If you won't deal with your Feelings, your Feelings will deal with you!

Empathy is having the capacity to identify with and relate to another’s pain, inner-experiences, perspectives and struggles.

Sympathy is the ability to feel sorry for another’s hardship.

While the two emotions may feel similarly when experienced in the body, they are by definition and value, substantially different. Emotional development is the precursor for moral development. You cannot have the latter, without having first established the former.

One with Narcissistic or Borderline Personality Disorder traits lacks Emotional Development. He/she learned to shutdown or sidestep their painful feelings, around the age of 2. Most do this by talking to themselves and mentally analyzing their inner pain in childhood, to try and end the tormenting confusion of “why” it exists.

Harsh self-judgement over having difficult/painful emotions when our parents reacted unfavorably to them, can stick with us for a lifetime. If for example, if our mom or dad treated our sadness, anger, jealousy or frustration as an unacceptable emotion, we grew up carrying precisely the same attitude about these feeling states, which undermined our overall sense of worth and lovability.

Young children learn very quickly, which emotions are accepted in their home and which are not, by how their parental units either respond or react to each. If our anger or depression is reacted to negatively by a parent, we work very hard to suppress and amputate it out of our emotional repertoire. You might say, we judge ourselves as being “wrong” for even feeling it!

The process burying natural, normal (albeit difficult to experience) feelings is clinically referred to as, emotional dissociation. When we’ve harshly judged and practiced disconnecting from our inner pain, our emotional development is halted, and we remain developmentally ‘stuck’ at the age at which this derailment of feelings occurs.

Emotional dissociation results in all sorts of physiological, social/societal and interpersonal ways, because one who is disconnected from his/her own emotions, cannot identify with nor relate to yours. On a physiological level, that which we refuse to cognitively acknowledge and accommodate, tends to create stagnancy and blockages in our body that lead to ailments and illnesses, which are not always easily mitigated.

Chinese medicine, specifically acupuncture, has long-recognized the correlation between blocked emotions and organ system impairment or shut down. Chi, our body’s energy flow, is blocked when we struggle with emotional issues. It’s kind of like having a kink in our garden hose, which prevents a full stream of water from coming out the spout.

The mind, body and spirit aspects in every human must operate in harmony, or the tone of our life goes awry. Think back to when you had a bad cold, or were trying to recover from a serious injury. Was your mood light and airy?? Of course not! Nobody feels spiritually and emotionally good, when their body is compromised, and in pain.

Similarly, when we‘ve felt depressed or sad, our physical energy and impetus or motivation drops much lower, than when we were feeling light and good. Humans are extraordinarily intricate, complex creatures~ except for those who’ve grown accustomed to living solely in their head, since they were very young.

Obsessive-Compulsive thinking and Anxiety Disorders are inescapable byproducts of emotional dissociation. Every Borderline and Narcissist I have ever worked with therapeutically, has struggled with these symptoms. Most have “learned to live with” discomfort or pain because it’s The Devil They Know. Even those who have Anxiety to an extreme (Agoraphobia) and can’t leave their home without sensations of PANIC overtaking ‘em, resign themselves to remaining indoors for the duration of their life!
Is this living~ or merely surviving?

Emotions occur in the body~ NOT the head. Our mind tries desperately to make logical sense of feelings in our body, so we don’t have to judge ourselves as “wrong or bad” for experiencing ‘em, but typically fails at this task.

In truth, a huge number of emotions flow thru us 24/7, whether we are cognizant of them or not! It’s the dramatic or intense feelings that break thru all emotional controls we’ve put in place since we were very little, which are the most troubling to us~ and spawn obsessional thinking.

Obsessional thinking arises out of feeling confused and/or out of control. The things we fully understand, we never mentally obsess about! Stop right here for a moment, and try to remember how much mental energy you gave to a specific problem or setback in your past. Understand that it was your sense of confusion or feeling out of control, that triggered your need to spend all those waking hours of your time obsessing about it. You may have even sought professional guidance to help you surmount that struggle~ if it felt too difficult to deal with on your own.

I have seldom encouraged a client to consider antidepressant therapy, unless their obsessive-compulsive thinking routinely gets in the way of effective treatment. Depression is the underlying cause of obsessional thinking~ which is one’s learned defense against feeling pain in the body. When depression is harshly judged or ridiculed in early childhood, a kid’s only recourse is to either find a “good reason” to allow its existence, mentally make it “not matter,” or self-flagellate (with shame) until that depression grows 20 times larger than its original size (never advisable).

When we beat ourselves up for feeling inert, down, depressed or sad (or even angry), our pain intensifies, because we’re brutally kicking ourselves when we’re already down on the mat! When our attacker is Us, we cannot defend against nor deflect the attack.