While I have called this post “When Sadness Comes,” I might well have substituted the word Rage for Sadness. In my experience, all feelings of anger and grief are inseparable although, depending upon care giver expectations, we may be unable to experience one or the other of these profoundly humanizing emotions. Some of us are born into families who permit the expression of anger but deny any grief that may lie below this emotion. And many are born into families where it is “safe” to express sadness, but absolutely forbidden to express any form of anger. And some, of course, must pretend a kind of cheerful neutrality regardless of what emotional landmines are detonating throughout the days and nights of family life.
Our journeys to wholeness require that we acknowledge and experience the feelings our early care givers insisted we deny, and this requirement is often very challenging. The reclamation of our forbidden feelings is a process similar to muscle building. We go through an initial period of painful resistance that requires we choose to persevere. Once we make this choice to reclaim our denied emotions, our new emotional breadth increases our emotional intelligence one hundred fold. This reclamation process takes the time and patience any worthwhile undertaking requires. Happily, energy tools, and specifically EFT, can be very helpful partners in improving our emotional literacy on the journey to wholeness.
Continue reading Building Bridges Through Loss: Four/When Sadness Comes