| Worksheets | I-40 Program | Daily Accountability Report | RH Website |
FOUR STEPS TO EMOTIONAL RENEWAL
Step One: NAME IT
Begin by looking for clues that you are feeling something. Usually, your body changes tell you that you are having a feeling. You feel stiff, your stomach gets upset, your heart beats faster, your breath becomes shorter, your shoulders tense up, you feel restless, your throat tightens, you clench your fists, you feel fatigued or stressed.
Your mood changes. You feel melancholy, unhappy, out of sorts, withdrawn, confused, depressed, overwhelmed, very sensitive, continually irritated, or anxious. You may simply feel a vague sense of discomfort and emotional turmoil. You feel that you are under a cloud of unmotivated malaise and pressure.
Your behavior changes. You act differently. You are unkind, attacking, short and sharp with others. You withdraw, avoid, or decline to interact with others. You want to be left alone.
Once you have picked up on the clues that feelings are going on, the first thing you have to do is identify or name the feelings you are experiencing. As soon as you become aware that you are feeling something, look for a word or phrase or behavioral experience to describe it. Let's use Richard, who we met before, as an example.
Richard often feels tense and agitated at the end of a workday. After he gets home, he tries to take some time to tune into what happened during the day and what he is feeling. Richard has come to learn that when he loses touch with his feelings, especially the painful ones, it isn't long before he feels like cruising. He starts to feel that complexity of painful emotions which leaves him feeling deprived and empty, unwanted and unimportant, and he wants to be with a man.
Richard is a waiter at a busy restaurant. As he begins to reflect on his day, he realizes that he had one particular customer who upset him. The customer became loud and verbally abusive because he was displeased with his meal. Richard knows that this incident was staying with him because his body was tense, his mood was irritable, and he felt like he didn't want to talk with his roommate.
As he got in touch with these feelings, he began to name them. He knew his sensitive inner child felt humiliated, hurt, angry, embarrassed, inadequate, and demeaned. When these feelings are stimulated in Richard, he would rather push them aside and deny them, but he knows that when he does this he only gets more tense, upset, and eventually empty enough to begin looking for sexual release.
Here is how Richard (IA=Inner Adult) began to converse with his inner child (IC).
(IA) OK, Richard, what are you feeling?
(IC) Well, that customer really got me (I could use some very un-Christian language) "angry."
(IA) And . . . ? (IC) That's what it was: anger, fury, annoyance.
(IA) Richard, you and I both know that "anger" never stands alone. Come on, Rich, what else were you feeling before you got angry?
(IC) Well, let's see. Before I was angry, I was getting to feel . . . ah . . . ah . . . humiliated, insulted, I guess. (IA) Yeah, that's right! What else was going on? (IC) That's all it was at the time, I think.
(IA) But later, what were you feeling?
(IC) On my way home from work, I was still feeling humiliated and angry and insulted. Then I think I started feeling embarrassment, some inadequacy...
(IA) Wait, let's just talk about that feeling of inadequacy for a minute. What were you saying to yourself that turned the anger and humiliation into a feeling of inadequacy?
(IC) Well, I guess I started to say, "You should have been more clear with the cook. You should have told the cook to leave the onions on the side. That's what the customer wanted."
(IA) Richard, that sounds like your inner parent. I hear the "should" word. You know, whenever you hear "should" or "ought to," it is most often your critical inner parent talking. (IC) Yeah, you're right! I hear it also.
(IA) So, let's see; you felt hurt, angry, humiliated, embarrassed. You started to call yourself inadequate.
(IC) Right! Then I noticed that for the rest of the day I started to look at guys a little longer and a little stronger. I realize that looking at guys was a way of taking in something pleasurable and pleasing. It sort of made up for the hurt and inadequacy I was feeling. WOW! I see how my feelings really are tied in with homosexual attractions.
(IA) You're doing good inner dialoguing with your inner child, Richard, keep it up!
Feelings often show up in quartets, trios, or at least in pairs. One of these patterns is the "buddies" I frequently see hanging around together in pairs, triads, or quartets. This grouping of feelings is particularly common among Christians who struggle with homosexuality. It is the sequence which was seen in Richard's experience at work: hurt, anger, guilt, depression.
He initially experiences some form of hurt (humiliation, attack, demeaned, rejected, ignored, etc.) which is not easily dismissed because of his LSE, low self-esteem. Then this hurt arouses his anger (irritation, annoyance, criticism, sarcasm, etc.). But frequently anger was suppressed or repressed in childhood; it was not allowed to be displayed. Therefore, it quickly became guilt because the anger was turned in on his sensitive inner child. When hurt-anger- guilt is held within for very long, it becomes depression or sadness.
Sometimes it is anger that is seen first with pain hiding behind it. Behind the pain is shame, insecurity, or helplessness. If you will pursue the trail of feelings, one after another, you will discover that there are several "buddies" hanging around together. In order to capture that grouping of feelings, you will need to move to a second step.
Step Two: FACE IT, FEEL IT
The next step in your dialogue with your inner child is to stay with the feelings you have named. Look at them directly. Allow them to be experienced. Get used to and "comfortable" with even the most troublesome feelings. Don't back away from them. Get to know what these feelings really feel like in your body. Let them be themselves. Don't judge them, run from them, change them, or try to even analyze them. The important thing here is to experience them; hold them, caress them, embrace them as your very own feelings. Learn to tolerate them in their pure form.
Try a few of your own needles. See if you can get into "gut" contact with these feelings! Rather than intellectualizing about them see if you can experience them:
feelings:
Anxious
Ignored
Angry
Failure
Self-pity
Weak
Violated
Ridicule
Shame
Helpless
Rejection
Victimized
Unloved
Afraid
Another thing Richard does to face and feel his feelings is to make sounds that seem to capture the essence of his feeling. With the feeling of embarrassment, he gets alone at home or in the privacy of his car, and exaggerates how he is feeling with sounds like, "Ooooooh . . . Ooooooh . . . Nooooo." As he makes these sounds, he acts out his feeling in some way.
With the feeling of embarrassment, he will cover his face, bend over his shoulders and head, and shake his head from side to side.
These different ways of trying to experience and stay with his feelings enable Richard to move through the chain of feelings going on in him and to experience his feelings in greater depth.
As he stayed with his feeling of humiliation, he started to feel his embarrassment at the restaurant more. This brought a sense of shame upon him. The feeling of rejection and abuse he felt from the customer opened up feelings of loneliness and abandonment. It made him feel unimportant and worthless. He began to realize that these are all feelings from times in his childhood. Childhood memories of rejection and aloneness began to come to consciousness. This led to a deep sadness and Richard began to cry.
Self-pity seemed to follow from his sadness; then irritation, anger, and even rage. All of this led to the need to want someone to love him and comfort him and care for him. He needed to be with someone to affirm him. He felt he had to find someone soon so that he would not be alone with this deprived and empty mood any longer.
All of these things were going on in Richard the three days prior to the day he left work early, went to a cruising area, picked up a guy he knew, brought him home, and Hank walked in on them.
Now, Richard has learned to take two other steps to complete his dialogue with his inner child.
Step Three: TALK IT, TALK TO IT, TALK ABOUT IT
Now that Richard is in touch with a whole complexity of feelings, he needs to talk it through, as he felt it through in step two. He needs to expand and continue the dialogue between his inner child and inner adult.
Imagine this inner conversation!(IA) So, Rich (his nickname as a child), talk to me about your feelings.
(IC) I really feel hurt by someone who criticizes me, like that customer did. It must attack my self-esteem. I'm very sensitive to it.
(IA) Go on, tell me more about it!
(IC) Well, I just close off and shut down when I am made to look foolish or inadequate. And then, when it becomes anger, I can see how I have a really hard time with that feeling. I get sad almost immediately because anger turns to self-blame and guilt, and guilt is hard for me to feel.
(IA) Yeah, go on, I'm listening.
(IC) Well, guilt makes me feel like I'm bad and evil, or something.
(IA) That guilt comes from turning that anger in on your child. How about just being angry.
(IC) That's what I have a hard time with. I don't like to get angry, and I don't like to feel angry.
(IA) How come? What does anger do to you? (IC) It makes me insecure, unsettled, anxious, nervous..
(IA) Did you get that way when your father got angry around the house, or toward you?
(IC) Oh, yes, many times! I can remember just hiding behind my mother. I must have been very fearful of him. I must have begun to feel very frightened of men from my father. That made me afraid to be a man and act like a man. WOW! That's still going on in me.
(IA) Keep talking, Rich, it's good for you! (IC) Yeah!
The conversation continued. As Richard talks through his feelings, he notices how acceptable and comfortable he becomes with them. Even better, he notices how acceptable he becomes to himself. He starts to like himself better. He feels more secure, more in control of his emotional life. He feels stronger, more confident, and more manly.
Step Four: ACT IT, ACT ON IT
Feelings really become worked through if you complete the process of steps one, two, and three by taking some action whenever this is possible and appropriate.
One way to do that is to talk with someone about the whole experience you have had. You could talk to your "special friend," a family member or, of course, a counselor. Another good way to "actionize" your conversation between your inner child and inner adult is to write about it in a diary or journal.
Other times, the situation may call for you to actually talk to someone involved in the circumstances which provoked your inner child.
Richard may have had to talk with a fellow waiter at work, the cook, or his supervisor. He also now talks to Hank more often.
Since the trail of feelings led Richard to some painful childhood memories, he could choose to speak with his parents about some of those experiences. This could open up troublesome relational areas, but it could also begin to heal them. Remember Romans 8:28!