Episode 168 -- MNovember 22, 2021

Practice the Feeling Process: Tips on Finding Freedom

Feelings. What do we remember of our feelings when we were using substances? Ups and downs, anger and sadness? Or were we numb? Scared? How do we know if what we were feeling made sense in the given situation? Addiction alters our consciousness and builds a barrier between knowing and feeling. As we gain more time in recovery, this will change. We'll remove what was keeping us from connecting to our authentic emotions.

But when we have removed all the barriers to feeling, then what?

There is a colorful palette of feelings—it can be overwhelming, especially when we are new to recovery. In this excerpt from her book When Misery Is Company: End Self-Sabotage and Become Content, Anne Katherine offers guidance on how to handle our full range of emotions. As we become more comfortable with our feelings and move into a right relationship with them, we will be able to better assess situations and determine more appropriate reactions.

This excerpt has been edited for brevity.

What to Do If You Don't Feel Anything
After a lifetime of avoiding feelings, yours may be buried very deep. To tap into them again, arrange some quiet times with a therapist or a recovering friend. Prime the pump by thinking of a time during the previous week when you had a negative reaction to somebody, such as irritation or sadness.

Use that experience as your material as you follow the steps in the feeling process, verbalizing each step.

Here are the main steps in a healthy feeling process:

1. An event takes place that triggers a feeling. That event can be internal (something inside you) or external and may not be obvious.
2. A feeling begins. Remember, it can be subtle, sneaky, and powerful—and you may not even be sure what event caused this reaction.
3. You attend to the feeling, which means allowing yourself to clearly experience the feeling. It is important to do this without judging yourself.
4. The feeling amplifies and becomes more intense.
5. You help the feeling amplify, and scan your body to see where your feeling is located most strongly. Then you place your hand there and breathe into that place.
6. The feeling sharpens, but you stick with it and ride it out.
7. You express the feeling with words, sounds, or movement.
8. You go with what happens next. You may be given a memory or a picture or a pattern.
9. You keep going with what happens.
10. The feeling diminishes or suddenly disappears. In its place a need may appear. You address that need if you can, or ask someone else to help.
11. You rest, allowing the flow of further feelings and insights. You let yourself be comforted. You notice any new feeling and perhaps either a comfortable tiredness or a burst of energy.

From beginning to end, the entire process usually takes no more than twenty minutes, and often much less, if you don't fight it. For something huge, it can take a couple of hours but rarely more than that.

Practicing this once a day will help you open up and discover your real self. This sounds scary, I know. This whole process flies in the face of how you've painstakingly arranged your entire life. But it will be more than worth it. It will enable you to make the transition from numbness to joy. You will at last be able to engage in your own life.

What to Do If You Feel Too Much
When you take the cap off the volcano, of course it will blow. Down the road a piece, this will naturally calm down. A woman who has blocked anger her whole life may be quite angry at almost everything and everyone for a couple of months. But the storm will blow over. However, if anger is the feeling that comes out, remember to direct it away from anyone who might be hurt by it. If you need to, curse or scream or beat up a pillow in private. In particular, keep your release of anger away from children. If grief is the feeling that comes out, find a comforting friend or therapist to talk to. Allow yourself to accept the soothing and concern your friend or therapist gives.

What to Do When You're Feeling Too Vulnerable
We feel exposed when we finally start living without our insulation. Unlike in childhood, however, you now have resources. When you feel vulnerable, you have some choices.

• You can take it through the full feeling process.
• You can ask for and receive comfort from others.
• You can think your way through it, remembering the resources you have now.

What to Do If You Feel Scared—Perhaps Even All the Time
Fear is just a feeling—no more and no less. Take it through the feeling process, and as much as possible, spend time with your recovery community. If you feel afraid all of the time, you are tapping into something real that frightened you at an earlier time. There is a cause, and if you are around safe people long enough, you will let yourself know what it is.

In recovery we need to let people love us until we can love ourselves. We have to let ourselves be sheltered by safe people until we can find our own strength. Sometimes, as we go deeper inside, we may come to the edge of an abyss, and we know instinctively that if we go down there, we will discover that something very bad happened. Is it essential to discover the details? Not necessarily. It can be enough just to know that something bad happened. We can make this work by letting ourselves have all the feelings around it. We let ourselves have feelings about the bad event, without identifying what was so bad about it. We let the feelings be the evidence. We trust them and allow the process to work. This can be sufficient and allow us to move on.

Yikes! I'm Feeling Happy
Steady now. It's going to be okay. This doesn't have to be a bad thing. Sooner or later (usually sooner) in your recovery, happiness will appear. It may completely frighten you. Your fear is about the past, remember, not the present. Something in the past made you scared of being happy. Something bad probably happened after you felt good. You knew this would happen, but you're still afraid. What do you do? Try to change the pattern. Instead of letting anxiety about happiness create a setup for pain, set up some good right now. Make plans to do something you love, either alone or (preferably) with someone you like being with.

The Flow of Feeling
Your inner self will direct your healing, if you let it, at its own wise pace. It will pluck out of the current environment the exact intimation that has the capacity of bringing forward whatever primeval issue is next on the healing agenda. A pivotal childhood event may carry a flock of issues—different aspects, different messages—that fly off now and then and need attention. A single event can send you repeatedly through the feeling process. This means that, in order to move completely through it, you may experience grief, sadness, denial, anger, and fear, in any order or combination. At times you might also feel embarrassment, loneliness, and/or excessive responsibility. As you are using the feeling process, you won't necessarily visit each part a single time. Especially with a complex event, you may find yourself moving through some of the parts multiple times before you are ready for the final steps. This is both normal and appropriate. In fact, it is the path to freedom from your past.

About the Author:
Anne Katherine, MA, is a psychotherapist, licensed mental health counselor, and popular author who is known for her pioneering work in developing effective programs for recovery from food addiction and discovery of life purpose. She is the author of the best-selling book Boundaries: Where You End and I Begin, and her newest book is How to Make Any Diet Work: Repair Your Disordered Appetite and Finally Lose Weight. Katherine lives in the Pacific Northwest.

© 2004 by Anne Katherine
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