“I don’t have any feelings”.
She stopped almost as soon as she said it, and you could tell by the look in her eyes she knew there was no way I was going to let that slide. And she was right. I’ve been coaching her for a few months now, and she’s become very wise to my strategies and techniques.
She’s also come far along enough in her own journey to realize the complete fallacy of that frustrated statement, and what it was covering.
And she was right. I called her out on it – immediately.
When we first started this journey together, her goal was to have me help her improve her relationship with her son. She was ready to tell me everything that she wanted me to know, while keeping herself in the background as much as possible.
That immediately caught my attention, and within a few minutes of talking to her it became very obvious that she was hurting.
Her desire to improve her relationship with her son was very real, but it was the gateway to a whole lot more.
Slowly, as we have gone deeper and deeper into her soul we have uncovered so many things, and I am truly in awe of the person she has become given all that she has been through. But even though I admire and respect her, there’s no way she was getting away with that. To do anything else would have meant doing her a disservice, and that’s not how a coaching relationship works.
So I pushed. Not hard, but gently and firmly.
She was honest enough with herself to admit to feelings that were painful. It’s hard for her to allow these things to the surface, because it hurts when we have to process the trauma of events that we have kept buried for so many years. She has perfected the art of suppressing her feelings deep down, and facing life with an emotional backpack that is overflowing with pain, longing and regret.
She carries a heavy load, and it’s time for her to put some of that down.
We’ve been fighting through her emotional barriers of late; both the ones that she understands and the subconscious ones that she’s completely unaware of. It’s been hard, but I’m so proud of the progress she has made.
She’s really improved her emotional fluency, and her self-awareness is so far beyond where we started that it’s hard to recognize her.
But every so often she backslides just a little, and that’s why I’m here.
The sad truth is that all of us carry our emotional backpack that weighs us down. Maybe it’s a belief that we have, or an event that caused us to feel intense pain, and rather than process that emotion, we have hidden it deep inside our pack where no one can see.
We try to forget about it, but the weight of it is still there in our soul. Slowing us down, and preventing us from enjoying everything that life has to offer.
So today, I invite you to open your backpack and take a good deep look into your soul, and see if there is something that you could benefit from unpacking and leaving by the roadside.
I promise you, you will be glad that you did.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings