by Pete Walker
With that said, we will move on to Feeling, the fourth grieving process – a process that is a type of body work. Feeling is a way of focusing on somatic experience that enables us to reclaim our ability to experience full, relaxed and vital inhabitancy of our bodies.
4. Feeling: Passively Working Through Grief
“Feeling is the antithesis of pain…the more pain one feels, the less pain one suffers”
– Arthur Janov
Ongoing engagement in the active grieving processes of angering, crying and verbal ventilation can help us to discover the fourth grieving process: Feeling.
Feeling is a subtler, passive process than emoting. It is best illustrated by contrasting the concepts of emoting and feeling. Emoting is when we cry, anger out, or verbally ventilate the energy of an inner emotional experience. Feeling, on the other hand, is the inactive process of staying present to internal emotional experience without reacting. In recovery then, feeling is surrendering to our internal experiences of pain without judging or resisting them, and without emoting them out.
Feeling is a kinesthetic rather than a cognitive experience. It is the process of shifting the focus of your awareness off of thinking and onto your affects, energetic states and sensations. It is the proverbial “getting out of your head” and “getting into your body.”
As a grieving process, feeling involves consciously reversing the learned survival mechanism of clamping down on pain to banish it from awareness.
Feeling “occurs” when we direct our attention to an emotionally or physically painful state, and surrender to this experience without resistance. When we relax acceptingly into our pain, we can learn to gently absorb it into our experience. Feeling then functions as if our awareness is a solvent that dissolves and metabolizes the affect, energy and sensation of our emotions.
Feeling Can Heal Digestive Problems
The practice of feeling is also similar to healthy food digestion whereby a relaxed digestive tract allows us to effectively assimilate nutrients. If, however, we suppress or repress our feelings, our bodies typically armor and tighten, especially along the alimentary canal.
I believe digestive tract-tightening can create the types of digestive problems that frequently co-occur with Cptsd. Diarrhea, for instance, is sometimes an emotionally-caused, physical response to intense danger. When this occurs, fear triggers the sympathetic nervous system into further triggering an immediate evacuation of the bowels. Nausea can operate similarly. Constipation, on the other hand, is sometimes a tightening in the alimentary canal that hampers the peristaltic motion necessary for healthy evacuation.
The Emotional-Physical Connection
There is often a close relationship between emotion and physical sensation. Physical sensations in the body often co-occur with feelings. Moreover, sensations of tightness and tension can develop as a defense against feelings. As unexpressed feelings accumulate, a greater degree of muscular tension is necessary to keep them under wraps.
A child who is repeatedly punished for emoting learns to be afraid of inner emotional experience and tightens [armors] the musculature of her body in an effort to hold feelings in and to banish them from awareness.
Holding your breath is a further manifestation of armoring. It is an especially common way of keeping feelings at bay, as breathing naturally brings your awareness down to the level of feeling.
As my client, Kylie, free associated on the feelings of a particularly intense flashback, she painfully recalled the traumas she underwent trying to avoid her mother’s punishments for crying. Her worst memory was of the day in the supermarket, when her mother’s scolding rained down upon her as she tried to suppress her rapidly mounting urge to cry. Knowing the worst punishment would ensue if she cried, she held her breath to hold back the tears. She held it so long that she fainted from lack of oxygen and cracked her head open on the floor. Her mother, mortified by what she saw as public humiliation, beat her black and blue when she got home.
It took us two years of trust-building work to bring this incident back into awareness. She then cried her first tears since when it happened, three decades earlier. These were also the first tears she could ever remember that brought relief.
The technique of focusing your awareness on physical sensations in your body can help you to become more proficient at the practice of “feeling”. With enough practice, paying attention to tightness in your face, throat, heart or belly area brings feelings into awareness, where they can simply be felt through. However, in your early experiences of focusing on sensations, feelings may come up so strongly that you will benefit from allowing yourself to emote them.
Balancing Feeling And Emoting
When we become more mindful of the subtle sensations of feelings, the passive grieving process of feeling through them complements the active processes of grieving them out. We are typically in advanced recovery when we can both emote out and feel through our anger, sadness, fear, shame and depression.
Furthermore, feeling also helps us to bring emotions into awareness that need to be grieved out through active, cathartic emoting. Thus, grieving is especially profound when we can fluidly shift between feeling and emoting. Sometimes we will only need to fully feel and accept the sensations of our pain. Other times we will want to verbally ventilate about our pain with someone who gives us full permission to color our words with angering and tears.
Learning To Feel
As a survivor becomes more adept at angering and crying, fear of his feelings will decrease, and opportunities to learn to simply feel will present themselves. He can engage these opportunities by passively attuning to the more subtle sensations of his anger and sadness.
Over time this practice will build his ability to stay passively present to the sensations of his deeper feelings – to his fear, shame and depression. But in early stages, this awareness will often morph into the need to actively emote them out – to grieve himself out of the abandonment mélange. Eventually, however, his abandonment mélange feelings will also be digested and worked through purely with the solvent of awareness. This also applies to anxiety which is often fear just below the level of awareness. With sufficient practice, anxiety can often be felt through passively. We will explore this process in greater depth in the next chapter.
An Exercise In Feeling
Here is an exercise to help you enhance your ability to feel and grieve through pain. Visualize yourself as time-traveling back to a place in the past when you felt especially abandoned. See your adult self taking your abandoned child onto your lap and comforting her in various painful emotional states or situations. You can comfort her/him verbally: “I feel such sorrow that you were so abandoned and that you felt so alone so much of the time. I love you even more when you are stuck in this abandonment pain – especially because you had to endure it for so long with no one to comfort you. That shouldn’t have happened to you. It shouldn’t happen to any child. Let me comfort and hold you. You don’t have to rush to get over it. It is not your fault. You didn’t cause it and you’re not to blame. You don’t have to do anything. Just let me hold you. Take your time. I love you always and care about you no matter what.”
I highly recommend practicing this even if it feels inauthentic, and even if it requires a great deal of fending off your critic. Keep practicing and eventually, you will have a genuine experience of feeling self-compassion for the traumatized child you were. When that occurs, you will know that your recovery work had reached a deep level.
Techniques To Invite And Enhance Grieving
Tears were hard to come by after my first breakthrough cry in early adulthood. I would often long for the incredible relief I felt on that occasion, but unlike angering, I could not force my crying. I have come to learn that this is typical of many people. My friend Malcolm, suffering the same frustration, wanted to cry so badly, that he squeezed lemon juice into his eyes. He was able to laugh about it later, but solemnly warned me to never try such a thing.
; This is a list that evolved out of our ongoing discussions about how to coax out the tears of a good cry. As with all the advice in this book, please feel free to use only the ones that seem to fit, and in whatever order seems best. Moreover, different combinations may enhance either crying or angering, or both together. Finally, sometimes nothing works, but I encourage you to try techniques that intuitively seem like they may work more than once.
Find a safe and comfortable place where you won’t be heard.
Close your eyes and remember a time when you felt compassionate towards someone. This can be from real life, or from reading a book or a poem, or from watching a movie or moving news item.
Invoke self-compassion via the memory of someone who was kind to you, or imagine someone you think would be kind to you. I would be kind to you.
Verbally ventilate about what is bothering you in a journal or aloud to a real or imagined friend or to me.
Imagine yourself being comforted by a Higher Power. See yourself in the lap of a kind higher power or actual person who seems kind. [Santa Claus once worked well for one of my clients].
Remember a time when you felt better from crying or angering, or seeing someone else cry in real life or in a movie.
Remember a time when being angry, or when someone else being angry, saved you from harm.
Imagine your anger forming a protective fiery shield around you.
Imagine your tears or anger carrying any fear, shame or depression up and out of you.
Imagine holding your inner child compassionately. Tell the child it’s normal and okay to feel sad or mad about feeling bad or hurt.
Tell the child you’ll protect him/her from being criticized.
Breathe deeply, fully and slowly.
Put on some moving or evocative music.
Watch a movie that is poignant.
Watch a movie that portrays “enviable” anger release.
An elaborating note on technique #15: Several clients told me that the scene in the 1976 movie Network where the main character yells out a window: “We’re not taking it anymore”, helped them to bring up and ventilate their anger.
Finally, if reading this book does not begin to release the critic’s stranglehold on your ability to grieve, please consider working with a therapist or support group to help you work through the shame that the critic uses to spoil your ability to grieve.
THE MAP: MANAGING THE ABANDONMENT DEPRESSION
Cptsd burdens us with a hair-trigger susceptibility to painful emotional flashbacks. Flashbacks, as we have seen, are layers of defensive reactions to the abandonment depression. These reactions include physical, behavioral, cognitive, emotional and relational responses to the reemerging sense of danger and despair that plagued our childhood abandonment.
This chapter presents a map of these layered, defensive reactions to abandonment pain. This map shows you which reactions are most important to work on at any given time. It includes a strategy for reducing harmful reactions that are no longer necessary. This strategy involves self-compassionately soothing yourself when you are trapped in fear and/or depression, so that you do not launch into intensified fear, toxic shame, critic attacks, or self-damaging 4F reactions.
Cycles Of Reactivity
This section presents a verbal diagram of the layering of our reactions in an emotional flashback. Experiences of depression and abandonment trigger us into fear and shame, which then activates panicky inner critic thinking, which in turn launches us into an adrenalized fight, flight, freeze or fawn trauma response.
This is how that reactivity takes place in a flashback. A survivor wakes up feeling depressed. Because childhood experience has conditioned her to believe that she is unworthy and unacceptable in this state, she feels anxious and ashamed. This in turn activates her inner critic to scare her with perfectionistic rants: “No wonder no one likes me. I’ve got to get my lazy, worthless ass out of bed or I’ll end up like that homeless, bag lady in the park!”
Retraumatized by her own inner voice, she then launches into her most habitual 4F behavior. She either lashes out domineeringly at the nearest person [Fight] – or she launches busily into anxious productivity [Flight] – or she flips on the TV and foggily tunes out or dozes off again [Freeze] – or she self-abandoningly redirects her attention to figuring out how to fix a friend’s problem [Fawn].
All this typically happens so quickly that we do not notice the fear and shame, or the inner critic. The first thing that we usually begin to notice in early recovery is that suddenly we are engaged in our most typical 4F response. As recovery progresses we become aware of the critic. Eventually this promotes mindfulness of the fear and shame that fuel the critic. And finally in later recovery, we become aware of the abandonment depression itself.
Unfortunately this dynamic also commonly operates in reverse. This can occur in early recovery when you suddenly notice that you have slipped back into a dysfunctional 4F behavior. This then triggers you into new self-attacking criticism, which then amps up your fear and shame. This in turn increases your abandonment depression as the process of self-abandonment runs riot.
Desperate to escape the deathlike feelings of the abandonment depression, the initial cycle revs up again. Depression creates fear and shame which fuels venomous critic attacks and launches you into fighting, fleeing, freezing or fawning.
Survivors can careen back and forth through these layered reactions creating perpetual motion cycles of internal trauma.
I believe this process also accounts for the spiraling down feeling that many survivors report having during intense flashbacks.
This is a diagram of these dynamics:
ABANDONMENT DEPRESSION FEAR & SHAME INNER CRITIC 4Fs
Let us look at a case example of how triggering works in the reverse direction. My mega-perfectionistic, flight-type client, Mario, came into our session five minutes late. It was the first time he had been late in two years of therapy.
Mario was in full-fledged flight, sweating from racing up the hill from his parking space a block away. He told me he just could not sit on the couch today. Could he please just pace in front of the couch. “I hate being late. I won’t tell you - please don’t ask – just how fast I was driving on the freeway!”
Mario compulsively paced, but this driven-ness was nothing compared to the speed of his obsessing, as he rattled off many versions of most of the inner critic attack programs listed in chapter 9.
To him, his being late was merely the tip of the iceberg of his defectiveness. As his rant against himself amped up, he increasingly scared himself with his own words, and shamed himself with his parents’ disgust.
Finally, seemingly exhausted, Mario collapsed on the couch, and launched into the first suicidal ideation I had ever heard from him. He had just landed in the pit of the abandonment mélange [depression encrusted with fear and shame] and was sinking to the bottom into a despairing depression of helplessness and hopelessness. This was the real helplessness and hopelessness that had so characterized his childhood.
Fortunately, I had been diligently planting seeds about his need to grieve over the last two years. For the first time since early childhood, the tears came, and it was the most moving monsoon I had witnessed in ages. He cried for the little forsaken boy he had been. He came home, via his pain, to being on his side. The long exile into self-abandonment was temporarily over for the first time that he could remember.
We were then able to look at the cycle of reactivity that had turned into a cyclone. Triggered by a traffic jam into the “terrible danger” of being late, Cptsd launched him into his flight response as he raced to get to my office. The flight response also immediately triggered the inner critic to attack him for his lateness and to catastrophize about the consequences. As it did he fell deeper and deeper into shame and fear, and then ultimately into the abandonment depression itself.
This time however, Mario broke the flashback with his tears, as his crying released his fear and shame. This in turn
defueled his critic and allowed his body to begin releasing the hyperarousal of his flight response.
Had he not been able to do this, he most likely would have continued attacking himself with shame-fueled perfectionism and fear-fueled drasticizing. He would then have launched out of the session back to obsessively and compulsively racing through his day driven by his infinite to-do list.
The Layers Of Dissociation In The Cycle Of Reactivity
All the layered reactions in the cycle of reactivity are defenses against the abandonment depression. Each layer is also a defense against all of the other layers beneath it. As such, each layer is a type of dissociation. When we are triggered and lost in a 4F response, we fight, flee, freeze or fawn to disassociate ourselves from the painful voice of the critic. On a deeper layer, the critic is also distracting and disassociating us from our emotional pain. Moreover, fear and shame dis-associate us from the bottom layer - the terrible abandonment depression itself. Dissociation [the psychological term for disassociation], then, is the process of rendering all these levels less conscious or totally unconscious.
As recovery progresses and we learn to stay present enough to the critic to begin shrinking it, we become increasingly aware of the fear and shame that underlies it. With sufficient feeling into fear and shame, we notice that fear and shame cover up the deadened feelings of the abandonment depression itself. Learning to stay self-supportingly present to the feelings of this depression is the deepest level, bottom-of-the-barrel work of recovery. When we are able to do this, our recovering has reached a profound level.