CIRCUMVENTING JUDGMENT OF PRIMARY FEELINGS
The secret to circumventing self-attack is to allow the primary feelings that we uncover to be whatever they are without judgment. These feelings desperately need understanding and acceptance, but rarely do they get it. Instead, they get judgment. When our feelings receive judgment, they cannot find release. Consequently, they stay attached to the judgment and continue to empower it.
Judgment is an evaluative, mental process. It separates good from bad, acceptable from unacceptable, useful from useless. In its positive sense, it uses its ability to help us find clarity and choose constructive pathways. However, in its negative sense it can be harshly evaluative and condemnatory. The latter offers only conditional love, saying in essence that we are acceptable only if we agree that things are the way our judgmental, rational self says they are. 1 When dealing with self-attack, we certainly do not need this. Instead, we need to give our primary feelings unconditional love, which accepts things the way they are.
When we find ourselves judging our feelings, this usually means that we have bypassed our visceral experience of an emotion and have instead gone into our heads. We have abandoned the real awareness and real experience of our feelings and moved our attention up into our mental processes where we have replaced something real with thoughts about something real. At the very least, this can prematurely take us away from an identification and experience of our feelings. At worst, those thoughts can be used to further our self-hate.
When we notice ourselves adversely judging our self, it is important to immediately stop the judgment process and go back to whatever we were originally feeling. If we are able to successfully get out of our heads and back in touch with the original feeling so we can meet that feeling with understanding and acceptance, we can quickly subvert another round of self-attack.
Judgment is very unyielding as it presupposes that we are unable to change an offending behavior or alter an unacceptable situation. It exists out of time and so remains in place long after we have changed a behavior or altered a bad situation. 2 Because of this, no matter how much we change, we are stuck with the bound-up emotional energy that our judgments hold in place. Until the primary feelings underlying our judgments are heard and accepted, the judgments will remain. In fact, each time a judgment is revisited, the feelings behind that judgment remain unmoved or they are intensified, and release of them becomes more difficult.3
Judgment has its place. There are all sorts of things that need to be carefully sorted out and evaluated. Judgment against our deepest and truest emotions, however, is not one of those things. Certainly, we can assess what is working in our lives and what is not, thereby coming up with behavioral or life-style changes that will help our emotional self-feel better, but we cannot hand down harsh value judgments and expect to feel peace.
Instead, we should always strive to understand how we might feel as we do, particularly if we have a difficult history that affects us deeply. In such cases we are already emotionally bruised and battered, leaving us with a limited ability to take much more abuse.
We must also come to a firm realization of the fact that on this plane of existence, we are human beings with human-proportioned selves — not gods with godlike proportions. We are limited in our earthly capacities, and we are far from perfect. As humans, we struggle mightily with our life experiences and the growth that they bring. Judgements surrounding them abound. However, despite our limitations and imperfections, our life experiences are the only way to learn about ourselves and to evolve in our consciousness.
Because we cannot evolve in our consciousness without individuated life experience and all the awareness that it brings, we should avoid wasting the opportunities afforded us in this lifetime by trying to be saints. While we can aspire to be loving and compassionate people, we need to refrain from demanding super-human, transcendent perfection from ourselves. That would be like expecting a two-year-old to have the cognition and motor skills of an adult.
What makes our actual feelings seem so deeply unacceptable? Sometimes it is because we tell ourselves that our feelings are childish or infantile. We deem them to be not at all mature and reasonable. We do not like the prospect of immature functioning, nor do we think others will. We therefore demand feelings from ourselves that reflect perfect development and maturation.
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as perfect development and maturation. We are all flawed in some way. When our primary feelings seem immature, we need to let them be just that. We should not attempt to renovate them at all. After all, in the end, after consideration of all things, we are probably not going to act on them.
Rather than try to renovate our immature side, we should strive to understand that our feelings come from the part of the brain that is reactive. Its whole job is to react to sensation. It cannot do anything else other than to produce gut level responses. This part of the brain will always be a child and react like a child. It is best to acknowledge its limited capabilities and accept its emotional truth rather than try to make it be an adult. There are other parts of our brain that will help us make constructive decisions.
One of the biggest things we judge ourselves for is our need. It is important to remember that until we are somewhat advanced in our knowledge of self, we can only choose within the context of our own need. We all have need — sometimes a lot of it. At times it is worse than others. Need makes us feel weak and vulnerable. It embarrasses us. It alters our decisions. We fear it. Whatever the case, we have to befriend it and let it be known in its nakedness.
We are needy for very good reasons. Perhaps a certain need of ours was not met sufficiently in our youth or we have not yet achieved enough individuation or independence to know our own capabilities. Maybe we are unusually lonely, we have endured sustained stress, we have suffered the loss of someone we depended on, we have been emotionally beaten up, we have over-given, or we are thoroughly exhausted. Perhaps we are simply young and our self-reliance is still to come. Perhaps we are inducing feelings of neediness from those around us; feelings are very contagious. The list could go on. The point is that need is present for a reason. Need, in particular, should be embraced and deeply understood.
Another thing that makes our feelings seem so deeply unacceptable is that when we are hurt, sad, vulnerable, or disillusioned, we tell ourselves we should have chosen our partner, job, friend, etc. more judiciously. We say that we should have known better. We can hardly believe that we overlooked the obvious warning signs.
Sometimes it is true that we know ahead of time that something will not be good for us and still plunge straight ahead. Yet most of the time we do this due to an unfulfilled emotional need that we are desperately trying to fulfill. Oftentimes we are trying to fill our emptiness. We may be trying to escape terrible emotional pain that we carry and are attempting to get back to emotional equilibrium. These things drive us to overlook the realities of this world and the consequences of our actions. Intellect seldom trumps emotional need or pain.
At times we think we know something ahead of time when in reality we do not know all the variables. In fact, we are woefully naïve, uninformed, and inexperienced about the matter at hand. In some cases, we cannot possibly know what is going on because we have lived in a dysfunctional situation for so long that it feels normal. We may tell ourselves that we know what we are doing and may even feel like we know what we are doing, but in actuality our knowledge is limited. Teenagers are famous for this. In reality we can only choose according to the information that we have at the time. We cannot know what we do not know. We do not exist as a combination of psychologist, professor, doctor, lawyer, sociologist, mechanic, and psychic. We have to learn to be okay with not knowing everything.
Occasionally we find our real feelings to be unacceptable because our bad choices seem repetitive and self-sabotaging. Sadly, before we come to know ourselves, we can only choose within the context of our own personal issues and our own internal programming. These two factors have a massive impact on our choices. Many times they drive our behaviors blindly. This is why we should all embark on the process of self-discovery. It is a beautiful and enlightening journey. We can overcome many of our problems and become wonderfully cognizant of our conditioning by working on our personal growth, but we cannot achieve mastery of every single thing within us. We can only make choices based on our level of self-awareness at any given point in time.
Every now and then we have difficulty accepting and understanding our real feelings because our guilt is saying things like “But you’re not a child. You’re an adult. Act like one.” Or it is saying things like “If you were a good mother/father/wife/husband, you would feel more forgiving. If you were a good person, you would give everyone a chance and you would include them no matter how you feel about them. If you were a good person, you would feel like giving to others. If you were a good person, you would never feel sadistic, punitive, or full of hate.”
These ridiculous mandates about how terrible we are if we feel whatever we actually feel are tremendously destructive. They keep the self-hating cycle going endlessly. Do not buy into them! For all we know, our feelings may be transient ones that, given a chance to be heard, would dissipate almost immediately. They would release precisely because they were allowed to vibrate and to move. This is what we want — movement — not some rigid morality that lets absolutely nothing within us shift.
If this idea of giving emotions room to move is frightening, remember that we are just doing the work of releasing emotion here. We will not be automatically basing our behaviors on the emotions we are striving to release. After rational thought (sans harsh judgment) has been introduced, we may or may not base our actions on our primary feelings. However, we should not allow thought to interfere with the initial process of welcoming and understanding them.
It should always be remembered that guilt is part of our self-attacking mechanism. Its doubt-inducing pronouncements never come from a valid place. Some say that there is appropriate guilt and inappropriate guilt. This is an interesting point that has some validity. However, if we regret something that we have done, feel terrible about it, and have made amends, it is still preferable to allow ourselves an experience of our primary feelings rather than allow self-attack as a response. We can feel deep regret and rectify our actions without hating ourselves endlessly.