What Feelings?

Feelings - Feelings are subjective experiences that can be positive or negative, and can be influenced by sensations, thoughts, images, or situations. Feelings can also involve emotional or moral sensitivity.  Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Everyone has feelings. They are part of our human nature. We can't avoid them because they are with us no matter what we do, who we meet, and where we go.

They are our emotional outlet when we are affected by something. They are how we learn. Feelings are all around us, in other people, and in situations that influence us in a positive or negative way.

Trauma survivors have tons of repressed feelings that have been buried. These emotional wounds tether them to the past.

To be able to heal from trauma, survivors must acknowledge their feelings first. There is no other way to begin the healing process, which is not as simple as just remembering a feeling, out of the blue and dealing with it.

So, where do you start? How do you begin to heal when those feelings won't resurface easily because they have been pushed down and forgotten for decades?

Your Complex PTSD brain has made you "forget" because you were too young to understand and handle what was happening to you. The trauma was too much for your young mind to process.

You may have always known that you were abused as a child, or you might be a survivor, like me, who was living in denial. I didn't want to remember my past.

It was too painful, and I was not ready or willing to begin to even try going down into my dark past. I wanted to forget. I tried hard to start living again and keep busy, not feeling anything.

I was fine without my feelings. My brain, on the other hand, had other ideas.

When a survivor becomes an adult and life begins to look up again, you start relaxing. Maybe you start breathing for yourself for the first time, so to speak.

As an adult, the law gives you free will to make your own decisions. It is overwhelming for someone who has never had free will to be living free.

Then, once your body and mind decide that you are in a good place and feel safe, those feelings from your childhood will start resurfacing. It will happen whether you want it to, or not.

You will start experiencing triggers from years, maybe even decades ago that suddenly crash into your newfound freedom.

These feelings can wreak havoc in your now well-adjusted and happy adult mind. That is what happened to me: my feelings resurfaced from a lifetime ago that I thought I had buried firmly in my past.

Unprocessed memories must surface to be dealt with. These trauma memories need to be time-stamped, reorganized, and stored in the correct part of the brain.

Until a survivor deals with these unprocessed memories, they will keep returning. It can be the most embarrassing and inconvenient time to flashback to a traumatic event.

Feelings have no appointment in your busy calendar, and they will not phone you to make an appointment.

No, your feelings just appear - demanding all of your time in that moment.

Feelings from traumatic events can be like a toddler having a tantrum of epic proportions in the middle of the mall. You cannot walk away and are forced to stop and feel.

I started remembering things in my late teens. To begin with, I had nightmares and flashes of darkness and uncomfortable painful feelings.

They evoked a deep fear inside me, and I couldn't make sense of any of it. It was like my mind was making soup of someone else's life from a horror movie.

There was no way these feelings were my own.

I was in denial.

Feelings, whether they provoke negative or positive emotions, need some kind of outlet while we process them.

The first step is to take a leap of faith and realize that these feelings are real. These traumatic events happened, and they happened to you.

It was not a story from a book you read, or a movie you saw. These feelings were from your life, from a long time ago.

I've written about coping strategies from triggers before, but I've never explored our relationship with the arts and music as a way of therapy.

Bringing Music and the Arts into your life, is something that you can do without a therapist. It helped me, and so I'm paying it forward to you - hoping it will do the same for you.

Let me show you how you can have a go at creating without even thinking about it.

Try to close your eyes and allow your body to relax. Focus on your breathing as your body relinquishes the day's stressors away from your body.

Breathe in and out a few times until you are relaxed.

What do you feel?

If you can't think of an answer, then maybe you could draw, paint, play, or sing it?

Whatever those feelings show you in that moment, it might be time to let them out and feel them?

How about giving it a try?

I am a victim of child abuse and trauma and I have always had a love for music and the creative side. When I had no voice, I expressed myself through art and music.

You don't have to be an expert at drawing or creating paintings, you can just experience it through your feelings. Let the art flow through you and create what comes into your mind.

How are those feelings making you feel today?

If drawing and painting are not your thing, then how about listening to music or trying to write? When I was a selective mute as a child, I spoke through my own comic pictures and then eventually added words to my pictures.

In addition, I often sang to myself or hummed tunes, and I liked to drum my hands on my legs when I sat on my feet.

As an adult, my love for the arts and music has followed me. Once I started remembering feelings from my painful past, I picked up my flute or my guitar and let the music flow through my fingers.

I sometimes played for hours until my fingers got blisters, but I felt better. The music helped me deal with those dark memories of my past until I could make sense of them. I could then start writing my feelings in my journal.

Once I had got to this point in my healing, I realized I needed to get professional help to deal with my past.

I still play music today and I write every single day. It is important to acknowledge your feelings no matter what they are.

No feeling is wrong, they just are.

We need our feelings to process the world around us, and when we do, we feel better. My therapist encourages me to use music and writing to heal in between sessions.

I adapt my music to suit the mood I am in. Sometimes, music and art are not enough because I need more. That is when I turn to sports like running. The beat of the music in my earbuds and my pounding feet on the ground feel great after a hard day at work.

What do you think is your best self-regulating therapy to keep your feelings in check?

Are you like me and turn to music, arts, and sports? Or, do you find yourself doing something else to process emotions?

Whatever you do and wherever you are, be kind to yourself. Remember that you do matter, and feelings come and go.

My name is Lizzy. I'm a trauma survivor, a wife, a mom, a teacher, and an author.

If you enjoy reading about what it's like to live after trauma, then please follow me.

For more about me: www.elizabethwoodsauthor.com

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