Express your bad feelings

Expressing all our bad feelings is the way to becoming a whole person.  The longer one lives denying any feeling at all; the longer one says, ‘No, I’m all right, I’ll be all right’, when clearly one is not all right, the harder it is to come back to living true to yourself.  We’ve been taught and we live in a feeling-denying societies believing in feeling-denying religions, all to the detriment of ourselves, all causing us to slowly kill ourselves through the lack of true self-love.  True self-love being the act of accepting and expressing every feeling, not just the good ones whilst suppressing the bad.

‘YOU STOPPED ME!’

‘You stopped me, you stopped me, you stopped me – why, why did you stop me, why, why did you stop me – WHY!’

The two boys both hooked a fish at the same time, I said I’d net the eldest boys first as he was standing in front of me, and for the other boy to wait as I’d be with him in a moment, and just to take it easy winding his fish in as there was no hurry. The man whom I’d wrongly thought to be his father when to help the younger boy.

As I was netting the first lovely pink-sided rainbow trout I heard the man (step-father? Mother’s boyfriend?) telling the younger boy to slow down, to stop winding the fish in, to wait. And he told him again and again his voice getting louder and angrier. Then he was yelling at him to stop, to wait for me to come with the net, and then it happened, the hook came out of the trouts mouth and it was gone, back into the dark pool.

The young boy threw the rod down and stormed off, up the path and right out of the rainforest area. His mother said to leave him be, she was angry with his behaviour, and if that was how he was going to behave, then he wasn’t to do any fishing and could miss out on catching any fish.

The fishing continued, one, two, three nice fish, then the eldest boy asked his mother if he should go and find his brother. She said no.

Not long after, the young boy returned, his brother welcomingly called out ‘Come and catch a fish, look at all the ones we’ve caught, look at this big one’, the boy came over. Nothing was said by the adults.

The young boy said to the step-father/boyfriend man: ‘You stopped me, you stopped me, you stopped me, YOU STOPPED ME! Why, why did you stop me? Why, why did you stop me – WHY!’ The man and the mother both mumbled something about a possible apology, nothing was forthcoming. They both knew the boy was right and that the man had been way out of line by trying to control and take over the boy too much, even if he did think he was helping him. His brother gave him a rod and obligingly a fish had taken the bait. The boy became absorbed in catching his own fish.

After a few more caught fish, the young boy kept asking his mother if he could ring his father and tell him about all the fish they had caught. She said no – later.

As fucked as the whole thing is, even the fact that the poor fish are bred solely for our entertainment, at least his mother and her friend allowed the young boy to go off in his rage, and they didn’t tell him to shut up or stop it when he returned angrily demanding to know why the man had stopped him. At least they allowed him to express his bad feelings to some extent. And I envied him.

He could easily articulate how he felt, I doubt I could have done so when I was that young. I can’t remember, however I know I wasn’t allowed to go raging off in a fury, and I wasn’t allowed to come back accusing my parents of being mean to me – especially in public. After all my years of working on trying to bring up and express my repressed bad feelings, I can only just be like this boy is, I can only just allow myself to rage and express all my anger.

It would be nice to think that at least he might be able to grow up expressing something of what he feels when he feels bad.