Share on bsky
When self-awareness quietly becomes self-suspicion, even reasonable reactions can start looking like something we need to fix.
I have spent a remarkable amount of my life trying to heal feelings that may not have needed healing.
For decades, I have read books about anger, anxiety, grief, fear, forgiveness, relationships, trauma, and spirituality. I became a hypnotherapist and Reiki Teacher and learned Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). I meditated, journaled, examined my beliefs, revisited my childhood and became very interested in what was happening underneath whatever I happened to be feeling.
A lot of that work helped me. Some of it changed my life. But somewhere along the way, I picked up the idea that if something continued to bother me, there must still be something in me that needed to heal.
I don’t remember anyone explicitly teaching me this. I think I assembled it over years of books, workshops, therapy, spiritual teachings, and self-help. Anger had something underneath it. Resentment meant I hadn’t forgiven. A strong reaction might be a trigger. If someone’s behavior bothered me, I could ask what it was bringing up in me.
Sometimes those were exactly the right questions. The trouble was that I got so good at examining my reactions that I stopped considering the possibility that some of them were reasonable. I could spend a tremendous amount of time wondering why I was angry without spending nearly as much time considering what had made me angry.
Self-awareness had quietly become self-suspicion.
I learned that part early
I spent years thinking I had deconstructed my religious upbringing because I no longer believed much of what I had been taught. I questioned the theology and rejected ideas that no longer made sense to me. What I didn’t notice for a long time was how many of the rules survived after the theology was gone.
I had been taught to be suspicious of my own desires, to put other people first, to forgive, to be careful with anger and not to trust my own understanding too much. I could stop believing I was sinful and still carry the habit of assuming my instincts required supervision.
Years later, I had much healthier language available to me, but I could sometimes use it to arrive at a familiar conclusion. I wasn’t selfish; I might be triggered. My anger wasn’t sinful; I might be dysregulated. I didn’t need to pray harder; I had something left to heal. These aren’t the same ideas. But I was still remarkably willing to begin with the assumption that I was the part of the equation most likely to need correcting.
That showed up in relationships too. If I could understand why someone behaved a certain way, I thought I should be able to make peace with it. If I remained angry, hurt or uncomfortable, I went back to work on myself.
It is astonishing how much personal growth can be devoted to becoming more tolerant of things you don’t actually want to tolerate.
And when you finally stop doing that, it doesn’t necessarily feel like growth. I’ve actually thought to myself:
“Finally. I’m not the goody two-shoes everyone thought I was. I’m an asshole.”
Which sounds ridiculous, but there was something almost relieving about it. If being “good” meant being agreeable, accommodating, understanding, forgiving, and careful not to upset anyone, then disappointing somebody could feel like evidence that I’d finally become the opposite.
Except I hadn’t become an asshole. I’d become less willing to make being good my full-time job. That distinction would have been useful about 40 years ago.
When discomfort doesn’t mean something is wrong
I think we’ve become so accustomed to interpreting feelings that we sometimes forget to simply have them.
Guilt doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve violated your values. You may simply have disappointed someone who expected you to say yes. Anger doesn’t automatically mean you’re dysregulated. Sometimes something happened that you’re angry about. Grief isn’t evidence that you haven’t accepted reality. Acceptance doesn’t make loss painless.
None of this means every feeling is accurate or every reaction should be trusted without question. Old experiences can distort the present. Sometimes the thing that feels enormous really is touching an old wound. I know that because I’ve lived that too.
But I don’t think my feelings need to enter the room already presumed guilty.
There are things in my life I genuinely needed to heal, and I’m grateful for the work that helped me recognize them. There were also times when I was angry because I had been treated badly, anxious because things really weren’t secure, or unable to “let go” because the thing I was trying to let go of hadn’t actually stopped happening.
I don’t want to turn every one of those experiences into another assignment. After decades of asking what my feelings are trying to teach me, what they’re connected to, and what I need to do to move through them, I’m adding a much simpler question:
Does this feeling actually need to be fixed?
Sometimes it does. Sometimes I need to stop arguing with myself long enough to listen.
~
Amy Hale | Contribution: 5,210
Amy Hale is a writer and longtime hypnotherapist who has spent more than 20 years listening to what people say, what they don’t, and what their nervous systems announce anyw… Read full bio
Read 0 comments and reply