Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Author: Anthony Rella

  • We Are Divided and Whole

    We must grapple with our internal contradictions. Most of us go about our days only dimly aware that such contradictions exist. A person may spend their days accusing others of being controlling and manipulative and fail to recognize how this behavior controls and manipulates those around them. I may argue passionately for tolerance and religious freedom for some particular groups, and suddenly realize I become harsh and intolerant toward a few particular groups that I just cannot accept for one reason or the other.

    When I was younger, I used to say that people seem to turn into the things they hate as we grow older. My friends would adopt particular fashions or claim certain political opinions “ironically,” only for those postures to become permanent and genuine. People who hate their parents find themselves acting like their parents. Once again, the word enantiodroma is salient, that psychological tendency for things to become their opposites.

    The mystic Gurdjieff spoke about “buffers” within the self that keep us unconscious of these contradictions. We can see these buffers and contradictions more easily in others than ourselves, and we certainly become incensed by the hypocrisies of others while remaining fiercely protective of our own. The ego, that part of ourselves that filters experience to convince us we are consistent with our beliefs about ourself, feels threatened by the implication that this coherence is an illusion.

    The ego is like the command center of the self, an empty chair that could be occupied by any number of different parts. A part of self who identifies as a loving father may sit in the chair and abruptly be displaced by a part of self that is fed up with people taking advantage of him and doesn’t care who gets hurt. Without the benefit of self-observation, the ego is unable to differentiate who is sitting in the chair, and responds to whomever takes charge. Even if we act with total incoherence or hypocrisy, the ego will justify the action, deny it ever happened, or find some other way to maintain its story of consistency. We need to develop a center of awareness that can hold and include all these different pieces.

    Becoming conscious of contradictions upsets us, because many of them cannot be easily reconciled. I cannot say that the dutiful son is me and the lazy comfort-seeker is some bizarre interloper. I can say that both have something important they want, and their wants can feel in conflict. Making the conflict conscious, however, enables us to become more integrated and more able to direct our lives. When the buffers are firmly in place, then our lives are being lived for us, unconsciously directed by these things we refuse to see. We lose touch with our core values. We become the things we hate and believe that’s what we wanted all along.

    We see this occurring at the levels of Congressional gridlock, partisan politics, and the rhetoric around our international interventions. On one hand, we may call ourselves a nation dedicated to freedom and individual autonomy, and yet we may endorse torture or extrajudicial drone strikes. We tolerate the erosion of civil liberties to protect the freedom symbolized by those civil liberties. We have to wrestle with these questions in public conversation. We have to weigh the desire for safety and strength against the values of liberty and individual rights.

    Self-observation and inquiry are powerful tools for becoming conscious of our inner contradictions. We can do this through sitting in meditation and watching the flow of thought and emotion every morning. We can go to therapy and sit with someone who can hear us and gently lead us to our incongruities. We can look at the people who really stir up a strong reaction in us, good or bad, knowing that those charged feelings often lead back to something within us that we do not yet see or claim.

    One exercise might be to commit some time to studying a story or belief about ourselves, something we think, say, or do so often that it becomes the experience of life. Say you never feel like anyone understands or listens to you, and this causes a lot of distress in your life. Self-observation can begin by spending a week with the intention to notice every time you feel misunderstood: what happens in the conversation, how you respond, how others respond. Keeping a notebook can help, making notes about incidents and observations. Then you might explore other angles of the problem. Spend a week noticing when you think you understand where others are coming from, what you say and do to verify your assumptions, what you do when others seem to feel misunderstood. Spend another week noticing when you feel misunderstood and add the question, was there something else I could have done to help the other person understand me? Did my response increase understanding or increase misunderstanding?

    Sometimes we avoid this kind of observation and inquiry because it stirs up feelings of being criticized or dismissed. Admitting the possibility that our perceptions and dearly-held hurts might not always be completely accurate can seem like saying nothing I say or feel is valid. That is not the purpose of this. Self-observation and inquiry is to invite more awareness to the problem, a deeper sense of exploration as to what’s beneath it, and discovering what might be possible. Many of us engaged in this work discover that in subtle ways we contribute to the problem, or we get so caught up in our story that we miss out on other things happening in our lives. On the other hand, you may spend this time observing yourself only to find that you are misunderstood no matter what you do, and you make every effort you know to understand others. At this point, you might be able to safely conclude that the problem is that you’re surrounded by jerks. What a relief it will be to realize it’s not you! And now you have documented evidence!

  • Seeking Completion

    I think we are both smaller and more powerful than we let ourselves imagine.

    I want to say, we are so powerful that our lives, our choices, our friends, lovers, careers, and communities are expressions of our inner longing for completion. Even the problems, even the stuck relationships, even the hurts. Sometimes I forget how powerful I am and feel like a victim to the people and problems in my life. I get overwhelmed and bitter, I think about all the ways I feel depleted and incomplete. Then I stop and think, what if I made my life in exactly this way to help me become the person I want to be? What does this relationship problem have to say about the ways I hold myself back? What is the deeper message of my job dissatisfaction? What is really missing here, and where can I find it if not in myself?

    I want to say, we are so small that our lives are singular blades of grass in a large field, subject to larger relationships and events, cycles and tides of history. Natural disasters, wars, abuse, exploitation, systemic discrimination, violence — these things may occur to us or those around us. They are not personal. Vast swaths of suffering and destruction do not occur because one person was bad, or we as a society were not judgmental enough of a minority population. Groups of people are not oppressed because of some innate inferiority or worthiness to be oppressed. Sometimes I get so caught up in guilt that I become paralyzed, or so caught up in my suffering, wants, and needs that I fail to do even the most simple thing that could help others find solace, strength, or joy. I become impoverished by my sense that I am alone, cut-off from the greater whole of things occurring. Some moments I am lucky enough to see the immensity of stars, land, or ocean, and I become aware of how enormous and vast this world really is, and how even this world is a speck of dust in contrast to the multiverse, and somehow this awareness of scale fills me with awe, a feeling that I am part of something larger than me.

    I do not know how to reconcile these two views with a rational formula. Both feel true, both feel oppositional, and both expand each other. We are neither greater than nor less than, we are necessary to the world.

  • Dualism and Belief

    “What negative belief are you struggling to confirm?”

    I had written this question to myself months ago and have reflected on it recently. Though I wrote it myself, the question has changed as I think about it. The popular use of “negative” usually has connotations of bad, undesirable, pessimistic, or cynical. In behavioral psychology, however, “negative” is often used more formally with the meaning of negation or subtraction.

    Carl Jung often used a word, “enantiodroma,” which is highly useful and yet has fallen out of use; I suspect in part because one cannot be sure how to pronounce it simply by looking at it. Enantiodroma is the psychological tendency of a thing to become its opposite. Taoist thought speaks to this as well — extreme weakness becomes strength, extreme strength becomes weakness. In part I think of this as the natural consequence of dualistic thinking. Though I often work with binaries in my thinking, a binary is an imperfect means of separating and analyzing phenomena that co-occur.

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  • Wanting to Become Open

    Nefertum, from Ancient Egypt Online: http://ancientegyptonline.co.uk

    There is a god from the ancient Egyptian (Kemetic) pantheon named Nefertum. According to one of the stories of creation, Nefertum emerged from the blue lotus that grew from a great ocean. Realizing that he was alone, the god wept, and from his tears came humanity.

    This myth evokes an underlying truth in our experience. The human heart grapples with fear and longing: fear that it is alone in a vast, uncaring world; longing for connection to others who can share joy and pain. Longing to be seen, to share, to be connected, to be open among other open hearts.

    Unfortunately, so much in our life becomes fodder to close around our pain, fear, and loneliness. Early experiences of rejection, abuse, neglect, from the most extreme to the most subtle, feed disconnection. If Nefertum had not taken the risk to cry openly, to share his pain and loneliness with the world,  humanity would never have been born to witness and reach back toward him.

    We lose the opportunity to touch others and be touched when we close off. Yet we cannot deny the pain and truths that keep us closed. To be open is to risk experiencing all that pain. New skin is tender and vulnerable to the elements, not yet strengthened by the wind and rain. I think we fear that subjecting those tender parts of ourselves to the world will harden and scar. This feels like a loss, yet it is also a process of strengthening and building resilience.

    When things hurt and I feel pain and vulnerability, often the last thing I want to do is to return to face the person who contributed to the hurt. Sometimes it is absolutely not safe to do so. Other times, lingering past hurts restrain us with fears that we are not equal to enduring more pain.

    We don’t have to wait our entire lives for perfect conditions, so we can finally give ourselves permission to take a risk. We don’t have to rush headlong into terrifying worlds or wait until we’re good and angry before we finally tell that person what we really think. Opening can be a slow, gentle, but continuous process.

    Clinging to suffering is not being good to ourselves, but neither is avoiding  suffering. Remaining a tight bud only seals the pain deep within and keeps us cloistered from sunlight, from rain, from wind, from the open sky. Consciously experiencing our suffering is what leads to transformation. To choose to become open in the moment — not completely, but to move toward openness — to choose to say the thing we were afraid to say, to bring up the lingering doubt, to acknowledge that I felt hurt by what happened, to take up the task I’ve been scared to attempt, and bringing awareness of what is happening inside me while I move into this uncertain, frightening territory — that is when the flower opens and the tears flow, that is when our pain invites its salve. That is when feeling pain is also healing pain.

  • Upcoming publication and Kickstarter

    To break from my recent trend, I am proud to announce that a short story of mine, “Heart of the Labyrinth,” has been accepted for publication in the upcoming anthology Gay City Volume Five: Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam. Follow the link for more information on the anthology and the Kickstarter fundraiser currently in progress, and if it is your will, please support the project.

  • Inner Dialogue

    Our lives may be colored by a particular feeling or mood, accompanied by certain thoughts or beliefs that seem to recur. In my own life I have noticed an automatic emotional reaction to the unexpected: this moment of fear, a sense of “Uh oh, what’s about to happen?” Some part of me seems primed to expect the worst. When someone important to me says, “Oh, I want to talk to you,” then I feel myself preparing for something awful. With time I have been  able to notice this, take in a breath, and choose to be open to whatever is about to happen. Often these conversations end up interesting, helpful, beneficial, or transformative, but still this part of me prepares for a catastrophe that may never happen.

    Analytical psychology may call this a complex; Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) calls it a negative cognitive schema. Strict CBT theorists say that the thought causes the feeling, the thought that “something bad is always around the corner,” for example. I have a minor quibble in that I think sometimes those feelings are activated by certain conditions and then justify themselves with relevant thoughts. Either way, these thoughts and feelings happen together. We can allow them to continue making each other bigger and bigger. We can notice the automatic responses, take a deep breath, and look at what is happening with curiosity.

    Thoughts and feelings are like the two wings of a bird or plane. We may want to elevate one and diminish the other, but both can help or harm us. If one is not working properly, the other suffers. If both are faulty, good luck getting off the ground. I encourage a willingness to listen and hold both with interest.

    I cannot get rid of that moment of fear, and I’ve tried! What I can do is notice what the fear wants and does: my muscles start to constrict, heart rate accelerates, I start preparing for defense or flight. The fear is saying: something unexpected is happening, and I do not know what’s coming. The fear is bringing me to attention and presence in the moment, but it wants to go further into a narrower room. Fear wants to be ready for something bad, and intellectually I understand from experience and insight that what’s coming could be something wonderful, something neutral, or something that I know I can handle because I have survived so much already. If the thoughts start saying, “Don’t be stupid, you always act like this, nothing bad’s going to happen,” then I’ve become locked in an inner debate that will only escalate the inner tension.

    Fear is not trying to hear any of that. Fear knows something bad could always happen. Fear is not wrong. Reason is not wrong either. This is an unwinnable inner argument. My best option is not to take sides, but to make room for every part of me. Time to breathe, slowly and consciously, letting my muscles relax. Breathe, and bring my attention to what’s happening, to the conversation at hand. If I can continue breathing, I know that I am alive, I know that I can get through what’s happening.

    I speak of fear but that is only one example. You may respond to everything with irritation or anger: hurt, inconvenience, impatience, the unexpected. You may respond by becoming numb or disconnected to your experience, feeling lost in a fog or like you’re floating somewhere away from your body. You may respond by focusing only on whatever feels good in the moment, tuning out everything else.

    (Have you ever felt intense desire or affection for someone or something who ended up being bad for you? Did you ever, while feeling those feelings, have moments of doubting thoughts that you ignored by focusing on what you thought was good and happy about the relationship? After the relationship was over, did you ever kick yourself or ask your friends “Why didn’t you warn me?” when you were warned, in so many ways?)

    What I advocate is effort to work with both as each bringing something important to the table, but each potentially being misleading in some way. This can feel difficult to work with, takes time and practice, and there is always an opportunity to practice. This way of being does not offer a sense of security by stating rules that are always true, though you may come to discover your own inner set of rules that makes sense for you. Enter into a conversation with yourself, constantly unfolding, in which many voices have a chance to speak, and each has value. The voice that says “This is wonderful!” and the voice that says “I have doubts” are both welcome and heard, though neither gets to steer the plane alone.

  • Navigating Multiple Worlds

    We live in at least two worlds. One world is our outward experience: conversations with friends, work, chores, the movement of history, all of which connects us to life outside. Another world is the inner experience: feelings, thoughts, fantasies, secret grudges, dreams. By the time we reach adulthood, most of us develop working models to navigate both worlds with a moderate level of success. When these models fail to meet the challenges of life do we experience significant distress, interpersonal conflict, withdrawal, toxic anger, or any of the things that we term in this culture “mental illness.”

    One truth is that few of us have truly robust, accurate models of either the inner or outer worlds. This is wonderful! We can spend our lives continuing to learn and grow with curiosity and wonder at the complex lives we inhabit. What seems the most troubling is when we stake so much identity in this belief of knowing everything, having it all sorted out, knowing exactly what something means and being unwilling to entertain any doubts or questions.

    We benefit by a willingness to listen to what is happening inside or outside of ourselves. Each of us inhabits a subjective world that is contained within this larger world, and through our individual experiences we touch some underling truth. Often my experience feels in conflict with another’s, particularly when the experience moves into touchy, vulnerable territory. I could be going about my day thinking all is fine, only to be given some challenging feedback about the impact of my behavior, and then an opportunity arises. I could shut down and deny the feedback, clinging to my idea of who I am. I could totally throw aside my sense of self and accept the feedback uncritically. I could avoid the entire conversation through jokes, charm, and willful ignorance.

    I could also allow the space to hear the feedback and attempt to understand the other person’s subjective experience. This is a difficult balance to hold, allowing the person to speak while honoring what is happening for myself. Allowing another person to feel angry and attempt to make themselves understood while I feel afraid and want to run away, or vice versa. I can listen to both experiences with curiosity — what is this fear saying to me? Does it feel appropriate for the circumstances, does it feel exaggerated, does it feel almost absent? What is this person’s anger saying to me? What does this outside feedback tell me about the congruence between who I think I am and what others see?

    Providing space and empathy my own experience can help us to be more comfortable when those around are struggling or need to say something difficult. Roshi Joan Halifax speaks of how empathy for our own feelings increases empathy for others, while learning to distinguish between what is mine and what is yours increases true compassion. Compassion is the ability to “feel with” what another is experiencing without taking it into myself. I know your pain is your pain, and I can feel and honor your experience of pain, but I am not driven to fix or justify away your pain so I can feel better in the moment. As I can listen to and honor my own experience, I can allow you to have yours.

    This is not about minimizing real danger and denying my self-protective instincts, as these may be guiding me to the best action. Listening to what is happening does invite a moment of reflection and curiosity, a willingness to accept that more may be happening inside or outside of myself that does not match my beliefs about either world. These uncomfortable or painful moments can break into deeper insights into self and the world, greater freedom with one’s own challenges and greater connection to those around us. If we can be present, we are also helping our friends, enemies, and family to have their own opportunity for growth and expansion. I notice that when a person is allowed to truly be heard and understood, then they are more willing to hear and understand my perspective. We can have an honest, real conversation that’s not about blaming each other but about truly taking responsibility for our own experiences.

  • Vulnerability

    Vulnerability can be a terrifying feeling to have. We spend much of our lives developing strategies to mitigate this, this underlying awareness of our own vulnerability, our mortality, our living in an unpredictable world. Perhaps we stay on the surface and only focus on what feels good, uplifting, or orderly. Perhaps we fixate on the vulnerability and spend hours of life worrying about what might happen. Perhaps we get stuck in grief, or stuck chasing the substances and relationships that keep us from feeling the anxiety and vulnerability below.

    When giant catastrophes happen, such as the many that have occurred this week around the world, the anxiety and pain can feel palpable and hard to deny. Everything we try to do to contain or ignore it doesn’t seem to work. I noticed myself, as I watched footage of explosions in Boston more than was healthy, feeling a sense of urgency around their resolution. I wanted to know why it happened, who caused it, and I wanted the perpetrators to be found and contained as quickly as possible. This swiftness of reaction is one that I find completely understandable, and inherently more problematic. I reminded myself often, as I jumped to conclusions, of how little I knew about the circumstances. I remembered that such swift conclusiveness in the face of little evidence almost inevitably leads to the kind of confusion we’ve seen in the 24-hour news cycle this week.

    What I suspect is that this wish for closure, containment, and wish for a strong protective authority to enclose me comes out of my discomfort with my own vulnerability. So many painful things we do in life, I think, share this root. Becoming addicted to some drug, behavior, or relationship that causes us suffering. Rejecting someone before he rejects me. Insisting I cannot do a task when I’ve never tried. These feel like a child’s early attempts to bring solidity and structure to a world that feels unsafe. When we do this as a society, we make collective mistakes whose impacts far exceed our capacity to manage. We get into wars that drain our resources, injure our people, and contribute immeasurable suffering to communities. We empower the police to erode our own rights and protections, break up families, and imprison or kill people who may only be guilty of having a particular skin color. We do not use our resources and power with skill and effectiveness, addressing the core problems.

    What I am trying to invite in myself is compassion for the fear and vulnerability that’s arising, a willingness to contribute to those who were directly impacted and suffering the most, and an openness of mind to what evidence is present. To slow down a bit. To feel vulnerable and angry and continue to listen to what is unfolding. To recognize even now the urge to have some answer that will wrap up the problem, and to try to open my ears a little more and realize that I am one person among billions attempting to understand and create a meaningful life in the world. I share my humanity with those who are perpetrators and victims, and I contribute what I can to ease our collective suffering.

  • Mood and Motivation

    Mood is like weather. Moods change and shift without warning, their causes are subtle and at times difficult to predict. With self-observation one may come to notice certain patterns, like feeling particularly irritable during the early spring, or prone to melancholy in the late fall. We may learn certain tricks or develop strategies to shift these moods, but often it feels out of our hands.

    We get tripped up in the relationship between mood and action. I have had the experience, and I suspect others have as well, in which I’ve looked forward to some particular event or eagerly awaited the time when I could be available to write or engage in some hobby, only to find when the time arrives that my mood has suddenly shifted and gone sour and now, “I don’t feel like doing it.”

    Sometimes this inhibition overcomes the plan and instead of doing the thing we looked forward to doing we do nothing, or engage in usual numbing habits, and the opportunity passes by. Healthy habits we long to integrate go by the wayside. Assignments stay unfinished, paperwork sits in a pile, the novel sits unwritten. This problem is exacerbated by problematic mood states like depression or mania, in which we need that much more energy and focus to do the work that would ground and nourish us. Sometimes our moods are like torrential rain or a tornado; the best we can do is buckle down and wait for it to pass.

    I think there are times when our intuition speaks to us and advises us against a course of action, sometimes at a time that feels inconvenient. I am not convinced that this is usually what’s happening when these shifts of mood occur. There is something in us that longs to be actualized in the world, core values that can anchor and inform our lives. There are also parts of us that, for whatever reason, resist these values and resist acting upon our desires for connection, for health, for creative expression, and so forth. Even with this resistance, we can move toward these values and desires. I think we can become more creative and flexible with our responses to mood. We can notice what we always do when a particular mood strikes, and try doing something different. See what happens.

    When I decided to commit to exercising, I learned that I rarely if ever am “in the mood” to work out. If I let that mood make my choices, I may sit around the house becoming increasingly mopey and lethargic, not feeling like doing much of anything at all. My mood has not gotten better, it’s worse. If, instead, I decide to go ahead and start exercising, letting myself start slowly and do as much as my body seems inclined to do, I often discover that I walk away from exercising feeling energized, refreshed, and engaged. My mood has vastly improved, and it is not running my life.

    I think, like many feelings, mood is telling us something about our experience, but again I see this less as a call to action and more as a weather report. If I’m feeling irritable, then I can proceed through my day with the awareness that I might be irritated and distressed by incidents that would feel negligible on other days. When something like that happens, I can remember to take a breath and temper my response before proceeding. I can admit to my loved ones, “I’m feeling irritable today,” as a good-faith warning to take into consideration. (Not a threat — “Steer clear of me or I’ll bite your head off.”) Sometimes this admission feels uncomfortable because it exposes some of our vulnerability to others, that awareness that we don’t always have it all together and sometimes our thoughts and moods seem to be miscued with the environment.

    I don’t advocate wholly ignoring mood.  I seek integrity between “what I feel like doing” and “what I want and need to do.” I often think of an integrated life as a sailing ship. I have this vision of my destination and the path I need to take to arrive. Without that goal, I am simply listing about in the ocean. Yet I need to account for how the wind and tides move so I can harness those energies toward my goal. Some days I may only go forward a little bit, other days I may go forward a lot.

    Recently I noticed I was becoming more irritable and feeling overwhelmed, and I decided to create a vacation for myself in which I didn’t go anywhere but took a break from some of my responsibilities. I still engaged in some of the core practices that help me to feel healthy and satisfied with my life, like exercise, writing, and spiritual practice. Part of me longed to withdraw completely but I chose to spend time with friends. I decided to approach this slowly, as I would with exercise: I will just show up and offer as much as I am willing to do. I will slow down. I will breathe through the impulse to rush and add tasks to my to-do list. I will listen for what I want in the moment.

  • Clinging – Letting Go

    Sometimes we get stuck.

    It may make no sense. Parts of life might be going really well. The feeling seems to come from nowhere. All at once we feel trapped in something that we’ve faced before. This anger, deep and fierce, that scares others. A sadness, a hopelessness that feels like it has no bottom. A joyousness that seems incapable of feeling pain.

    We have a cultural ambivalence to emotions and feelings. Some parts of our culture emphasize “letting go” and “forgiving” and focus on cultivating “positive” qualities and emotions. Taken superficially, this can leave those of us struggling to feel even worse about ourselves for being unable to transcend our suffering, particularly those emotions that seem to come from nowhere. Other parts of culture may treat feelings as the truth about who we are, and emphasize sharing them, expressing them, holding others responsible for our feelings. Taken superficially, this keeps us stuck in a different way, keeping us dependent upon our environment for emotional peace. If I cannot be happy because you did something, then I have relinquished the keys to joy.

    These extremes signify qualities of which we need both. Regarding forgiveness, Wilfred McCay writes:

    Forgiveness makes sense only in the presence of a robust sense of justice; without that, it is in real danger of being reduced to something passive and automatic and empty, a sanctimonious way of simply moving on.

    He speaks to a truth about our condition, in which mercy and justice define each other. I want to address how this paradox speaks to our emotional reality: we cannot let go of our pain and stuckness until we have embraced them. We cannot honor our pain and stuckness until we acknowledge that it can help us move in a direction that serves our whole self.

    Feelings are not things done to us by others. They are messages from our body and soul trying to communicate something important about our experience. Our feelings provide the energy, esteem, and authority by which we engage in our lives.

    This shift in perspective is not to say that what others do doesn’t or shouldn’t matter, that we “should” be able to control our feelings and not feel hurt or vulnerable to what others do. The underlying message of our cultural norms is that somehow our feelings are not valid if we cannot make a strong case for blaming others. “You made me mad, you hurt me, you need to change” seems like a strong, forceful position. Speaking from this position, however, limits the scope of our attention to one of wariness, and undermines our ability to listen when others want to make amends, explain, or offer a different perspective. Saying “I feel angry and hurt about what just happened” communicates accurately and precisely my emotional experience without enfolding it into a larger story. I don’t need to prove that what you did was wrong or hurtful, I only need to honor that it was my experience, and then I can listen to your experience.

    I think of emotions as being like small children or pets: living creatures that have needs and wants but lack language with which to communicate. They do the best they can to communicate their needs, but adults accustomed to verbal exchanges can struggle to understand and attune to what is happening. And if needs go unmet, then the communications intensify or begin to distort. When we find ourselves breaking down in tears because the grocery store is out of our favorite cereal, we are hearing from a part of us that has deep unmet needs and pain. Not about the cereal. The cereal has become symbolic of the larger problem. The cereal symbolizes how “all my life part of me has felt deprived and starved,” for example.

    This is why I think “letting go” is not always a helpful suggestion. That anger is trying to say something to you, and wants your attention, wants you to listen and hear its need. We cannot simply forgive away our deep pain of being wounded, tortured, or abused. Sometimes we need to make time to be still and listen to what the emotion is saying, and it can be a process. We can approach this curiosity and a willingness to set aside our usual beliefs about what things mean. What’s happening in my body? What thoughts are coming up? What memories seem to be activated? What was happening when the emotion began?

    As we learn to better “hear” what emotions are trying to say, the intensity often seems to diminish. We stop fighting the feelings and allow them to rise and fall as they naturally will. Simply turning to face the feeling can be enough. Other times, we may need to make changes in our lives.

    Doing this work can open up places in ourselves that feel scary, and it can throw us off for a period of time. We benefit from the support of trusted friends, clergy, therapists, or others to help us hold ourselves. Some of us are not in life circumstances that are safe or stable enough for us to do this work. Some of us will spend our lives avoiding this work, with steep costs. This process can be challenging, unpleasant, and it can transform our lives.