Learning To Love Yourself by Gay Hendricks

Author:Gay Hendricks [Hendricks, Gay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-10-09T23:00:00+00:00

All these things we tell ourselves keep the sadness locked up inside us. We are afraid to open up to it, to really let go into it, for fear that we may get so deeply mired in it we may never get out. Of course, the opposite is true. Being unwilling to feel it deeply keeps it trapped inside us. Sadness, fully felt, passes quickly.

All we really need to do is acknowledge our sadness. All we really must do to be free of it is be willing to feel it. Perhaps we still think that if we become willing to feel it, we must go around sad the rest of our lives. Ten years of working with the feelings of many people in therapy has shown me something I never would have guessed: When people truly open themselves to a particular feeling, even deep grief or rage, the expression of that feeling, only lasts a few minutes. Further, they always feel good afterwards. People tell me they feel cleansed, whole, light. I have never seen anyone who did not feel better after becoming willing to feel something they had been holding back. It has been a miracle to me to see person after person become willing to feel, and by doing so to become free.

FEELINGS ABOUT PARENTS

Some of the most difficult feelings we have are those about our parents. In my work as a therapist I have encountered hundreds of people who were stuck because they had feelings about their parents they could not accept and resolve. Our inability to deal with feelings about parents seems to me to rest on one simple problem. We feel simultaneous positive and negative feelings toward them, and we think that we must feel either one way or the other.

It is normal to feel anger toward your parents. It is normal to feel scared of them. It is normal to feel hurt by some of the things they do and do not do. You also feel grateful to them, love them, and have a host of other positive feelings. The complicating factor is that parents often do not want you to feel negative feelings toward them and will do things to try to keep you from feeling mad, scared, or hurt toward them. Through these kinds of interactions you begin to believe there is something wrong with your negative feelings in general, but this belief does not stop you from having negative feelings. It simply drives them underground.

This becomes the essence of our problem in learning to love our feelings. We believe there is something wrong with them; they are unlovable. Of course the only way to deal with negative feelings is to love them. How do you love something that is basically unlovable? So it goes around and around in the mind. It stops either when we change the belief from “negative feelings are unlovable” to “negative feelings are lovable” or when we go ahead and love them regardless of our beliefs.

THE BIG LESSON

Feelings are here to stay.

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