Feeling Seen by Jody Carrington

Author:Jody Carrington
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2022-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

Part Two

The Roadmap Back to Each Other

When We’re Acknowledged, We Ris

Okay. Here’s where the work begins. What do we do with all these emotions and the subsequent pain they can sometimes cause—either the pains we inherited, the ones that were thrust on us by our experiences, or even the ones we’re so desperately willing to step into? We will be inclined to come up with solutions and strategies to fix all this dysregulation, but this Part Two is the critical piece we so often miss. The goal, dear ones, is to eventually integrate the emotions that these experiences evoke. It’s never about getting rid of our experiences (because we can’t). It’s truly about making sense of them so they can settle into our stories and the defenses become less necessary to protect the soul. When we process intense emotions, they don’t bite us in the ass out of the blue or keep us stuck in time in an experience. The kicker: You can’t go around any of it. There are no shortcuts. You have to go through it. It’s the simple acknowledgment of some of the particularly dark, heavy burdens that is the key to healing. That is the work of allowing each of us to see and feel seen.

The scientific nuances of language fascinate me, but I’m no linguistics expert. For the sake of simplicity, here’s what I know: language does so much more than just act as a communication tool. I can tell you what it feels like in a therapy session when you hear a deep sigh after someone finally tells their truth. Or the safety of having a good cry over a glass of wine with a soulmate who just listens. They use just the right word, a well-timed nod, or a phrase to put a name to the mess that’s in your heart, and sometimes you can even physically feel the shift. Honoring the sacred nature of the story—the stories we share and the ones we hear—and knowing we’ve been entrusted with something valuable we should treat with respect and care. I love this skill of simply holding space because otherwise, particularly when there are cultural differences or the desire to fix or do a full-fledged narrative takeover, the result is often a clamoring lockdown of the soul. So, these next few chapters are an attempt at a deliberate slowdown—a roadmap to guide us through this process of what it truly means to acknowledge another and understand that it doesn’t mean you sacrifice your worth or your beliefs along the way.

Simply acknowledging another’s truth becomes particularly difficult when their experience is much unlike our own. And it seems that the more we disagree, the more we just want to fix it; get you back to a state of emotional regulation; suggest strategies or solutions or enforce our power to bring you to where we think you should be. That is the fundamental definition of behaviorism. The intention is to “make it better”; however, if we do that before truly understanding, we miss so much.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.