Notes From a Relationship Coach
​(Big ideas in a small email)

“The price of emotional repression is a constant, wasteful expenditure of energy that leaves many of us depressed and taciturn.”

–Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling​

Gabor Maté wrote a whole book (When the Body Says No) detailing how emotional and psychological stress contribute to actual disease and physiological deterioration. Unfortunately, most folks file that kinda stuff away as “won’t happen to me” or “that’s a problem for future me to deal with.”

But Pete’s talking about how dissociation and emotional avoidance affect us NOW.

When you sit still by yourself with no distractions and bring your awareness to what is happening inside you… what do you notice?

Pain, tension, discomfort, restlessness?
Fear, anxiety, shame, sadness, numbness?
Compulsive thinking, judging, analyzing, projecting?

If you don’t have comfort in your body, emotions, and mind (but something unpleasant), ya got two options:

1. Follow that cry for help back to whatever part of you is trapped in the well
2. Crank the music up louder so you can’t hear the screams anymore

And to be clear, if you don’t have the resources to do 1, you will do 2. So I hope you know there’s no moral judgment in the subtext here. Just letting you know how it is.

If you’re the “workin on myself” type, answer the following questions:

•What physical, emotional, and mental symptoms of dis-ease do I have?
•What unresolved issues or unmet needs are they likely pointing to?
•Who can I ask for help treating / addressing these?

That’ll get the ball rolling in the right direction. And if you wanna do some more reading…

•The #1 Sign of Unresolved Trauma
​•Meditation, Dissociation, and Embodiment
​•When Your Survival Strategies Start Killing You​

Waking up is hard, but it’s worth it.

P.S. Suppression is a willful ignoring or subduing of something. Repression, however, is an unconscious denial of an intolerable experience. Which means, by definition, if you have emotional repression, YOU DON’T KNOW IT. Like wind or gravity, we cannot observe it directly, but we know it exists because its effects are palpable.

*This email contains Amazon affiliate links to the books mentioned.

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