How we approach the ways our difficult experiences are living within us can either stifle the parts of us that really need to be heard or allow them to feel safe enough to show up and share. Often, what is inside us is like a shy child that is afraid to say what is really wrong.
When I was a child and my family went to visit my grandmother, her harsh, unfiltered way of showing love overpowered, overwhelmed, and frightened me. I got stomach aches each time I visited.
My mother knew why, but she didn’t let my grandmother know what I was feeling or try to help her soften her approach and no one helped me learn ways to vocalize when I felt unsafe in a healthy way. And so the stomach aches continued. Unaware of the cause, my grandmother would squeeze my cheeks and shove a big spoonful of pepto-bismol into my mouth. Of course the medicine didn’t help. Eventually I just pretended I felt better so she wouldn’t try to give me more.
I often wonder what would have happened if my grandmother and I had been given gentle guidance that addressed the real situation. Perhaps we would have both had a chance to grow in healthy ways and share a closer and more fulfilling bond. Its sort of the same way when we try to listen to what’s going on within ourselves. Parts of us get scared to be known. They go into hiding because we don’t have the right tools to help them feel safe enough to show up as they really are. And if they can’t show up, maybe we get stuck in that way my grandmother’s solution to my stomach ache wasn’t ever going to make me feel better or bring us closer.
For example, Perhaps you are carrying a sensation that someone has hit you in the gut after a conversation with a friend. It feels so uncomfortable that you pour a glass of wine to get rid of it. You know the wine might ease the sense of it, but what if it has something important to tell us? In Focusing, we believe that everything we are experiencing inside is there for a good reason and doesn’t actually want to hurt us and that getting to know it better without trying to change it is a way towards finding our next forward step and releasing tension.
So, how do we create an environment that feels safe enough for things to show up as they really are living inside us or in someone else we care about?
Here are a few ways:
Look at the picture above. Ann Weiser Cornell and Barbara McGavin from Focusing Resources liken the shy things within us to small creatures in the forest that need a very careful approach that considers how they might like to have our contact. Parker Palmer too talks about what he calls the soul as a “wild” creature that it is beautiful to behold when we stay open enough to let it show up. The chipmunk in this photo could not show up the way it is for the photographer if they had come stomping through the woods with a club, ready to eradicate it. It would have just scampered away. Yet we often do that to many of the things we think, sense, and feel.
- Take some time to think about how you would approach that chipmunk without scaring it away. Write down the qualities that you think of. The next time, you are engaged in a problem, see if you can adopt those qualities when you are listening to someone else from their point of view or to what is there within yourself about that problem.
- Assume that there is more to it than you think you know already. More to that clenching fist feeling in your stomach than just anger, for example. Try to describe it rather than label it as just one thing.
- Don’t force anything to share what it is not able to share yet. And don’t immediately try to change it as soon as it shows up, even if it is uncomfortable to keep company with. Assume that it doesn’t want to hurt you. Take time and get to know it.
- Find someone who can listen to what is inside you without labelling what is wrong, trying to fix it, or judging you.
Remember, what we really want to change is what is making things within us so upset or stuck. And just the way a toothache lets us know that we have a problem in one of our teeth, so do the painful emotions and thoughts within us let us know that there is something happening in a situation, relationship, or in our life at large that needs to be understood and addressed. And those things are often the things that point us toward the real things we need to do differently…our first fresh forward steps through.
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