I am a horrible person. You won’t like me.

I am a horrible person. You won’t like me. There is nothing to like about me. You’ll hate me. I am very bad. I am the worst. I do awful things. I’m evil. I’m perverted. I’m sick. I’m ugly. I don’t love you. I don’t care about you. I don’t want to know you. I don’t want you bothering me. I don’t want you in my life. I hate you. I hate everything. I hate everything about you. Go away. Leave me alone. Leave me in peace.

When you work your way deep into seeing the truth of how badly, how unlovingly, how appallingly your parents treated you, making you feel repulsed by them, like you will never want to have anything ever again to do with them; and then you realise you are the same as them, you are of them, it’s a terrible blow to your ego. To have to accept and admit that you are just as horrible as them, doing all the same horrible things to yourself, nature and everyone else, even to people you love, is very difficult. It hurts.

To have to face the hard truth that you are evil, rotten, despicable, such an unloving and uncaring person as they are, is… Just wait until you do, then you’ll know what I mean.

And then when you take it further, you begin to realise and have to accept: I am a horrible person, made to be so because of my horrible parents. And if this is true, being shown in my impure self-denying negative state – all shown up as my childhood repression, then so is everyone else. Because we are all living in the negative, all stuffed full of repressed feelings and all that’s resulting from them, from our early childhoods. So we are all horrible people, all desperately not wanting to be so, desperately wanting to be liked and thought well of, doing all we can do cover up our yukness by being ‘friendly, ‘happy’, ‘caring’, ‘loving’…

I am the Greatest Evil One.

I am no love. I have a heart of stone – this I now know as I feel it to be so. This is the truth of my anti-love negative state of mind and will.

And I feel good. Surprisingly, I feel good being able to accept this about myself. It’s taken me years of hard slog doing my feeling-healing, but now I’m there, now I understand. Now I know I am cold, with no warmth, no blood, no fire in me, no love – just cold hard stone.

I have tried to resist this truth, I have not wanted to be told or accused of being unloving, but I am. I have fought my way to this hidden truth of myself and now I am there. Now I feel I need go no further, only to understand more about what it is like to be my unloving self.

I don’t feel love. I don’t feel loved by anyone – I don’t love. I used to believe I did, but it was only a lie, all make-believe, false and wrong. It was nothing more than a belief I needed to have so I didn’t have to face the cold hard truth. It was a belief given to me by my mother, father and grandmother. They believed it too. They believed they were loving, perhaps even all-loving, but they weren’t. They weren’t because I didn’t and don’t feel loved by them. And as I am of and from them, so too am I unloving. I too am as they are, only now I know and accept the truth.

I wanted to change the world. I wanted to make everyone be nice, kind, caring and loving of each other. I wanted to do this so they would all love me. The world being really just my parents. I so desperately wanted them to like me, to accept me as I was, to not try and change me – to just love me.

I wanted the whole world to do my bidding. I know the new way, the right way, and if only everyone were to listen to me, then we could all live happily ever after.

I wanted to change the world as many before me have wanted to, as many other people still do, but now I can see in myself, as I see in them, that we are all wrong. I am only wanting to do it for selfish self-centred self-glorying reasons. I am only wanting to be the supreme controller, the ultimate master of all. I want to be god. I want to wave the magic wand and make everything be how I want it to be – all so I will always feel good. So I want everyone to do what I say. And if they do, then I will be happy. It’s all for me, not for them, only I pretend and superficially make out that it is for them, this being exactly how my parents said it was for me. They said they were all for me, the life they were giving and making for me was all for me, but it wasn’t, it was only all for them.

Now I know the awful truth of myself. I am not all-loving and trying to be like Jesus, showing everyone The Way whilst showering the sick and poor with tenderness, goodness and love. I am the opposite, like the Evil Ones, with no love to give, only a leech wanting to suck everyone dry of all life, vitality, spirit and love – to suck them dry all for myself.

And I want to use everyone until there is no one left to use. Then it will only be me, the greatest person alive. But I will be alone. And this too is what I want. I don’t care about being alone because that is all I have ever felt, it’s all I have ever had. I am alone – that is my lot, as my mother told me, so I expect nothing more. Being alone I should be happy. Being alone I will be happy, because when I was alone I was away from them and I felt better. But I also know this too is all wrong. This is the price I pay for being unloving, for having no goodness and no truth within me. This is the price of my suffering – the cost of my pain. But I can live with it, or so I believe, as I have nothing else. There never was anything else, so this is all I have, all I can look forward to, all I can aspire to be. It is all I want.

So here I am, alone in my heart with nothing I love and no one to be loved by. I do actually have a loving person with me and a loving little cat, but I can’t feel their love for me. I used to pretend that I did, but I didn’t – I just wanted to believe I did.

I am with them and I am no-love, and I am alone. And there is nothing I can do. It is just how it is – how I was made to be. However as I said, strangely, I don’t feel bad about about it anymore. I am just as I am and that is all I can be – it is all that I AM. I is all I can be in my negative unloving state.

The fucking vacuuming!

Feeling experience, number… Expressing my bad feelings.  And it’s in all those little things in life.

I hate doing the vacuuming. I hate doing the dusting, the cleaning, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. I wish I never had to do it. I don’t want to do any housework. I don’t want to wash, cook or clean. I don’t want to do it as it’s so tedious, it hurts my back. I hate banging the vacuum around and into my foot. I hate the dust, always more dust. I hate having done it, and instantly there’s more dust, never ending fucking dust. I hate having to be tied to doing this thing I don’t want to do. I don’t enjoy it, it’s a chore. And I hate that if I don’t do it, the dust will build up – bloody piles of dust everywhere. I don’t want everything to get dirty. I like it clean, but I hate having to do it. I feel so powerless in it all, it has control over me. I am subservient to it. I don’t get a say. I feel so angry. I can’t have things how I want them. Nothing goes my way, nothing works for me. It all makes me feel so bad. I can’t get away from it. It’s just like my parents. I couldn’t get away from them. They were always making me do what I didn’t want to do. They never let up – always at me, always demanding, always telling me what to do. I couldn’t bear it. I hated it. I hate them. I could never say no. What they said I always had to do. They had complete power over me. They dominated me. They had it all their way. I never got my way. I never had my say. It wasn’t fair. All those things they made me do, and I hated doing every one of them. And now here I am still doing things I don’t want to do – still feeling just as powerless; still feeling so alone and with no one to help me. It’s all too much. I wish it would end. I wish I could make it all go away. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it!

Just keep expressing your bad feelings. Don’t try and find solutions to stop them. Just allow yourself to say all you feel you want to say, and every time you feel to say it. Even if it’s every time you vacuum. Make sure you speak up about it and tell your friend. (And if you don’t have anyone to speak to, write it down, speaking it out loud to yourself.) I whinge and complain to Marion, she to me; we drive each other mad with it, until we accept that it’s what we need to do. DON’T just push all your bad feelings aside telling yourself to just get on with it because it needs to be done. Complain, complain, complain. Drive yourself and everyone else mad with your complaining. Long to see the truth and underlying reasons why it’s making you feel so bad. And keep going. Always keep speaking about how bad you feel. Never stop speaking about your bad feelings. And long for the truth again and again.

Day 3 – my cold

How my cold makes me feel reveals how I felt as a young child. It’s quite amazing. Each time I feel bad and focus on how my cold is making me feel, I can relate to the bad feelings being exactly the same as how I felt so often during my childhood. Through it I almost feel like I’m in two realities at the same time: back then and now, being shown and connected by the same bad feelings. This being what I am meant to feel as I use my cold to help shed more light on the truth of my early life.

Last night I had another dream, and this one helped me, as I spoke about it to Marion, see more about my relationship with my brother and our family dynamics. I have already seen a lot to do with my relationship with him, yet as happens through my feeling-healing, every time I go over it again because of more bad feelings, I see deeper into it, more subtle aspects, gaining a greater understanding.

In my dream I separated from my brother refusing to do what he wanted, and I felt good for the first time seeing that his way was not mine.

Speaking about how the dream made me feel helped me to understand how so much more attention was focused on him, he being younger than I. He got away with doing things that I got punished for. He was the one to entertain the family; I was just there to help him. I was meant to look after him, to make sure he didn’t get into any trouble. It was all him and not me, making me feel I wasn’t important; he was, I wasn’t allowed to be an individual in my own right, but he could. I wasn’t equally the central focus, I was always in the background doing all I could to support him. He was more the leader, and yet they told me I was to lead him being the eldest. I was praised for being a good boy being his minder, and clung to the praise wrongly believing they did like me, and that I too was important, but it was all for the role I played and not for myself. So now as I strip my role away, that which my healing has forced me to do, I feel totally at a loose end, without knowing what do to without him to order around. And it helps me to see how fragile and false my feelings of power were, all just given to me by them, but nothing coming from my true self.

All of this helped to liberate feelings of sadness, and a deep feeling of hurt from a wound deep in the core of me: they loved him, not me; they wanted him, not me; they made a fuss of him, not me; all he did was important, even if it was bad, nothing I did mattered.

And these feelings explain so much to me about myself, and how I’ve conducted my life. I’ve felt more like an extra in a movie, sort of needed and wanted, but not too much, and definitely not to show up the main performers. Just so long as I stayed out of the way, didn’t demand too much attention, didn’t interfere with what was going on, then I was tolerated – just tolerated.

And I know if I were to tell this to my mother she would say I was wrong, that she loved me just as much as my brother but in a different way. And then she’d go on about how different we are, yet I now know it wouldn’t matter what she said. It’s all meaningless because the truth is: I don’t feel loved by her or dad or anyone else. So whatever is going on in her mind is her thing, and it’s not going on in me. Which then confirms all I feel, making me feel even worse, because I know she’s full of shit. And I know the truth of how my cold is making me feel is the truth of how she made me feel. And I know, because through these feelings I can remember; I can remember exactly how I felt back then. And it’s how I still feel as nothing has changed.

I am so grateful to my cold. It’s getting better now. Three or four days duration, compared to how my cold’s used to go on and on for a month or more, before I started to honour the bad feelings such sore throats brought up in me: before I wanted to know the truth of such feelings.

And I can’t tell you how much better it is to live this way, to allow my cold and all my bad feelings to have their say.  And to tell me just how it was in my early life, and just how it still is. And although I feel very miserable about feeling such bad feelings, feeling so unloved by my parents, still I would much rather feel such feelings than deny they exist. Because I now know I am feeling them, and once I have spoken about them to Marion, once I have admitted to feeling this way, then magically I no longer feel bad. I no longer feel the pain of such bad feelings – the pain of feeling unloved. And in fact I feel good, very good, as I feel more of my true self.

My feeling-healing brings out my sadness, along with my anger at being made to feel sad. My cold makes me feel, depressed and miserable, and together with my runny nose, sore throat, strange feverous head feelings, all being how feeling sad makes me feel.

And now that I am connecting this way with my cold – all through my feelings, it has no longer any need to help me, so it will go. The truth has been seen.

… and sure enough, the next day, it had gone, I was back to feeling ‘normal’.

Day 2 – my cold

Day two of my cold and the symptoms are getting worse. I haven’t had a bad cold since I started my feeling-healing, but occasionally I get a sore throat and feel like ‘I’m coming down with one’.

Marion in her usual enlightening way has been helping me to understand how my cold is really a bunch of my unexpressed childhood bad feelings seeking the light of day manifesting in what I call ‘a cold’.

It’s a new way for me to look at my cold. And I can feel what she means. I can feel lots of repressed anger and hatred from my early childhood ‘causing’ my cold symptoms. So it’s not that I have ‘caught a cold’, but that I have all these unexpressed feelings to now express. And sure enough as I speak about how bad I feel, out comes my anger with more insight into why I’m feeling it.

So my ‘cold’ is saying to me: you need help; you need me to make you feel bad so you can bring up more stuff. You need me to make you feel how you are feeling, but refusing to allow yourself to acknowledge. You need me to help remind you how you felt as a young child. And I know if I don’t speak about all I feel, my cold will just get worse.

My cold is as though I’ve reached a point in my on ongoing repression and I’m boiling over with repressed feelings, which I’m not allowing myself to express, so this has to show itself in a weird way called ‘my cold’. My cold not the actual expression of my bad feelings, only the signal alerting me to the fact that I have to now focus on and deal with these feelings.

Late yesterday my throat became sore. Now it’s 2.30pm the next day. And here’s something of a list to illustrate how productive my ‘cold’ has been so far in helping me see more truth about myself through my bad feelings.

But before I write it, a couple of hours before my throat became sore, Marion and I witnessed a sight that has also hugely contributed to what my cold has been helping me to understand about myself.

We heard very loud child’s crying coming down the street outside our house. It was a young boy, possibly about six years old, crying and yelling at his mother. We couldn’t hear what he was upset about but it looked like he was imploring her to stop. He ran around facing her, pushing himself wailing against her, but she just ignored him, pushed him aside and walked on. This infuriated him even more, making him run after her so desperate for her to do what he wanted as he repeatedly tried to stop her, only to be continually pushed aside. His loud heart-crushing hysterical crying could be heard as they continued on all the way down the street.

This incident is a perfect example of how we are provided with all we need when we want to uncover the truth of ourselves. For this little boy to come into my life at this exact time was perfect for me to help use my cold to see more truth about myself.

My list – so far what my cold and this little boy experience have helped me see about myself:

I am scared.

I hate feeling sick.

I hate going to the doctor.

I hate mum and dad for making me sick.

I’m so full of anger at how badly they treated me.

They made me sick.

They made me sick because I couldn’t express my anger.

They forced me to give up fighting them.

They made me feel weak, powerless, sick.

They made me feel just like that little boy might feel: I would cry, yell and scream my protest, only to be pushed aside.

They rejected me, didn’t care about my bad feelings – didn’t care about me.

I imagine that when the little boy finally gives up – as his mother certainly isn’t going to, that he will feel wrung out, out of his senses, weak, spent, pathetic, what’s the point, no one cares about me, all of which my cold is making me feel, all that feeling sick makes me feel. I feel glazed, worked over, as if I can’t go on. I want to die. I feel just as I did so many times with them as I tried to tell them how bad I felt by having ‘my tantrum’. I can feel-remember this through the  feelings of my cold.

I feel trapped and want to break out. My protesting comes to nothing. I have to do as my mother says. I don’t want to be brushed aside and treated as if I don’t matter.

I’m not free to express myself in life as I’d like to.

I want to smash everything apart.

I want to smash her apart. But I can’t, I’m just too pathetic, too useless.

I have no say.

I have no power.

I don’t matter – certainly not to my mother.

And all these insights, many of which I’ve had many times through my feeling-healing, have all come as a result of speaking about how angry I feel – how angry my cold is making me feel.

And still my cold is making me feel and connect with my buried rage. I feel just like that little boy, raging against the stone wall, and that wall is my own mother. Where is her love and compassion? How can she just lock down and pretend I’m not there? How can she just see me as a tempest she has to stoically weather, and once it’s blown itself out, can get on with her life like nothing happened? Yet it’s me! Her very own child that is storming at her. Me! How can she be so cold, heartless, cruel and unfeeling – to me?

Day 1 – Doc, is it the big one… have I got it… the dreaded…

Another feeling-healing example:

I became aware I was feeling bad

Late yesterday afternoon I suddenly felt it. My throat was sore. Swallowing hurt. Gee, it came on fast!

I accept, honour and describe my bad feelings – I tell Marion about them.

‘Suddenly I’ve got a sore throat. It hurts right across the back of my throat, from ear to ear. It reminds me when I had my tonsils out, but it’s nowhere near as sore yet. I feel like I’m coming down with a cold. My head feels light, yeah, I even feel a bit sick.’

I express how feeling bad makes me feel.

‘I don’t want to get sick. I feel scared. I hate getting sick. I don’t want to get all coldy: coughing, runny nose, all blocked up.’

‘What’s the worst part you fear?’

‘It’s if I get really sick and I have to go to the doctor. I don’t want to go to doctor. But what if I have the flu, the Swine flu, and what if it makes me really sick? I don’t want to get really sick. I don’t mind a bit of a cold, but not the flu.’

‘Why don’t you want the flu, what’s so bad about it?’

‘I hated having to go to the doctor to get the injections. Whenever we got sick mum took us to the doctor. I hated sitting in his waiting room, the horrible smells, the old leather chairs all placed so far apart. Other people there, and everyone so quite. The mother’s all telling their children to shush. It was always so scary, waiting to be called. And then it was always another injection. “Yes, well we better give him an injection just in case it is the flu”. And at other times, “He better have a tetanus injection, he hasn’t had one for some time, and you just never know what might happen with summer coming up”. Always bloody injections – god I hated them, they always hurt so much.

‘One thing I did like about being sick however, was hearing those magical words… “I don’t think you’d better go to school today, keep him home for a week and then we’ll see how he is”. At least that was some compensation for having to go to the doctor, he was always on the side of allowing me to stay at home, but I still hated going to see him.’

‘What other bad feelings do you feel?’

I long for the truth of why I’m feeling sick. Expressing my feelings takes me into it.

‘I hate feeling so powerless being sick. Just having to lie around in bed, doing nothing, waiting to get better. Yes, it was always that this thing was making me sick and I couldn’t do anything until it – the bad thing – went away. So I’d take the pills or do whatever, but at least now I know I can speak about how bad I feel and look for the truth of it, that makes me feel not so bad, not so useless…

‘… Now a new bad feeling is coming up… yes, it’s anger… yes, now I feel really angry. And I feel angry with them, with mum and dad, with all the bullshit I had to put up with from them. It was how they treated me that made me sick. I can feel that now. I am so angry with them. They made me sick, they fucked me up so I had to get sick. It’s as if some part of me was even trying to get sick to stop them interfering with me, to make them see what they were doing to me. Gee it’s so clear, I would have never known that, but I can see it. They made me sick, then they fussed over me as if they were the nice and caring ones: “would you like me to bring you back something from work, are you comfortable, do you need another pillow, are you warm enough, how about I buy some fresh oranges, they’ll help you, what about a nice book to read over the week?” It was all such crap, they didn’t really care. If anything they were probably happy that I was out of the way – I wasn’t any trouble for a week. I’m so angry, I can feel it within me, it’s my bloody anger, the fact that I wasn’t allowed to express it that is making me sick. I’m all blocked up with it. I feel so cramped in my chest, like I want to hunch over, and I also feel like I want to break my chest open, expand it somehow, blow out all my anger, and blow it out all over them. I want to rip myself apart, rip it out of me. I want to smash them up with it. Give it all back to them. They can be fucking sick, they can have it all, they can leave me alone. I am furious at how they treated me. It was all such shit.’

More repressed anger, that’s what’s making me sick. How much of it do I have within me? There’s an endless supply. When’s it all going to come out? I don’t want to be sick… I hate being sick… I don’t want to get a cold… I don’t want to feel bad!

Some time later, just before bed.

‘Fuck it, you know, I can’t be bothered trying to fight it. And what am I trying to stand up to it for anyway? I can’t be bothered fighting with them, it never got me anywhere, they always won. So I’m giving in. Now I feel to give up, just let it come. Yes, if I am to be sick, so be it. Bring it on, just do me in, kill me, I don’t care anymore. I’m not going to resist it, it can overwhelm me. And so what, what will happen, just more bad feelings. I already feel so bad, what’s more bad feelings going to do to me? And I can speak about them to you. I feel bad. I feel sick. My throat hurts, it’s soarer down the back of it now when I swallow. And my nose is getting runny. And I don’t care. They can yell at me, they can make me do whatever they want, and I give up trying not to do what they say. I hope I do die, it would be much better than always being angry and trying to make them stop. I will just let myself be as miserable as I feel. I feel miserable anyway, so I’ll feel worse – so what! I hate them. I hate my relationship with them, it just always makes me feel bad. You know, I still can’t believe that I loved them, that I thought we all had a nice time together, when now all I feel – the truth – is that they make me feel bad. It’s a wonder that I wasn’t sick more often. I nearly died that time when I was around six, but that was all, other than bad colds. I wish I had died back then.’

Having said all that to Marion, now I feel my cold moving more into my chest. But I feel okay about it. I no longer feel angry, and in fact I actually like feeling a little bit sick. It makes me feel like I’m changing, like yuk in me is breaking down and coming out. I want to change, and it feels like a good cold, firing up my system, will help me. I’ve seen so much about myself of late that I don’t like, and I want it all to go, so perhaps this will help it. I’m looking forward to speaking about the next good or bad feeling my cold makes me feel…

A Feeling-Healing example: Cape Barren Geese

1. I became aware I was feeling bad

The Cape Barren geese – gorgeous birds – are currently nesting – it’s winter. One female has been sitting atop a mound of cut down trees about three metres off the ground. The males stands around the base of the mound in the grass, on guard. She sits on top of this mound exposed to all the elements. We haven’t seen her off the mound feeding on the ground eating the grass, but we’re only car-seat birders driving past her early in the morning every couple of days, and a bird book we read says she periodically leaves the nest covering her eggs in down.

Another female sits on her nest on the ground right in the middle of a paddock. The cows all mill around her with the male on duty not far from her side, but never, too close. She too is very exposed to all the wintry weather. Apparently they sit on their nests for up to 37 days. Thirty-seven days of sitting out there in the middle of nowhere!

Last night it rained. And it rained and rained and pelted down. We haven’t had such a downpour for many months – the other day it hailed. The winds roared, our little house shook. The heavy rain woke me up. It was very cold and very dark, and all I could think of where the mother geese sitting out there on their nests. I felt bad. I felt bad for them. I was scared that something bad might happened to them. I lay awake wondering how on earth they manage to cope with such fierce winds and torrential rain. On and on the rain pounded on our tin roof. Hour after hour – how could they manage, surely they would have to abandon their posts and seek shelter; surely they won’t be there sitting on their nests the next day we visit them? And I dreaded to imagine what disaster might assail them having to abandon their nests, the eggs going cold, the growing chicks inside them dying.

My mind cuts in over my fear trying to reassure me they will be alright; trying to stop my worrying about them. It says: yes, these things happen, but it’s nature. Nature has designed them to cope with such extremes or else there wouldn’t be any of them. Nature makes them nest in winter so it must be right for them. Nature knows what it’s doing. The mother geese can cope, you have nothing to worry about. Go back to sleep, enjoy the noise of the rain hitting the roof. You’ll see them when you next go out, just as you have these past weeks, and after they survived the fierce winds and hail of the other day. They’ll be all right. You have nothing to worry about.

Before I started my healing, my mind saying these sorts of things to me, would have prevailed. I would have listened to it, using my rationalisations to block out my bad feelings. I would have chided myself that it was pathetic and pointless to worry about the geese, they were after all, only birds. And my mind would have succeeded. I would not have worried about them. My mind would have been so domineering that I wouldn’t have even allowed myself to be worried and concerned about them. I might have had a fleeting thought about how they cope on such nights, but then would have dismissed all my bad feelings, all my fear – I didn’t want to feel bad, and especially over something that had nothing to do with me, and, wasn’t me.

But now I no longer want to dismiss my bad feelings, I want to feel my fear. I want to identify with the mother geese, because that’s how I’m feeling. I want to feel bad because I AM FEELING BAD. I want to honour my bad feelings, not dismiss them, now that I have allowed myself to become aware that I do feel bad.

2. I accepted my bad feelings

I lay in bed allowing myself to feel worried about the geese. I allowed myself to feel as scared as I could. I didn’t like feeling scared because of the rain pelting down, but I stopped my rationalising mind from interfering. I was scared – that was what I was feeling. I allowed myself to imagine I was one of the mother geese sitting out there, and how terrible I would feel. All alone, dark, getting saturated by the rain, cold, with water on the ground rising about me threatening my eggs; too much rain, it not soaking into the ground quickly enough, exposed to the winds… Argh! I just wanted to scream, run away and hide somewhere safe and warm.

3. I expressed my bad feelings

In the morning I spoke about my fear to Marion. I described it all, the whole situation: what I felt, how I was imagining I was the mother geese. I spoke about how scared I was, how I felt like it was me out there sitting in the dark, cold with all the rain.

I told her how feeling scared made me feel. “I hate feeling scared. I feel suffocated by it, there is no escape, I feel at my wits end. I feel like my whole being is going to die, that something really bad is going to happen to me. I hate feeling scared, really scared. I feel so powerless. I can’t do anything about it. I just have to take it all. I can’t run away. I’m just out there, no one cares about me – I don’t matter. The rain just pelts down on me. I want to disappear, go somewhere else, be somewhere else; somewhere where I feel warm, wanted and loved. I feel like I’ve just been thrown out there and what’s going to happen to me? No one loves me. NO ONE LOVES ME! NO ONE CARES ABOUT ME! I’M SO ALONE.”  Shit I hate these feelings.

4. I longed for the truth of my bad feelings

I long for the truth as I am telling her about all I feel. I try to concentrate on feeling scared and trying to express all this makes me feel. It’s very hard to do. How does feeling scared, really make me feel? After some time, I pause, I long for the truth again. I want to know why I feel this way: why do I feel so bad about the geese. I’m the one feeling about about them and their situation. I don’t know what they are experiencing. I don’t know if they feel bad about it. For all I know they might relish it, or simply not feel anything at all. Why am I identifying with them so much? What is it I am trying to show myself through them? What is it that my bad feelings want me to see about myself?

Marion speaks about all she feels, and her comments help me to shift my focus a little. She says that it seems like I’ve been shut away in the dark, alone and cold, not literally, but emotionally, as all of my repressed stuff is mostly emotionally based.

The truth comes

And it’s true. That is how I feel. I feel so emotionally shut off from my family. My healing has been one long awaking to this fact. How I lived with these other people I called my loving family, and yet how we didn’t express ourselves freely to each other; we didn’t communicate all we thought and felt – at least I didn’t, as I can’t really speak for the others. And the result was that I feel so alone, shut away from them. I feel like they don’t want or care about me. They just need me to be around, to fulfil something they need, but it’s all for them, and nothing for me. I just get blasted by their anger, hit, criticised, ridiculed – made to feel I’m stupid. I’m just all alone, out there on the ground and atop the mound getting pounded and rained on from all sides, and they didn’t care how I felt.

I felt so scared with them. I may as well have been literally shut away in a small room, in the dark and cold. It’s been a huge revelation and one very difficult to accept that I actually feel scared of my parents. My own parents, who always said how much they loved me. And yet it’s true. All of my healing has led me to see just how terrified I am of them. I am the geese, scared to death out there in the dark. And that is how I have lived in my life, terrified that at any moment the next storm will break on me. I will be emotionally beaten, traumatised, scared yet again feeling my life is threatened. My existence – me, myself, I will cease to exist, all because they don’t want me to. The fear and bad feelings are too much. I can’t embrace them all in one go. I feel I will go mad, something extreme will happen to me if I do. I don’t know what, and I don’t want to know, it’s just all too bad.

So my fear has come up in me in little bits – a bit more tonight. And so long as I don’t allow my mind to dismiss my bad feelings, and keep accepting and expressing them; allowing them to be and have their say, steadily more truth and understanding comes to me about my relationship with my parents and how it’s negatively affected my life.

Now it’s late morning, the dark rain clouds are moving on. The sun is peeking out, a moments reprieve…

More truth and understanding comes

Having been speaking about more feelings to do with my fear from last night, and specifically about how my mind was trying to stop me from feeling bad, Marion said, it sounded like it’s someone telling you those things. It’s not your mind by itself, it’s just what it has learnt to do. And she’s right. As I speak to her again about what it was saying to me – what I say to myself: not having to worry about anything, that nature knows what it’s doing, I can hear the words of my mother and grandmother telling me not to be scared, taking me over, making me be how they say I should be. All their attempts of trying to love and reassure me that I had nothing to worry about, did the opposite for me. All they did was help me deny, suppress and keep repressed such bad feelings. The fact is, I was scared, and the feelings should have been accepted – I should have been accepted for how I was, for having them. Instead they made me deny them, rejected them, and in doing so rejected and denied me. Causing me to live my whole adult life rejecting my bad feelings. Causing me to feel always so scared of feeling rejected, unwanted and uncared about.

Bringing up repressed memories

In my Feeling-Healing, I use my current bad feeling – by expressing it – to take me back down into myself liberating other repressed feelings, which at times can bring to light a repressed memory.

However, the focus is ALWAYS on feeling-expression and NEVER just using my mind, or a mind technique, to probe and hunt around, speculate, even contrive, a repressed memory. And there is a great temptation to do this. Trying to go deep into yourself via your bad feelings is not a pleasant experience – it makes you feel very bad, yet that’s what it’s all about – allowing yourself to feel these bad feelings, ones you’ve been hiding from yourself, and not escaping from them using your mind.

To try and avoid feeling bad, using your mind to create answers, reasons why and explanations, by making up false memories, is fraught with danger. The danger being, that for the most part, you aren’t even aware you are doing it. A plausible memory surfaces, you grab it – that must be it, you tell yourself, it all makes sense, and you feel you have found the truth, but all you’ve succeeded in doing is further delude yourself, further avoiding and denying your bad feelings.

With feeling-healing you don’t look for the truth or hunt for any hidden memory. I was guilty of this, desperately scanning over and over my early memories hoping to force a crack or open a new window into my forgotten past, something that would explain my trauma. But I didn’t understand about just expressing – ALWAYS ONLY JUST SPEAKING ABOUT ALL I FELT. Always staying focused on my feelings, and then simply allowing what happens to happen. While all the time longing hard to find, see and know the truth; and being patient, understanding that the liberation of my buried feelings will tell the story of what happened to me. And with time the picture of truth forms and grows, but not all at once. I have had masses of repressed bad feelings surface about every part of my unloving childhood relationships, all slowly coming to light like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

There has been a huge amount to see and comprehend. But my feeling-healing experiences have conclusively shown me that I MUST AT ALL TIMES keep my mind out of it, and always just keep focused on speaking about my feelings.

My mind, in a way, has become them – those who were against my natural self-expression. And so I only have my feelings to go with, and they have liberated many repressed feeling-memories.

At times, earlier in my childhood repression feeling-healing, a memory, or what I thought was one, would come into my mind, but I wouldn’t feel completely happy and certain about its authenticity. But I’d still use it, going with the feelings it stimulated in me, and usually, what could be years later having grown in other aspects of myself, that memory would come around again for more scrutiny and I would be able to detect its falseness, and so let it go. And it would evaporate, whereas all other true memories, no matter how much I tried to push them away, would remain firming in my feelings with increasing conviction of their truth.

During the early stages of my feeling-healing, a lot didn’t add up, but I just kept trying to speak about all I felt. Mind you, I was lousy at it, and it has only been thanks to Marion that I’ve made any headway, but now, years on, it is all coming together and making perfect sense.

Repressed Feelings – not repressed memories

As I read arguments for and against repressed memories, I look back over my childhood repression healing to see if I can say that I agree or disagree, and as far as I have read, all I can say is I can’t relate personally to much of it.

What I am focused on is trying to give voice to my repressed feelings, some of which have memories associated with them; some what I would call vague perceptions or impressions. At times I have felt as if I am on the verge of a profound forgotten memory surfacing, but often it doesn’t come, only the feelings. My mind tries in vain looking for memory pictures, as my feelings – that which are important – keep coming up. And I have found that it is only the feelings I require to connect with my past, so I speak and express them to uncover and bring to light their truth.  Often I have wished I could see a video of my early life, to see just how I was treated, but that’s not the way it’s done – it’s all feeling-healing.  To have too many visuals without direct feeling connection would only give my mind too much to hold onto, and inevitably deny the very feelings I am trying to bring up within me.

I do have some memories from my early childhood but not many. I wonder if my early childhood being devoid of memories is a sign of how miserable I felt back then with so little of it enjoyable for me. Too much of my childhood was overly dictated by my parents and grandmothers.  It didn’t make me feel good, so I have blocked it out.

I don’t have any memories of my time in the womb, or the early years after my birth, but my healing has given rise to many feelings and perceptions about those times giving me something of an awareness which I feel to be true. And these feelings, perceptions, and their associated awareness they create in me, have been substantiated over and over by other feelings and perceptions all adding up to the picture of truth my soul is revealing to me. And all the way along my feelings tell me that all I am uncovering and seeing about myself is true – because I FEEL it to be so. It all feels too familiar and explains too many things I have always wondered about myself and my life. All I feel-see, feel-perceive and feel-remember fits, and sadly enough, it’s a perfect fit.

As I move back into my repressed feelings I feel they were mostly repressed by me without any conscious action on my part. I might have suppressed actively and with awareness some of my bad feelings as I grew older, as my mind took over dominating my feelings, but still I can’t say for sure, as my feelings haven’t been too clear on that. And really it doesn’t matter, because whether I suppressed them consciously or they were repressed automatically and unconsciously in me for self-protection, what has become apparent is the extent of which I wasn’t allowed to freely express my feelings right from the first moment of my conception. And being stopped from being allowed to be my true self, from being able to truly and fully express in whatever way I felt, has caused the greatest amount of damage to me. And that is why speaking and expressing my repressed feelings as they surface during my feeling-healing is vitally important, as it is me finally liberating myself from my forced suppression and repression.

As to whether or not we have feelings and memories, and do need to express ourselves, right from our very beginning, I would have to yes. But feeling-memories I have brought to light from my earliest times are not clear feelings and memories like I have now, but that too doesn’t matter, because I now understand that my soul has taken the light from such early experiences, and when I need to feel such repressed and hidden feelings, it presents them back to me as feelings I can relate to as an adult. So my feeling-healing is literally taking me as the adult back through me as the child so I am able to feel and understand, so find the truth of, feelings I had back then. I am able to take the trauma of rejection I suffered by not being loved by my parents as I wanted and needed to be, and articulate it now as a grown man, by feeling that the feelings I feel now in my life are the same as those I felt back when I was small. The whole connection between the present and past being conducted by and through feelings, and really without the need for memories at all.

All I mostly have dealt with is feeling-memories. I had one this morning. A dream, as I recounted it and all I felt during and after it to Marion, helped me to feel, yet again, how interfered with by mum and my grandmother I was. I felt so angry, and full of anxiety, nervousness and stress in just being with mum, she wasn’t a calm rational mother, and her jarring impact on me was shown to me in the dream. So I then used these bad feelings to feel-remember times when I was young, when I felt these same feelings. The memories, although vague, were not important, as it was the feelings, remembering that I felt all these bad feelings time and time again during my early childhood, that was. And as I connected the feeling now with then it gave me another feeling like I was waking up, waking up in understanding and awareness – remembering – that my relationship with them was as I was remembering it. That all I was feeling was correct, it was absolutely true and right. They did constantly make me feel this bad, yet I had forgotten. Now I remember the feelings, all the bad feelings, and as I expressed them speaking about them, other bad feelings surfaced until I saw the truth of what they were all trying to show me. The truth I won’t go into here, as it was too personal and I’d have to write about my whole relationship with mum and Gran, of which there is no point; but when the truth came, then I felt as I always do, as if another buried and dead part of me had come up, had stepped forward into life to have its say. And mostly that say was standing up to them being able to say no. No, I don’t want nor accept how you treat me. It doesn’t make me feel good. It is not loving and I hate you for treating me this way.

I could say that, as I feel a bad feeling now, and also feel it connecting with the same bad feeling I felt when young, that there is something of memory involved, but really it only serves to assure me that the connection is truly being made, that I’m on the right track in my feelings, and what I am feeling is real and I’m not just making it up.

The difficult part about my feeling-healing has been trying to keep my mind out of it. So often it wants to jump in and take over. It wants me to push the feelings I am feeling aside and for me to then listen to it. It wants to tell me the reasons – to rationalise and justify – why I feel bad, in the hope that I will give over and listen to it, and so do as it says thereby stopping myself from feeling bad. And many times it tries to seduce me with false promises, that if I do the pain will go away, the bad feeling will no longer hurt me and make me feel bad. But luckily with Marion’s help, I have been able to understand my mind behaves like this, it being really all my parents and grandparents said to me when I was little to stop me feeling bad, and so I have been able to stop its negative influence allowing my feelings to finally have their say.

The beauty of the whole process is that because I am determined to uncover, see and understand the whole truth of myself, all that went on between me and my parents that made me feel bad; all that brought about my childhood repression, that I need only concentrate on my feelings. And in fact for the process, for the feeling-healing to work, it is vital I do so. I don’t allow my mind to start looking back into my past trying to find reasons why I feel bad. I always stay focused, well at least try to, on speaking about my feelings and FEELING them. Feeling them and desiring nothing more than the truth – and the truth comes. And this is the miraculous part. Seemingly out of nowhere suddenly there it is, I see it, it comes up in me, and I become consciously aware and it tells me all I need to know - the truth bubbles up and I KNOW. My mind then comes in and helps put it all together, as I speak about what I see and feel. When I see the truth, I JUST KNOW IT IS TRUE AND THERE IS NO DISPUTE. And because of this I also know that in no way am I making it up. I know I am not lying to myself. I feel it is all true with all my heart – with my whole being and all my feelings. And as I progress through the levels it compounds, building on itself as the picture of understanding grows in me. And how wonderful it is to have the picture of truth – the truth of myself, what it all means to me, and finally an explanation to all those parts of myself I didn’t understand; and reasons why I felt all those bad feelings that would assail me for seemingly no reason. Everything begins to make sense. And I have changed my life, giving up all the things I do, believe, and how I behave, that caused my feeling denial. And gradually I’ve felt so much better about myself. I feel that now I am on my side and no longer on the side of my parents against myself.  And I have done it all through feelings – my feelings.

We only can see the world through our eyes.

Our eyes being determined by our early childhood – what we saw and how we were made to see and experience the world in our family. And so as adults we largely still see, and judge or accept, the world through our child eyes. Our patterns were fixed, our behaviour set, with our adult lives being really nothing more than the outworking of our early childhood. So what annoys you and makes you feel bad during your childhood repression healing is reflective of what annoys you on the inside, it being representative of what happened to make you feel bad when you were little. And so we can use it, through our bad feelings, to take us back into those same feelings of our early childhood to find the truth.

Yesterday Marion and I drove off Phillip Island to have more of a look at the ‘mainland’ countryside – we went to Korumburra from Wonthaggi.

As soon as we left Wonthaggi the land opened up into mostly beef and dairy farmland. Miles and miles of open gentle rolling hills covered in grass – but where were all the trees? Where was all the native bush land? Where were all the gum trees, the wattles, the fantastic birds and all our beautiful creatures? As we drove we saw a tiny pocket of bush, a tree covered hill, a dense forested sectioned off area, an inviting dark green leafed small valley, but mostly it was farm upon farm of green grass. All the lovely lush green colours vibrant in the sun looked quite spectacular, but not the same as looking at a forest.

On the way home from ‘Wonthers’, back to the Island, I felt a headache coming on. Then I felt nauseous. And as I started to speak about my bad feelings, it became increasingly apparent that the whole experience to me was very traumatic, that in some way it had related to something bad that happened to me during my early childhood. But I didn’t know what. I couldn’t remember, and I couldn’t understand why seeing the land devoid of trees was affecting me so much, and yet I felt it was.

The more we spoke about it; the more I tried to moan and grown speaking about how sick I felt and how much my head hurt, the more I felt that sometime back in my past I had been taken out into bare farmland like what we’d seen and left there, taken away from mum and dad, from home, and left with some other family, something that I didn’t want to do and which greatly traumatised me.

As I concentrated on trying to express – trying to speak what I felt, trying to allow my bad feelings of sickness and pain to speak, my mouth dried up, my throat constricted, my eyes filled with tears and eventually, choking, I spluttered out, NO! DONT LEAVE ME HERE! And in my mind I was screaming with rage and the agony of feeling left, NO! DON’T LEAVE ME! I could hardly speak the words as emotion, too much and having been too deeply buried, rushed up in me, leaving me choking, slobbering, spluttering. And I threw up emotionally. I didn’t vomit, but huge deep dry retches of emotion spewed up out of me. And then it was over. I didn’t feel sick anymore. I still had the headache and the pain had moved and changed into being a more stabbing pain rather and a dull ache, and for the rest of the trip home we talked about all we knew of my early childhood that had been revealed through my healing and how it related to what I had just gone through. I also continued to moaned, groan and emotionally throw up as my head ache came back and went again in waves.

This morning I woke up with a picture in my mind of all the farm land we’d seen being covered in bush as it would have been before white man wrecked it. I imagined the hills covered in trees, and the birds, the animals, the little bugs and beetles. And as I spoke to Marion about this picture and how it was making me feel, so I could find out why it was in my mind, I became slowly aware that it was all me. How I was seeing the land was how I was seeing myself. I used to be covered in natural bush, lush, pure and untouched, a perfect piece of nature, but then my parents set about clearing me, clearing in me all they didn’t want. All that annoyed them, all that got in their way and made life harder for them. And so what am I left with, not much, just a little bit of me here and there with no way of connecting those parts. With a false me all but devoid of natural love having to live an artificial life of milking cows and watching the grass grow.

I still don’t remember if I was left anywhere when I was young, such as in the country, but that no longer matters. I can remember many times when I was left places I didn’t want to be. I was left as soon as I was born in the infant room in the hospital according to my feeling-memories. I was left every day I went to school. I was left emotionally. I was left alone a lot in my ‘corner’ playing with my toys without being communicated with properly; left to feel as if I was a stranger in my own family, a lodger in my own house; left to feel that I didn’t matter, that no one cared about me; and as long as I was good and did what I was told, then largely I was just… left.

There was also another very interesting point this experience helped me to understand about myself by putting the new me into perspective with the old me. The old me occasionally travelled in such farm land country, and I can remember back then thinking about the desecration of the natural bush, but it never emotionally effected me, not to the degree it did yesterday by making me sick. And that was because I looked at all intellectually. I would morn the loss of the environment and get angry with our unfeeling insensitive ignorant ways, but all mentally, all just within my mind and so at arms length. I didn’t allow any of it to come right in and deeply affect me. But now, the new me, the me that is allowing my bad feelings to govern my life instead of my mind, felt bad, and how very bad! Yesterday it was all highly personal. I was the bush. I could feel the violation and desecration within me of my unfeeling parents cutting down my personality as the trees were cut down; their uncaring attention stopping me express myself. I could feel it all around me, as if I could all but feel the pain of the land, the pain of Mother Earth as yet more wanton destruction took place. And as hard as it is to go through such harrowing deep emotional purging and feeling so bad, still I would much rather allow myself to be so affected emotionally than being shut off to my feelings and living alone in my mind. I would much rather feel my pain driving through that cleared land than driving through it impartial to it all, telling myself: well, there is nothing I can do about it anyway so why get upset about it. I would much rather know that what I can do about it now is just allow myself to feel all my feelings, and that there is nothing else to do. At least now I feel alive in my feelings relating to life, rather than just being in my unfeeling mind… and left all alone.