WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPENED in my childhood, I used a strategy I devised from the advice my father gave me. “Just suck it up and move on.” He taught me nothing about what to do with the negative feelings I sucked up, but each time he spoke those words to me, I did my best to do as he said.
Over time, I became adept at hiding and burying hurt, anger, shame, disappointment, embarrassment, and pain.
It never occurred to me that dad might have been uncomfortable with my pain. Nor did it occur to me that he taught me how to deny my feelings by a strategy he devised as a child, learned from his parents and they from their own.
Instead, I decided there was something wrong with me or that my feelings didn’t matter. Nonetheless, I was taught by my father, my favorite teacher, one of the deadliest strategies known to mankind.
It is no wonder why teenagers are angry people, who have within them the negative emotions of every bad thing that happened to them. What they do not know, and likely were never taught if they had parents who demanded they only display positive emotions, is that they not only carry their negative emotions, as if in invisible bags inside themselves, but they also made decisions about themselves.
Those decisions led to behaviors, which allowed them to cope with their reality.
Therefore, it is no wonder when these same kids get away from home, maybe in their college years, and drinking, sex, drugs, and rebellion become their favorite activities.
Like a release valve for the pressure that has built up over time, they have found relief for their hidden burden. It is also no surprise why they look at their parents with a jaundiced eye when reprimanded and determine they, these kids, are much smarter and wiser and in no more need of their parents’ training.
The truth about life is that we cannot deny negative feelings.
We can ignore, stuff, diminish, minimize or avoid them for a while, sometimes for many years, but anything deposited in the body will be expelled from the body one way or another.
This is why you can feel like a six or eighteen year old while standing in your high heels or business suit, maybe at your first real job or in your first marriage, and wonder why you cratered or got outrageously upset over a circumstance that caught you off guard.
Some bad thing happened and, with the invisible bags full of all the sucking up you’ve been doing, your subconscious mind, which never forgets an upset, transported you back to your past which had never been resolved.
In a nanosecond, you’ve projected the past onto the present. The only problem is that you aren’t six or eighteen years old and you’ve got some explaining to do about your behavior. Those negative feelings from the past come pouring out like a bad case of diarrhea and you’ve done the nasty all over yourself and others.
Not to worry, you think.
It’s their fault. It’s how I am. They shouldn’t have done that. Just another bad day of being disappointed, hurt, misunderstood, embarrassed, ashamed and out of control. Besides, it felt good to get some of those buried feelings off my chest.
Now I think I’ll get drunk or otherwise numb my soul with something so I can get through this day and back to my real self.
Denial is the strategy that leads to Rinse and Repeat and it is a choice that can be made without conscious thought. But, it comes at a high cost. The alternative does as well.
The difference is in the pay-off. The former leads to death and the alternative leads to life. The former holds you captive to your past and the alternative sets you free from your past.
The alternative to denial is to begin a new journey, whereby you make a conscious choice to change your behavior, something that is never easy to do. The life principle to follow, however, is quite simple and can be found in the Bible. Ephesians 4:17-25
I call it Put off, Put on.
If you make the conscious choice to feel your feelings, you will put off the old behavior of denial and put on the new behavior of honoring your God-given right to own your feelings. It may take a great amount of courage to speak, “I feel angry about this thing that happened,” but with some practice, you will notice the pain disappearing as the words and hurt are expelled from your body.
This may be the only motivation you need to begin using the same principle of Put off, Put on to change other behavior.
When you are angry, [or Be angry, and] do not sin; there is a time for righteous anger, [but it must not result in sin], and ·be sure to stop being angry before the end of the day [don’t let the sun set on your anger]. Ephesians 4:26 (EXB)
Colossians 3:1-17, James 4:1-2,Psalm 37:8-9, Ephesians 4:29-31
As always, it is my intent and hope that my words may encourage you wherever you are in your journey.
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If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.–Jesus (Mark 4:23)
Ouch! Reading my mail again. My strategy, “Hard work pays off.”
The reality, working hard (notice the switch) makes me tired.