were allowed to feel things; be emotional... but I wasn't. It just makes absolutely no sense... I can't find the context for this... unless it was simply that other people's feelings in my FOO mattered more than mine.. or they felt one thing, while I felt something else - and they imagined that this was challenging them or being bad... or crazy. I guess I wasn't allowed to have emotional needs... they were just magically going to be met by the universe... or I was just letting my imagination run away with me, to expect safety, protection, love, happiness, encouragement and validation from my parents. It certainly wasn't on their agenda.
But then, too - I was told what to feel; any deviance from that was disobediance or worse - a character flaw, insanity. That "party line" was paranoid, clinically depressed, powerless and full of learned helplessness. When I felt something else - hope, excitement, happiness, anticipation, and the ability to achieve a goal... don't ya know, that was just crazy? And I had to "stop it" and not be so egotistical, getting a "big head" - because it "hurt" my mother... because, I guess, she couldn't feel those things and that meant that they weren't "real".
OK, I'm rambling... but essentially, it's not been safe for me to feel my emotions... to be an emotional person in situations with others - and I learned to even keep my feelings at arm's length from myself via smoking. That, thankfully, is changing as a result of these years of work, now - finally. Yes, it's a little scary at times but I'm plowing right ahead anyway... and it FEELS good; much better than the alternatives. More alive.
And it isn't mutually exclusive to being tuned in to other's feelings - that still happens at the same time - sort of like when you get two radio stations overlapping because of geographics and atmospheric conditions. When I can allow myself to do this, I'm just more "there"... not simply a talking head... in my own experience.
