The Rise of Emotion
Often when one goes through experiences of massive change and grief whether from a loved one’s death, a loss of job or house, the loss of a pet, the loss of our child-like spirit or even loss on a much greater scale, there is a stage at which we may think it’s been going on too long or it is unsafe to be that vulnerable for ourselves or with others. We can look for ways to close the valve, detach, freeze it, or even unknowing be avoiding the response of emotions.
When loss has occurred more than we think we can handle, we perceive physical grieving as a passed experience as we have learned throughout the years to block the show of it usually without conscious awareness. Yet it materializes in other ways and manners both within the body and externally in our experiences. Sometimes, it is searching for a crack in our resolve, a way to break through the barriers that are allowing us to live life fully.
I used to watch certain television shows that evoked emotion to help me in releasing the energy and tears that I was challenged to do on my own due to many years of avoidance, detaching from experiences or not permitting or knowing how to walk such a vulnerable path myself. Many of the situations began in my childhood, a natural disaster in the form of a flood in which the words, photographs, and what I was first-hand seeing were heavy, the experiences of feeling and seeing such loss overwhelming and beyond the understanding of an eight-year-old. I learned to hide that part of me and hold her tightly as if protecting her from the external world.
You might be wondering why this thread of blogs recently. I began doing some writing around my father’s transition from in-body to in-spirit just in the last few weeks which opened a crevice for emotions to start surfacing. It is when we permit ourselves to truly feel into the emotions that we embark on healing. Feeling, accepting, and integrating creates pathways for processing and by which restoring our body to homeostasis.
Sometimes we need more assistance to reach that level of feeling into the emotions. This past weekend it caught me quite unaware. A friend recommended a movie and I had seen the name of it recently a day or so before yet had not investigated it. I decided to watch the recent movie called 13 Lives directed by Ron Howard that is based on a true story that occurred in 2018. It is about an amazing rescue and story of survival.
It takes a lot for me to watch a movie of this nature. I am more of a light-hearted movie watcher despite watching many detective type television shows in the past. This one was very different and one that quickly ramped up to being very serious and intense. It jarringly pushed me into facing insecurities from childhood as well as in and around the darkness of the unknown path we so often walk. It was surprising just how it affected me into feeling extremely uncomfortable with the darkness of nightfall the following evening to the point of having to work through getting in my car to drive to a pet visit. Literally addressing the emotions, memories and situations that surfaced.
Mind you, driving in the dark doesn’t tend to have that crippling type of apprehension and unease associated with it. Yet there were several experiences for me and family members that were mirroring aspects of the movie in very different ways. It’s like your body so wants to heal and is showing you that sometimes we subconsciously avoid things. And to overcome the experiences or old ways we have always handled things we require extra stimulation or a shock of sorts to face the anxiousness, uncertainty, and self-doubt to move beyond the unknown that is keeping us frozen in areas of our life to reach healing. For me this time it was a movie that promptly triggered me to address and accept the emotions that surfaced from my experiences and opened the doors on more insights for healing and new neural pathways.
