WHY IS IT SO HARD TO FEEL?

I am aware, and on many occasions, reminded that I need to learn to regulate my emotions. This is unfortunately something that I never learned as a child. Growing up in a home where you had to bury your emotions made it very difficult to understand them. I was not allowed to show sadness or anger or anything outwardly, especially if that meant making any noise that would disturb my mother. If that occurred, then I was punished with either a physical or verbal beating. After a few of those, I learned to bury any emotion and became very numb.

I also, unfortunately, learned to detach myself from feelings because of the abuse I was enduring as a child. When I was being beaten or sexually abused, I would go somewhere else in my mind to get through it. I never allowed myself to feel what was being done to me. I believe I had to detach to survive what was happening. Any emotion I did have, I turned inward so as not to provoke further abuse. I did that in many ways. To handle to pain and sadness, I began self-harm such as cutting myself, as a way to deal with those feelings. To handle anger or the feeling of loss of control, I developed an eating disorder. Eventually I developed an addiction to drugs and alcohol.

The bottom line was that whatever I put in place prevented me from having to deal with any emotions. I genuinely did not know how to sit with feelings either positive or negative. Here I am now, seven years sober and working on healing, and I find it extremely difficult to tap into my emotions. I have had many of them buried for decades and literally find it impossible to bring them into my consciousness. When on occasion, I try to allow them to come forward, I quickly have to shove them away because the level of uncomfortableness I feel is astronomical. It is not just negative emotions that give me that reaction but positive ones as well. I was never happy or joyful so now when something begins to make me feel that way, it is so foreign to me that I almost have to ruin it to feel comfortable. How sad is that?

I am trying very hard to let myself at least get a taste of these emotions. Sometimes I can only tolerate minutes and other times I am able to tolerate longer. It requires forcing myself to be very uncomfortable and explore something very foreign to me. I have found that there are times it is helpful to allow myself to feel new emotions in the presence of someone I trust yet other times I do better alone. That often depends on the intensity of the emotion. I have come to realize that I often avoid emotion because that is what is comfortable and familiar to me. That is certainly proving to be unhelpful, and it would benefit me to spend more time working through the emotions than avoiding them.

Until I begin to sit with my emotions and learn how to and allow myself to feel them, it is going to be difficult to learn how to regulate them. Like anything else, one day at a time I suppose.