Denying your feelings
By going along with feelings, you unify your emotional, mental and bodily states. When you try to fight or deny them,you divorce yourself from the reality of your being.
Jane Roberts
In church, they often tell you to be honest with God because He sees everything anyway. Do you really think you can hide your sins from someone all-seeing and all-knowing? You may as well fess up and own it.
When Christians do this, they feel an instant release and calm. The awesome power of God’s unlimited forgiveness washes over them and they’re clean.
The power behind this activity is that, for a moment at least, you stop lying to yourself about how you REALLY feel. You give yourself permission to be honest with yourself. Believe it or not, you actually do know how you feel. You actually do know what your reasons are. It’s just that, instead of being honest, we befuddle things by how we probably should feel. Or, we conceal the source of our feelings by inventing some innocent or moral motivation. Once we’ve smudged it all up good and proper, we can try to convince ourselves and other people that it’s the truth.
Is it any wonder we get confused about what to do next? It’s like living two separate lives inside yourself. How do you plot a course to where you want to go if you don’t admit to where you’re at now?
I sometimes fear that if I acknowledge ‘bad’ feelings, then I will act stupidly when I really do know better. It’s only very recently that I’ve allowed myself to feel things like jealousy, anger, hurt, affront, suspicion etc. Life is certainly a lot messier, but it’s also a lot more interesting… and infinitely better. It’s possible to feel bad things, own them, and then choose to act sensibly anyway.
Living this way makes decisions easier and without the need to waste precious time second guessing myself. It doesn’t really matter what people imagine your motivations to be. You know in yourself what they are. You know why you feel the way you do. You have a place to move forward from, whether or not you believe that a deity absolves you. Most of all, when you’re honest with yourself, it’s easier to recognise those feelings and to do something timely and constructive with them.
Muchness 