Avoiding pain by numbing feelings

To be in harmony, we have to walk straight in three areas: physically, mentally and emotionally. All three sides of our nature must work together, like two people running a three-legged race, for a human personality to find unity through growth. Having any one area underdeveloped will have a crippling effect; it will take the entire personality down. Our feelings are often left in the dust…

In every child’s life, there will be circumstances that are unhappy; disappointment and pain are the human common denominator…We each draw a similar conclusion: “If I don’t feel, I won’t be unhappy”…This is one of the most basic wrong conclusions that people draw about life…

We bury our feelings in the backyard of our awareness where they stay stuck, destructive and inadequate, even though we have long-ago forgotten we even hid them…But if we don’t let these experiences be felt and moved along, they will stagnate and create a dull climate of vague unhappiness that we’ll be hard pressed to later put our finger on…We shut down the factory of our feelings and along went our intuition and creativity. From there, we limped along on a fraction of our potential, and often, we still don’t realize how big a hit we took…

We grabbed a wrong solution like it was scissors—hoping to cut out what hurt—and we ran…This blocking action doesn’t prevent us from feeling the painful feelings forever—it just defers them…So as we grow up, the unhappiness we seemed to have avoided will come to us in a different, indirect way that is much more painful. We will suffer the bitter hurt of isolation and loneliness…We fail to see how we willingly choose our current painful isolation when we chose to defend ourselves this way…

If we numb ourselves to any pain, can we truly love? Isn’t love, first and foremost, a feeling?...In the end, we can’t have it both ways, both feeling love and not feeling anything…Whatever blocks us from looking at the negative in ourselves is the exact same thing that’s blocking the love….

There’s nothing inside us we need to run from…Once we move through that first painful release of what we’ve been sitting on all these years, it will feel like a poison has left our system…Old unfelt immature emotions are like a stopper holding back genuine good feelings…

We need our feelings to guide us—that’s what well-functioning, mature people do…With strong, mature emotions, we will be able to trust ourselves and find a security beyond what we’ve ever dreamed of…

Listen and learn more.

Bones, Chapter 1: Emotional Growth and Its Function

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #89 Emotional Growth and Its Function