How are you with your feelings? Do you feel them bubbling in your body? Do you cry much? Laugh out loud? Are you happy with your relationship with your feelings?
My relationship with feelings have taken many twists and turns over the years. During my twenties, I trained as a psychotherapist, and had weekly psychotherapy. I did lots of crying and raging.
Whilst I was pregnant, I trained in Private Subconscious-mind Healing, where deep emotional healing occurs quickly without understanding the causal event or feeling the feelings. I released a lot of fear about giving birth and as a result felt totally relaxed giving birth.
When I became pregnant in my early thirties, I resonated most with Aware Parenting (www.awareparenting.com), a form of attachment parenting which accentuates connection, laughter and crying to help babies and children heal from stress and trauma.
When my daughter was a baby, I learnt about Nonviolent Communication (NVC) – (www.nonviolentcommunication.com) which gave me a whole new perspective on feelings – I learnt that a lot of what I had thought were feelings were ‘faux feelings’ – ie beliefs – eg. “I feel abandoned” is a belief rather than a feeling. It also taught me that feelings come from needs met or unmet, as well as things that we are telling ourselves.
Mid way through my thirties, whilst pregnant with my son, I found out about Field theory (www.fieldproject.net), and ever since, I have been living with three different models – Aware Parenting, NVC, and Field theory, each of which have different ideas about feelings for adults and children.
In Aware Parenting, children heal from daily stresses from crying, raging and laughing with the loving support of a parent. Parents heal from childhood trauma and daily stress through laughter and crying, especially with loving support.
In NVC empathy and self-empathy create relief through feelings and needs being heard, understood, and met. Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of NVC, states that much of our painful feelings stem from the things that we tell ourselves.
In Field theory, I learnt that feelings stem from our identity, ie. who we believe we are.
One of the most helpful perspectives I learnt from Philip Golabuk, in his writings predating the Field Project, was the difference between first pain and second pain. In first pain, feelings felt lead to relief and moving on. With second pain, feelings felt lead to stagnation.
I saw a similarity here with NVC – feelings stemming from unmet needs, once felt, expressed and empathised with, shift – whereas feelings stemming from thoughts like, “I can’t” and “I should” lead to depression and guilt.
Yet Field theory goes further than this. Feelings flow from identity, not just belief. Unwanted feelings stem from outdated beliefs which were originally set up to protect us from the loss of life or the loss of love.
The outdated beliefs, such as “If I am loved, something dangerous will happen”, leave us in situations where we feel lonely and depressed; wanting love but stopping ourselves from having it because if we did, that something dangerous would happen.
So here, the feelings don’t come from unmet needs for love, as in NVC, but from the belief that something dangerous would happen if we did have the love we are longing for.
In Field terms, feelings are welcomed. When they are wanted. And even uncomfortable feelings are wanted. For example, when someone we love dies, grief is a wanted feeling; something to acknowledge our loss.
The question in Field Training most pertinent to feelings is; is it wanted? If it is unwanted, then it stems from our desires being set against our beliefs (eg. we want money, but we really believe that having money makes us unspiritual, so we unwittingly don’t let ourselves have the money).
Thus the feeling, perhaps of longing for money, doesn’t come from not having money, it comes from us not being willing to have what we want, for very good reasons.
There is a big difference between repression of feelings, and shifting the cause of the feelings so that the feelings are shift.
With repression, we have the feelings but then stop ourselves feeling them with a ‘control pattern’ such as reading a book or eating a chocolate, but the core feeling is not addressed.
Likewise we may cry and release the recent charge of those feelings, but if they stem from unfriendly beliefs about ourselves or life, they will keep returning.
Shifting the identity shifts the feelings. They are not repressed; they simply aren’t there any more.
For example, we may feel lonely.
From an AwP perspective we might ask a friend to listen whilst we talk about the loneliness and have a cry.
From an NVC perspective, we might receive empathy from ourselves or someone else – the loneliness perhaps stems from a need for connection, so we make a request of ourselves or another to meet our need for connection.
In Field methodology, we would connect to what we want, and then discover the belief which has meant we’ve had a very “good “reason for not having connection, even though we have yearned for it. We are then able to choose a new identity which has more friendly beliefs about connection, and step into being that person.
So, now, I enjoy how all these models are tools or glasses through which I can view the world.
I love Aware Parenting particularly for babies and small children; the way I see it, the are most affected by their environment (and their parents’ behaviours, beliefs and identities), and are not free to choose how they respond. Given support to express their feelings, they do so, otherwise they develop patterns of behaviour to repress the feelings (known as control patterns).
Once children are older, I enjoy a combination of Aware Parenting (encouraging crying and laughing with support), with empathy for feelings and needs (a la NVC);
For both these ages I also love the Field model of Aligned Parenting where our children often show us our own unwitting unfriendly beliefs. When we shift our beliefs, their behaviour often shifts. If it doesn’t, we no longer have any charge and can use our parenting skills and knowledge to respond empathically rather than react.
For older children and teenagers and adults, I enjoy AwP and NVC and Field theory, whichever seems most suited….
How are you with your feelings? What resonates with you?