How Pushing Past Defenses to Feel Your Feelings Makes You Strong — and More Human. "Emotions are not just airy-fairy abstractions. They are physical experiences throughout your body." You know how it feels when you are defensive, or filled with anxiety or depressed. When you feel your emotions you notice that their intensity subsides. Here is a sensible article on this sensitive topic. Emotions
"Regardless how well intentioned, a defensive approach to getting your partner to cooperate does not, will not, and cannot work. There are compelling reasons to understand and let go of these patterns.
The root cause of defensiveness is a belief system that fosters an inner mindset, which, by its protective nature, emphatically opposes the formation of intimacy in your marriage and other key relationships.
Thus, it is your perceptions that activate this reactivity. Your beliefs, you may say, scare you into thinking that your survival is at stake whenever an event triggers painful feelings inside.
At heart, defensiveness is fear of intimacy.
"Rooted in existential fears of rejection, abandonment, inadequacy, and the like, it is associated with fears surrounding your survival from the early years of life — childhood — a time when your physical brain and body literally needed love to survive.
Now, in adulthood, you face a different challenge. Your hope of finding the emotional fulfillment that you’re driven by inner human strivings to find in your connection to life rests in breaking the cycles of hurt and suffering. How? By diving deep into the very feelings you avoid, some of which you may not even know you have, to discover what no other person can give you, no matter how great their love for you."
"Emotions are not just airy-fairy abstractions. They are physical experiences throughout your body.
Feeling your feelings is a necessary part of healing defensiveness, as well as anxiety, depression, and other types of emotional suffering. When you feel your emotions, you begin to notice their intensity subsides, and a sweet sense of understanding and connection takes its place.
It is an encouraging process. It is also the path to sustaining your connection to life – to yourself and to one another. As it lowers your defenses, it makes it possible for your hearts to connect in mutual understanding.
The most powerful way, in my belief, to find fulfillment in your relationship is to use the power of your choices to:
Cultivate the optimal conditions that allow you to treat the other as you want to be treated — with honor, unconditionally.
When you take a chance to empathically connect to self and the other – and remain so during those challenging moments — your brain does the rest.
The rewiring of neural patterns that ensues is no less than a possibility for transformation."
How Pushing Past Defenses to Feel Your Feelings Makes You Strong — and More Human. Here is the "thesis statement" in my opinion: "At heart, defensiveness is fear of intimacy."
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