How to handle negative feelings/suppressed feelings

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How to handle negative feelings, how to understand what they mean, how to work with them in productive ways instead of falling back into the counterproductive and even destructive patterns that we often do with troublesome feelings.

Feelings are so important to us because we base our sense of happiness on our feelings. However, what we usually do is think that we have to achieve something, acquire something, or be in a certain relationship in order to be happy. One of the things I hope will emerge through our discussion here is that we don't need any of these things to be happy - we just need to approach our feelings in a certain way, and we can experience a sense of happiness and fulfillment unrelated to achievement, possession, or relationship. That's what I call unconditional happiness, and for me, that's an important part of the spiritual journey.

I think it's important for us to recognize that just the fact that you are interested in the content of these pages represents a tremendous step in personal growth, especially if you are new to feelings work. There exists in our society today a tremendous gap - we are intellectually advanced, but emotionally unaware. We are all in this condition; those of us who have chosen to become more conscious of our feeling selves constitute a vanguard. We will be instrumental in helping the rest of us grow to a point where intellect and emotion, thinking and feeling, reason and intuition, male and female, will be in balance.

There may be specific reasons why you've been attracted to work with feelings:
You may simply have strong negative feelings that don't seem to go away which you would like to resolve, such as depression, loneliness, compulsiveness.

You may be experiencing active emotions such as anger, jealousy, or fear that erupt from time to time, undermining personal or work relationships, and relationships, especially intimate relationships, are where our most deeply held feelings emerge.

You may not have feelings, and you may be perceptive enough to realize that this can be a problem, or you may just wish to become more familiar with the vocabulary and dynamics of feelings to better understand yourself or others.

You may have become aware that you are locked into fixed, limiting patterns that you wish to grow out of and beyond. It's my opinion that most of these patterns are created and held in place by suppressed feelings, and that we can't change the pattern until we release the feelings.

You may be experiencing stress, and I like to think of stress as the condition of negative feelings coming up faster than they can be released.

You may be concerned with the impact of feelings on health. This is a topic getting a lot of attention lately with people like Bill Moyers, Bernie Seigel, Deepak Chopra all suggesting strongly that trapped feelings are a primary cause of poor health.

Or, you may be a on spiritual path and concerned with finding a way to integrate your feelings with your spirituality. This is the context in which this approach was originally conceived. All these situations can be handled by the system we will be exploring.

The main objective for us here is to provide you with a training in how to work with feelings, on your own, using the system that I describe in detail in my book, Emotional Clearing - to give you the tools and insights to practice what we could call SELF-THERAPY. But I've found that this approach is not only a way to deal with feelings, but has become a spiritual path of its own, a path to higher consciousness if I may use that term. It's a feeling-oriented spirituality as contrasted with a spirituality that might based on intellectual concepts or beliefs. I hope that will also be your experience as you begin practicing.

I'd like to go over some of the background which is critical to understand before you can start applying a system like IP to your life - it's important to know why you're doing what you're doing. For me, it all starts with the concept of Duality. Duality is an ancient philosophical principle, originating primarily in the East, which states that our experience is dualistic, meaning that we are unable to perceive any particular quality without the knowledge of the complimentary quality. For example, up/down, in/out, coming/going, hot/cold, space/solid. The principle of duality is easy enough to understand and agree with in regard to the physical plane; when we apply it to our inner experience, it becomes more subtle and even controversial, because I believe the exact same principles apply. Basically, it's happiness and unhappiness, tension and relaxation, pleasure and pain. We are unable to appreciate any pleasure unless it's accompanied by a corresponding pain.

Now, I'd like you to realize that I don't think this means that we have to be unhappy half the time. I think it just means that we have to acknowledge, in some effective way, the so-called negative component to any experience: that even with the one we love the most, we will experience periods of alienation and loneliness. But what happens is that we resist our experience of the negative. It's easy enough to see why we do this, but this is where we get into trouble. Because when we resist our inner experience of the negative, we prevent that experience from being completed - that's the nature of feelings. It's the simple experiencing of them that completes the cycle, dissolves the feeling energy, finishes the gestalt.

However, what's happened is that we've become so used to resisting that we've lost the capacity to experience in significant ways. Even though the answer is simple - just experience your feelings - we have to consciously develop the capacity for feeling and examine the blocks that prevent this. That's what we are doing here.

When we resist an experience, that feeling energy gets trapped and held in our being. It gets held in our psychic being, in our emotional self, and in our physical body. Psychologists, such as Wilhelm Reich, have even found that working with the physical body can effect emotional releases. And that's how the feeling energy affects our health.When the feeling energy builds to a certain point where it starts manifesting in the physical, we say: heart attack, or: cancer. There may be other factors that contribute to disease, but it's my opinion that the emotional component is certainly significant.

When we resist a feeling, we fall into what's know as suppression. When we don't recognize the feeling, when we clamp down on the feeling energy not allowing it to release, we suppress the feeling. Suppression is something that we basically all do. It results in what we've come to call the subconscious. The subconscious is the body of unresolved feelings and emotions, building within us and waiting to be released. And that's the problem with suppressed feelings: it we don't consciously release the feelings, the feelings start working on us, coloring our experience, making us react in unreasonable and destructive ways, making us simply feel miserable and susceptible to addictions in an attempt to feel better. For the purposes of our work, the main way that the subconscious manifests to us is through the mechanism that we call projection.

It's important to understand projection, and I would like to discuss it in more detail. I recognize three stages of projection. The first state is the most mild. Because we have cut ourselves off from parts of our inner self, we then become more sensitive to influences that remind us of our cut-off, or suppressed, emotional parts. Those suppressed parts within ourselves that are trying to burst out don't leave us alone. They make demands for our attention, and we tend to notice those things in others who remind us of our suppressed qualities. This is what is meant when it is said that WE SEE OURSELVES IN OTHERS. However, because we have essentially condemned those inner qualities through the act of suppression, we then usually condemn the outer reflection. We become judgmental, we become intolerant, we condemn the mirror. For example, sexuality. We are sexually suppressed, and then we condemn sexuality outside of ourselves. We suppress the anger within and then condemn and punish those of us who commit violent acts instead of treating them with compassion. At the same time, we are fascinated by whatever we have suppressed - just look at sex and violence on TV. So, we are in this position of resisting and suppressing vital parts of ourselves, recognizing and being attracted to those same qualities in others, and at the same time condemning those qualities in others. It's the beginning of crazymaking.

The second stage of projection is where we become reactive. We think that some situation or person is making us feel a certain way - we assign responsibility for our feelings to others. In this stage, not only are we more sensitive to outside stimulus, but we overlay simple reality with the suppressed inner - we see things that are not really there. Our partner has to work late one night, and we think we're being abandoned. All our abandonment fears and issues come up, and we feel helpless, angry, and alone. We blame our partner, we have a confrontation and make demands. We don't see that the event is just triggering the feelings that we are holding within.. We don't see the real world, we filter it through our layers of suppressed energy and think the cause of our feelings is outside. This is important and basic to understand for our work. Your levels of realization of how you have been buying into these kinds of projections will continue to deepen and amaze you. These first two levels of projection are generally recognized by Western psychology. The third level is not recognized by the West, but is recognized by the East.

The third level of projection is when we actually attract events and people to us that correspond to our suppressed energies. We attract someone who really does abandon us, starting with our mother or father, continuing into our first and second marriage. And even when we become aware of the pattern, we seem to be unable to break it. What's happening here is that we can't break the pattern because we haven't released the feeling energy that is attracting this kind of person to us.

Western psychology used to think, and I believe many therapists still do, that the idea in therapy is just to become aware of your patterns and then try to do better. The thinking is that we are at first unaware that we are locked into a pattern, that we tend to become attracted to a certain type, for example. We are told: Now that you're aware that you attract someone who has commitment issues and will abandon you, be more careful about who you're with. But in spite of taking great care, we seem to keep getting into the same situation, we just don't recognize it at first. Western psychology has named this syndrome compulsive repetition, but is really at sea to explain why it is so difficult to deliberately break.

In our work, we recognize this situation as a form of projection, where we attract people and situations to us that share a similar or complementary energy. The attraction takes place on the unconscious levels of the psyche. A person with abandonment issues will be with a person with commitment issues. Moreover, this type of attraction is part of the plan of the higher self, or however you may name the infinite wisdom of the universe. We keep attracting the same situation in order to bring up that feeling energy from within us for clearing. Because we have suppressed the feelings, the universe keeps giving us situations that trigger those feelings, and it will keep happening until we release the feelings. We could say the higher self is bringing us those events to us in order to bring up the energies for clearing, or we could say the feeling energy goes out and attracts events on the inner planes where we have no awareness. In the East, this phenomena has been known for centuries and is called Karma.

Karma is usually explained in a simplistic form by statements such as you get back what you give out, usually from a previous life. There may be some truth in this, but I hope you have been able to see that Karma has a much deeper foundation. The suppressed subconscious is certainly carried over from life to life. Feeling energy is what draws events to us; feelings are where the power is. This is an infinitely empowering concept, for if you recognize and take responsibility that you are attracting events to you because of the suppressed feeling energy within, you also make it possible to change those events though clearing the energy. And this is exactly what happens in practice. As you clear the suppressed energies, you find that situations change automatically and miraculously. There is no need to fight them, indeed, if you fight, you are only fighting yourself, because what you are fighting is your projection, and you can never win.

The path of Eastern wisdom teaches us some interesting concepts in relation to feelings work. Clearing Karma has always been understood to be an important part of spiritual growth.The ancient yogis say that the ordinary person, who has no interest in concepts beyond the physical, goes through life the victim of Karma, experiencing all kinds of pain, kicking and screaming all the way, fighting as best as possible. At the end of the life, some progress has been made, some Karma has been experienced and exhausted, some growth has occurred. Of course, new Karma has been incurred out of ignorance. The person then comes back to continue this process, and this is what we normally call "life." By and by, growth occurs.

The yogis then also say, however, that, if you can simply be aware that what is happening to you is the result of your Karma, and if you can accept these experiences in a way that doesn't imply becoming a doormat, you will make much faster progress in clearing your Karma, and you will lead a happier life as well.

But then, the yogis also say that if you want to make especially fast progress clearing Karma, you should engage in Raja Yoga, the practice of meditation. Now think about this, how does sitting on your butt, doing something we call meditation relate to being out in the world, having all these painful experiences in order to exhaust your Karma. How can I possibly clear Karma just going inside myself when Karma means the need to have certain experiences?

I didn't understand this for a long time in my personal practice, until about ten years ago. I first learned to meditate in the late '60's, but what I was doing was suppressive meditation. If a bad feeling came up, I thought I was having a bad meditation - I had no way to release it. I was finally taught that if I work with my feelings in certain ways in meditation, I will clear those feelings and make it unnecessary to attract the events to bring up the feelings - I will clear my Karma. This was a major turning point in my life, and can be for you also if you resonate with what I've been saying. This is what Emotional Clearing is all about, and what I describe in detail in the book.

I think there's a general agreement among therapists today that releasing trapped feelings is the essence of therapy. There are other purposes, of course, such as understanding and validating needs, strengthening the ego-self, building boundaries, getting the support of the therapist. But once we understand and agree that the primary purpose is to release feelings, it becomes apparent how we could do what we could call self-therapy. And when we see that life is bringing up our suppressed feelings to be released, we have a new and radical view of life. It's no longer: why is this happening to me, why can't things go right, what did I do to deserve this, or even, what did I do in some past life to deserve this, but instead, it's thank you. Thank you for showing me what I need to work on, thank you for bringing up these feelings in me, thank you for the free therapy. I'm going to use these circumstances for growth.

It's not what you did, it's not that you are being punished. It's just that you didn't release the feelings. The feelings have built up and are attracting events and people to you. These are all opportunities for growth through releasing the feelings. This is one of the reasons for life on the material plane, if not the main reason. Clearing feelings is all that's necessary, you don't have to reprogram yourself for success or goals. If you release trapped unworthiness, self-esteem is there; if you release resentment and isolation, love is there. It's just a question of releasing the feelings.
2004 John Ruskan / The Institute for Integrative Processing
http://www.emclear.com/Articles_FRT.html