Coming to therapy wasn’t Daryl’s own idea. In fact, a polite way of putting it is that he’d been strongly encouraged to do so by his girlfriend, but I believe there was an implicit ultimatum – he had to find a way to moderate his drinking, or their relationship would be over.
Daryl was in his late twenties and worked as a tradesman, but he aspired to become a property developer. He told me that he’d enjoyed a drink since first tasting alcohol as a teenager, but the problem was that drinking had become more than just a way to wind down at the end of a hard day’s work.
Daryl drank every day. On weekends, he’d start at lunchtime, with barely a pause before he virtually collapsed in the early hours. Like many people who’ve become dependent on alcohol, Daryl was convinced he wasn’t an alcoholic. Only, now that he wanted to control his drinking, he found he couldn’t, and it was starting to frighten him. Time and again he’d had the best of intentions to stop, and he considered himself a determined person in other areas of his life, but it wasn’t working. It pained him to admit it, but he needed help.
As we explored some of Daryl’s emotional history, I saw that he was using alcohol as a way of self-medicating his emotions. As I asked him about his childhood and what was happening around the time he’d started drinking, he somewhat reluctantly told me about the tragic loss of his mother.
When Daryl was 16, his mother was diagnosed with bowel cancer, which then quickly spread. Despite her determined efforts to fight it, she’d died just nine months later. Daryl told me that he’d been in shock initially, but then he’d just ‘dealt with it’ and got on with his life. His father had been in and out of prison over the years, and even when he was around, he’d been an unhelpful influence, to say the least. After Daryl lost his mum, his father told him that he was a man now and he therefore didn’t need a mother.
When I suggested to Daryl that his drinking might be related to the loss of his mother, he looked at me with a confused expression. ‘Shit happens, and you deal with it,’ he said. To which I replied, ‘Yes, Daryl, shit does happen, but I don’t think you have dealt with it.’ Thankfully, I’d built a good connection with him by this point and so he pondered my words for long enough to recognize there might be some truth in them.
In essence, Daryl had learned to lock away his emotions and disconnect from his emotional body. Drinking alcohol helped him to continue to numb himself to his feelings, and his unconscious fear was that if he went too long without his drug of choice, he’d start to feel again.
Over the next few sessions, I worked with Daryl to build some awareness of his other emotional defenses, which included analyzing rather than feeling and blaming others for the way he was feeling. We then started to work experientially to inquire into what he was feeling in the moment. But as we did so, he’d consistently come up with responses along the lines of, ‘I don’t feel anything.’ Ultimately, the same inner resistance that had been there when his mother died when he was 16, was still protecting him from feeling his emotions.
For Daryl, this inner resistance showed up as an emptiness when he tried to feel his emotions. For others it might be a feeling of anger or wanting to push away, or an over-intellectualizing in their mind. Whichever way it shows up, though, it’s a layer of defense against feeling our emotions.
Inner resistance is our emotional body’s intelligent way of protecting us from feelings that we didn’t have the resources to feel at the time. It was likely not just the only response available to us but also genuinely the best option we had. And it worked because here we are to tell the story (and to create a new one going forward).
In a sense, the breakthrough at one stage becomes the limitation at the next. The same strategy that was crucial to our survival is now the very thing in the way of our moving forward. The walls that once kept us safe are now keeping us trapped. And as much as they might now frustrate us, we must treat those walls carefully and with great respect.
When our emotional defenses work to protect us, it’s rarely effective to try and smash them down. Indeed, the harder we push against them, the stronger they become in pushing back because that’s what they’ve learned to do. What we resist will persist.
To loosen the grip that our inner resistance has on our emotional life, we can’t meet it from a place of harshness and pushing. In fact, what we need is the opposite. The antidote to our inner shutdown is to give ourselves the qualities whose absence caused us to shut down in the first place.
Ultimately, we must learn to meet our three core emotional needs of boundaries, safety, and love, as doing so will provide the key to unlock our walls of defense. So, take some time now to learn how you can more effectively meet your core emotional needs.
Developing inner boundaries is ultimately about learning to be steady and steadfast with our experience. It’s being strong enough to keep our attention and presence with our difficult emotions. Just as a skillful therapist stays attentive and present to a client’s difficult emotions, we need to learn to do the same for ourselves.
Think about a small child who’s upset about something; the message they need from their caregiver is that they’re OK, and what they’re feeling is OK. The way the child receives this message is driven by how their caregiver responds to their emotions. Do they try and shut them down, or do they pull away when the child expresses them? Or do they encourage the child and lean in with the wish to hear more when they open up?
To create a safe space for your emotions to move and flow, you need to meet them from an encouraging place that says they’re welcome and OK. Put another way, your inner boundary that meets your emotions invites them in and makes space for them. The way to do this is to notice your direct response to your feelings when they arise.
I often ask my clients, ‘How do you feel about how you feel?’ When I was working with Daryl, what he felt was emptiness, and how he felt about this was irritated and annoyed. Ultimately, he thought he should be feeling something, and so the place where he met the emptiness was one of rejection. Meeting his absence of emotion from this place of rejection just deepened the inner shutdown and protection. As we worked to soften his inner emotional boundary and bring in some more gentleness and curiosity, things started to open a little.
Another key reason why we defend against and shut down our emotions is because we’ve learned it isn’t safe to feel them. If you think back to my story of witnessing my sister’s destructive use of her own emotions, you’ll recall that I learned that feeling emotions was a dangerous thing. As we discussed earlier, as children we’re dependent on our primary caregivers to co-regulate their nervous system with our own, teaching our system that we’re safe and that it’s OK to feel. As adults, we need to learn to self-regulate our nervous system to build our own sense of inner safety.
This is where meditation practice (see Chapter 9) is particularly important. By learning to regulate our nervous system and stay present to our experience, even if it feels difficult, we’re sending the message that we’re safe. This creates enough relaxation for our feelings to start to open.
While our inner boundaries and safety create the environment for our inner defenses to soften and our emotions to open, it’s the quality of love that draws them out. It’s the curiosity and warmth of our love that allows emotions to express themselves and the process of healing to begin. It’s the quality of love that says we’re perfect just as we are, that our emotions are valid and deserve to be felt. Like a loving and attentive mother adoring a child, we’re meeting our emotions from a true place of acceptance.
The kind of love we express to our emotions and their defenses is also important. It isn’t a conditional love where some emotions are welcome, and others are not. The key is that whatever we’re experiencing isn’t only welcome, we’re truly interested in it.
The purpose of this exercise is to practice softening your emotional defenses and inviting your emotions to open. This can take some time because you’re breaking an existing habit and working to create a new inner landscape of openness.
This is an exercise you can do reactively if you feel emotionally triggered by something, and proactively on its own each day. It’ll work particularly well when done immediately after your meditation practice.
With the previous exercise and what we’ve been building up to in the last few chapters, we’re ultimately creating an inner state of emotional movement. We need to let go and let the emotions flow. By understanding the strategies that we use to emotionally disconnect, by inquiring into our immediate experience, and by relaxing our inner defenses, we can allow our emotions to have the space they need to process.
Remember, we’re wired to heal, and our emotional body can heal itself, given the right environment, just as our physical body does. What you’re learning to do here is create the inner environment that allows the healing to happen. And when it does, your whole world can start to change.
You may recall the story of my own emotional opening, at the beginning of the book; I wrestled with it, my inner resistance and defenses holding on. But once I took the leap, everything became easier. We might start feeling a lot more, but it hurts us a lot less.
What this will probably look like is our emotions starting to open up. We might feel any number of emotions – including anger and intense sadness – or we might just have the sensation of energy moving inside us. The key here is that we’re learning to allow the emotions to flow and move; in a sense, we’re emptying that black sack of old, unprocessed emotions we carry around with us.
To be clear, though, we’re not talking about throwing these emotions at other people, as this will likely cause more suffering and pain for everyone, including ourselves. We want to let the energy flow out of us, but not all over others.
You may find that the instructions I’ve given in this chapter are enough for you to do this work by yourself, but some people will need holding and support from others, such as a qualified therapist. This is especially true when the events of our trauma were particularly overwhelming. In such instances, additional processing tools, such as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT/Tapping) can be immensely helpful.
As your emotions start to open, you may find they’re like the layers of an onion. Under each layer, there’s another one waiting to reveal itself. Indeed, there’s often a wisdom to the way our emotions protect and reveal each other as we open to them. We’re all different in our emotional experience, but there’s a particular sequence I commonly see:
If we look at why this might be the case, it makes sense that the surface-level emotions are anxiety and fear – this may be our maladaptive stress response and our nervous system running quickly to draw us into our head and away from the feeling. As we move beyond this, we reveal feelings such as anger and hatred, which allow us to feel ready for action and to protect against the more vulnerable feelings underneath.
As we process the anger and hatred, we can then more fully surrender to the feeling of collapse that may exist underneath it. This is the realm of our sadness and longing. But ultimately, our emotions are never a bottomless pit, and when we have the courage to allow them to open and free themselves, the reward is a deep sense of relief and connection to ourselves. The more we liberate our emotions, the more we liberate our true self.
And although superficially it can sound like semantics, it’s often helpful to get as specific as we can in naming the emotions we’re feeling. For example, there’s a significant difference in the felt sense between anger and hatred. Anger feels fiery and as if we want to have a fight whereas hatred is cold, calculating, and much more precise in its actions.
I notice that often when someone can find the right name for the emotion they’re experiencing, it allows them to feel into it and welcome it more fully. And when we’ve been out of touch with our emotions for a long time, finding the correct words can be tricky. Just as we do when learning a new language, we need to become familiar with the vocabulary.
At this point, you might be wondering whether I advocate a world in which we’re all feeling everything, fully, all the time, in all situations. Let me be super clear: I do not. Our emotional defenses didn’t happen by accident; they have their place, and what’s appropriate in one situation may well not be in another.
Furthermore, to reiterate something I said earlier, I’m not suggesting we should just throw whatever we’re feeling at whoever’s closest to us. This is not only childish, but it also often causes even more suffering for everyone. What we’re talking about is a healthy and mature relationship with our feelings, one in which we’re taking the time to process and heal our past by working through the excess baggage in our metaphorical black sack. At the same time, we’re also learning to live more fully in the present moment and to unlock a future that isn’t limited by the negative impacts of our past.
But what does healthy emotional healing look like? To those who don’t know us particularly well, it may seem that nothing’s really changing in the short term – we’re just a little more sensitive and reflective, perhaps. But those closer to us may notice that we’re feeling a lot more. And at times, in the quiet of our own mind, we may find ourselves wondering what the hell we’ve got ourselves into while we’re playing emotional catch-up!
If we’re spending a lot of time around the people who played a significant role in setting up our trauma ECHOs, we may also find that we need a little more space from them in the short term. We’ll talk more about how to manage these relationships in Part III.
Another dynamic that can be particularly tricky to manage while we’re working to open ourselves more emotionally is that we become more critical of ourselves. In a sense, the inner voice that’s worked hard to keep everything in check can get rather vocal when we shake things up in our inner world. We’ll get to this in the next chapter.
Returning to Daryl’s story, as we worked together to change his relationship with his emotions, gradually cultivating an inner space of boundaries, safety, and love, initially he reported feeling a little more sensitive and reactive but not much else; however, he stayed with it.
One day he had a conversation with his girlfriend in which she asked him about his mother. As he responded, seemingly (to him) out of nowhere, he began to cry. Reflecting on this experience in our next session, Daryl said that his instinct had been to shut down, but the work we’d been doing allowed him to open up instead, and before he knew it, the floodgates had opened, and he cried for almost an hour straight.
From this point on, Daryl found it so much easier to engage in his therapy. He worked through his sadness at the loss of his mother and through the intense rage and hatred he felt for his father, which in time, opened to a place of longing for his love and care. Over the months that we worked together, Daryl gradually noticed that he was drinking less, and we added in some additional pattern-breaking techniques (including those in Chapter 10). In one of our final sessions, Daryl walked in and told me that he’d gone an entire weekend without a drink, including attending a friend’s wedding where he’d been the only guest not drinking. I can remember the look of pride on his face like it was yesterday.
A year or so after I finished working with Daryl, I received a moving email in which he told me that his girlfriend was pregnant, and they were engaged. Recalling something I’d said in one of our sessions, the final line of the message was, ‘It’s time to break the cycle of emotional neglect from fathers in my family.’