Step Four: Remember My Ancient Feelings
“Discomfort is aroused only to bring the need for correction into awareness.” ~ A Course In Miracles
Following from Step Three, now that you’re “in the feeling,” you commit to recall the first time you felt this particular feeling — the earliest memory of that feeling. Use the present feeling in order to remember the first time you felt that same way. We’re talking about the feeling triggered by a current event, not the event itself. Close your eyes and allow the feeling of the moment to guide you back to an early childhood memory of a formational incident. Give yourself the space to explore it: How old were you when you first felt this feeling? What was happening then? Who said or did what? It doesn’t have to be a hugely traumatic event; whatever memory comes up is the right memory to process now.
Remember: You are never upset for the reason you think. The feeling of aggravation that comes up for me when I’m in the express line of the supermarket — where one is supposed to have only ten items, and the person in front of me has twelve — is the same feeling that might arise within me when someone doesn’t return my phone calls. “How does that work?” you may ask.
Well, because the feeling is chosen by the same belief that was triggered by each event. That belief (in this case perhaps: “I’m not important” or “I don’t matter”) was formed in an incident that happened long ago, and it is the memory of that incident that we’re after.
When I ask a client “Is this a familiar feeling?” the honest answer is always “yes.” It might be a “No” only if you are absolutely convinced that “it’s about someone else.” It has to be an old feeling, even if not familiar, simply because we do not ‘make’ new feelings after age eight or so. If it seems to be an unfamiliar feeling, it could mean that the belief that spawned this ‘new’ feeling has been deeply buried for a long, long time. Remember my own experience of coming face to face with the belief that ‘I should not have been born’? To recognize that “yes, it’s a familiar feeling” allows you to recognize again that the current circumstance is not the cause of the feeling. By acknowledging that, you are ready to let go of pursuing resolution in the story and to go much deeper, to the root cause of the upset. We have learned that the story doesn’t matter. Whatever is happening now (not in form but in content) only seems to be happening now, it is actually just a replay of an ancient event.
The story simply allows you to keep feeling what you’re used to — or rather, addicted to. In a very real sense, the dealer for my addiction hides in my story!
Let’s look at sadness. Like all feelings, sadness is caused by a complex mixture of bio-chemicals. Every time you experience this sadness, a specific combination of bio-chemicals is released in your body, thereby reinforcing the feeling. When this happens regularly, you become addicted to those bio-chemicals, and thus to the feeling that sends them into your system. This bio-chemical reaction was established the first time you ever felt that feeling, and thus literally became a part of you.
The feeling of sadness is a red flag indicating that a mistaken belief about your self is at play. After noting it, immediately get to work. After becoming familiar with the Six-Step Process, you’ll be able to link feelings to beliefs via memories quickly, in a matter of seconds. In so doing, you’ll nip that particular bio-chemical pattern in the bud, very much like putting a glass of wine down after one sip or walking away from an enticing waft of cigarette smoke.
“The initial corrective procedure is to recognize temporarily that there is a problem, but only as an indication that immediate correction is needed.” ~ A Course in Miracles
If you choose not to do an immediate correction, however, you are choosing to ‘use.’ You are allowing certain feelings to take over simply because your body misses the bio-chemicals and is actually experiencing a craving for them. Anyone who has ever given up an addiction knows what this craving feels like. Because you won’t feel quite right without that particular bio-chemical rush, you’ll soon be back to choosing sadness. You’re an addict, plain and simple.
On the other hand, if you don’t continue to see yourself as a victim (or whichever belief is at play, choosing your sadness), you can resist the craving, find the belief, do your forgiveness (Step Six), and your sadness miraculously vanishes. In order to heal your addiction, you must find the belief that has been triggered. The belief is the real ‘dealer’ as it chooses our feelings. After you’ve identified the main feeling ask, “Where does that feeling come from? How old was I when I first felt this very same feeling?” And in doing this, realize again that what you’re currently feeling has nothing to do with what just happened.
In the example above, my angry reaction has nothing to do with the fact that my phone calls were not returned, nor with that person in line at the grocery store — even though my ego is screaming that I know exactly why I am upset! The first time I felt that feeling was when a sudden breeze caught my mother by surprise, she accidentally slammed the door, and I awoke with a shock. I am simply replaying my upset three-year-old ‘self’ every time I am presented with such seeming ‘evidence’ of not being important.
Never feeling safe
Julie came to the center for healing as a last resort — she had been considering suicide. She found enough hope with us to keep on going, and to keep coming back for more healing.
“One of my predominant feelings was the feeling that I was never safe. One day, as a young woman in my late twenties, I had an appointment with my gynecologist. When she was examining me, she told me she saw something unusual — a polyp or something — and she wanted the doctor to have a look at it, which of course I agreed to. However, the next thing I knew the doctor was cutting inside me and all of a sudden, I had an image of myself at the age of two, in the bathtub, in a great deal of pain. In a two-year-old’s voice I said to the doctor, ‘Stop, stop, you’re hurting me!’ “In my mind’s eye I then went back to an early, deeply buried memory of my mother abusing me in the bathtub. I was shocked as the pieces fell into place. The abuse from her was a violation, one in a long line of them that I was to experience growing up.”
Julie experienced two traumatic rapes later in her life, but this memory of abuse by her mother was the key to her healing. Sometimes those memories are deeply buried, like Julie’s, and at other times you might be surprised at how quickly you will access the memory associated with a particular feeling.
“I am invisible”
A few years ago, I had the pleasure of dining with an old friend with whom I used to drink and play sports. On this occasion, we were at a wonderful Japanese restaurant, enjoying a lovely meal and some sake.
He turned from his drink and said to me, “This work you do is really just BS isn’t it?”
I smiled and replied, “Maybe.”
“What’s it really all about?” he pressed on, vaguely interested.
“Well, it’s about finding a path to real peace, real happiness.”
“Oh, I don’t need that,” he quickly told me.
“I’m so glad to hear that,” I answered back. (Yes, I have been accused of using feather-light sarcasm at times). “So you are always at peace?” Now, I knew full well that he was not. He worked twelve hours a day making more money than he could ever spend, and was riddled with anxiety.
In any event, he assured me he was always at peace. Just at that moment, in the Tatami room next to us, a cell phone rang, shattering the quiet, relaxed mood of the restaurant. Upon hearing it my friend said, “That really pisses me off.”
I took this as an opportunity to get to work. “This feeling of being pissed off,” I wondered aloud. “When and where did you first feel that?”
Without missing a beat he replied: “I am four years old, in Ireland, and my little sister has just peed in the corner of our living room.”
I continued: “What was the message you may have given yourself about you at that point?”
His reply was classic: “I am invisible and I do not matter.”
This belief of unworthiness was why he felt compelled to be in professional overdrive, earning increasing amounts of money to prove that he was not, in fact, invisible, but rather a real force to be reckoned with.
Does this ring any bells?
The roles of parents
One of our counselors, Ted, suffered feelings of utter devastation when his female friend of many years did not want to enter into a romantic relationship with him, but rather chose to date another man. By following these feelings back, Ted retrieved a memory of being five or six years old:
“My parents had decided to go out to a formal ball instead of spending their Saturday evening with me. Up till that time, my parents were always at home and available to take care of me. I couldn’t understand why they would want to go out. I felt completely abandoned and devastated by their choice to go dancing, leaving me at home with a babysitter. I couldn’t understand it at all!”
There are times when it may be very difficult to access the memory that triggered a belief and subsequent feelings, and sometimes a parent can supply the missing information. A man came to see me about ten or twelve years ago. His life was going well in most areas but he had one problem: he couldn’t eat in public. He couldn’t eat in front of anybody. As soon as he was in a relationship, the idea of having dinner with his partner was unbearable. As you can imagine, that put a little crimp in his style.
So we spent some time looking at where this may have come from. However, we couldn’t find the genesis of his problem, which we can usually uncover in a session or two. This was not an affliction you will find in the DSM5, yet.
So I asked, “Is your mother still alive?” He told me she was. I said, “Do you think she might be willing to come to a session?” He said he would ask her. She showed up at our next session and I asked her, “Would you tell me about your son’s first few days and what was happening for you at that time?” She proceeded to explain that she had become pregnant by a man who had left her. She subsequently met another man whom she ended up marrying. However, there was a problem with her new husband: he was pathologically jealous of the natural physical closeness between her and her newborn, and he forbade her to breastfeed the baby.
How did she deal with that? Because she couldn’t breastfeed in public, she breastfed her baby in secrecy, in private — in a closet. No doubt she experienced a high level of anxiety, hiding to sneak the feeding of her newborn son. As a result, in the first days of this baby boy’s life, he picked up the message: “Eating in public is dangerous.”
It’s important to see what belief this boy/man had made up around this issue. He picked up on his mother’s fear, and her fear became his fear. He developed an instinctual belief that if he ate in public his life would be in danger. Thus, eating in public literally became a life-and-death issue for him. Neither the mother nor her son had made that link before. But in our work together, the minute the link was established, the forgiveness was completed and the problem resolved. The man could eat in public, because the danger was gone.
When life gets too serious
About ten years ago a man in his early forties was referred to me by a colleague. She had worked with him for a few months but then referred him to me because they had reached an impasse. He was deeply depressed and there appeared to be no way to budge his depression. He was a financial analyst based in New York who worked hard at his job and made a lot of money. But there was clearly no joy in his life.
He sat in front of me, in a cloud of grey: his face was grey, his clothes were grey, and his energy level was a deep grey. He said: “I am clinically depressed. What are you going to do about that?”
My reply to him was: “Depression is an interesting choice. Why do you think you are choosing it?”
At this he became agitated. “I am clinically depressed! My father was clinically depressed, and my grandfather was clinically depressed! I guess you didn’t hear me the first time?” It took the rest of our first session together to have him even consider the possibility, however remote that might seem to him, that depression just might be a choice he was making.
In the second session, we started to explore feelings. Because of his depression, he was unaware of his feelings other than an all-pervasive dullness. We then did our first Six-Step Process and here is what it revealed: When he was a little boy, about three years old, he was playing in his parents’ garden and found a beautiful beetle. Eager to share his find with his father, he ran into his dad’s study. His father was a prominent brain surgeon, a very serious man, whose study was a very serious place. It contained lots of important-looking books, black leather furniture, and not a lot of color.
This happy little boy ran into his father’s study shouting “Daddy, Daddy, look at what I found!” His important father, who was sitting at his important desk, turned around and raised one eyebrow. That was it. The child’s elation was deflated and all of the joy he was feeling in that moment drained out of him.
And this is all that it took for this little boy, now a middle-aged man, to be absolutely clear that joy was not to be a part of his life. He got the message loud and clear. Or, rather, he made up that message loud and clear — because his father hadn’t said a word.
He and I proceeded to do a few more Six-Step Processes around this issue. I saw him one more time after that, and three years later I received a beautiful card from him telling me he had gone back to university, became an elementary school teacher, and was working harder than ever for a fraction of what he’d earned before — while feeling happier than he ever thought possible. His clinical depression, once diagnosed as “treatment resistant,” had lifted entirely. His joy in life had been restored to pre-beetle levels.
Getting past denial
Sometimes people are afraid to look at their feelings, and develop a habit of denying them. They may say, “My life is great! I was upset, but it’s okay now,” and they want to leave it at that. I suggested to one woman that she notice her feelings by writing them down on a daily basis, because she was tending to gloss them over in the group. This practice eventually revealed memories of her mother comparing her to her sister. Throughout her life, she needed to prove to her mum that she was good enough. This woman realized that she was still trying to prove to her mom that she was good enough — hence her very successful business. She’d spent her life compensating for feeling not good enough by being better than anyone else.
Before we move to Step Five, don’t forget to check in with the level of emotion you are feeling in the memory you have retrieved in this step. Go into the memory and make a note of how big that feeling is, on a scale of one to ten, as described in Chapter Four. You’ll need to review this number when you have completed Step Six.
By now you may feel a little overwhelmed by all this information (I just cannot resist: “Is being overwhelmed a familiar feeling?”). I appreciate that this is a lot of radical information to take in. Hang in there, for this is your ticket to freedom. This work will take you to a very powerful place.
Summary
1) The powerful feeling of the moment can always be traced back to an early, formational incident.
2) You are never upset for the reason you think.
3) We become biochemically addicted to repeating powerful feelings.
4) The more serious our feelings, the more likely they are to be denied or “diagnosed,” instead of us taking responsibility for them.