The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

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This book is an in-depth exploration on how we can safely open ourselves up to these difficult “negative” emotions, and therefore enrich our lives. Pete Walker examines rage, grief, blame and shame - emotions that many of us struggle with. There are no pat answers or easy solutions offered. I found his advice and insights profound and humane. and I began to believe that I might have an iota of worth after all. (This is not to say that I was

Many survivors who were silenced by the 'no talk' rule in childhood continue to suffer the same kind of mute loneliness in adulthood. They have yet to learn that real connection and belonging comes from people talking uninhibitedly together" (27). Elucidation of this dynamic to clients is a necessary but not sufficient step in recovery. There are many codependents who understand their penchant for forfeiting themselves, but who seem to precipitously forget everything they know when differentiation is appropriate in their relationships. To break free of their subservience, they must turn their cognitive insights into a willingness to stay present to the fear that triggers the self-abdication of the fawn response, and in the face of that fear try on and practice an expanding repertoire of more functional responses to fear. I was particularly impressed on his exploration of forgiveness and how much of a struggle it is to truly forgive a bad parent without repressing or minimising the hurt they caused. His description of how we oscillate between anger and compassion was very real and honest. This book is a handbook for increasing your emotional intelligence. Moreover, if you are a survivor of a dysfunctional family, it is a guide for repairing the damage done to your emotional nature in childhood. As such it is actually a sequel to my later book: Complex PTSD from Surviving To Thriving. The Tao of Fully Feeling focuses primarily on the emotional healing level of trauma recovery. It is a safe handbook for grieving losses of childhood. I love to have you near me, Pete. You are such a joy to me. I love it when you talk to me and tell me how it is for you. I want to hear everything you have to say. I want to be the one person you can always come to whenever you need help. You can come to me when you are hurting, when you just want company, or when you want to play. You are always welcome. You are a delight to my eyes, and I always enjoy having you around. You are a good boy, very special and absolutely worthy of love, respect, and all good things. I am so proud of you and so glad that you are alive. I will help you in any way that I can. I want to be the loving mom and dad you were so unfairly deprived of, and that you so much deserve. And I want you to know that I have an especially loving place in my heart for you when you are scared or sad or mad or ashamed. You can always come to me and tell me about such feelings, and I will be with you and try to soothe you until those feelings run their natural course. I want to become your best friend and I will always try to protect you from unfairness and humiliation. I will also seek friends for you who genuinely like you and who are truly on your side. We will only befriend people who are fair, who treat us with equality and respect, and who listen to us as much as we listen to them. I want to help you learn that it really is good to have needs and desires. It’s wonderful that you have feelings. It’s healthy to be mad and sad and scared and depressed at times. It’s natural to make mistakes. And it’s okay to feel good too, and even to have more fun than mom and dad did.”Feelings and emotions are energetic states that do not magically dissipate when they are ignored. Much of our unnecessary emotional pain is the distressing pressure that comes from not releasing emotional energy. When we do not attend to our feelings, they accumulate inside us and create a mounting anxiety that we commonly dismiss as stress" (1). Perhaps never before has humankind been so alienated from so many of its normal feeling states, as it is in the twentieth century. Never before have so many human beings been so emotionally deadened and impoverished. The disease of emotional emaciation is epidemic. Its effects on health are often euphemistically labeled as stress, and like the emotions, stress is often treated like some unwanted waste that must be removed. Until all of the emotions are accepted indiscriminately (and acceptance does not imply license to dump emotions irresponsibly or abusively), there can be no wholeness, no real sense of well being, and no solid sense of self esteem. Thus, while it may be fairly easy to like oneself when feelings of love or happiness or serenity are present, deeper psychological health is seen only in the individual who can maintain a posture of self love and self respect in the times of emotional hurt that accompany life's inevitable contingencies of loss, loneliness, uncontrollable unfairness, and accidental mistake. The abused toddler often also learns early on that her natural flight response exacerbates the danger she initially tries to flee, ”I’ll teach you to run away from me!”, and later that the ultimate flight response, running away from home, is hopelessly impractical and, of course, even more danger-laden. Many toddlers, at some point, transmute the flight urge into the running around in circles of hyperactivity, and this adaptation “works” on some level to help them escape from uncontainable fear. This then, is often the progenitor for the later OCD-like adaptations of workaholism, busyholism, spendaholism, sex and love compulsivity and other process addictions. self residing in the unconscious still waiting for the safety and nurturance it needs to come forth Others of us, however, are only able to feel forgiveness for our parents from a distance. Thus, while our grief work may bring us powerful feelings of forgiveness, it may still be impossible to feel relaxed or safe around our parents" (229).

The Tao of Fully Feeling describes the middle ground of emotional aliveness that lies between emotional deadness and emotional explosiveness. It helps us to soften and relax into our feelings without exiling them or enshrining them. It guides us to be emotionally expressive in benign, intimacy-enhancing ways. The Tao of Fully Feeling is a kind and calm voice that guides you to discover feelings you buried deep down and legitimize these feelings. I find the contents well-written and highly relatable. We have to walk down the path of anger, blame, grief, self-forgiveness, and maybe eventual forgiveness. The recrystallization of denial is even more likely when parents are no longer hostile in any way, but are still essentially indifferent. Tidbits of apparent interest from them can easily reinstate the illusory belief that Mom and Dad really do care after all. However, when their token gestures of caring are unsubstantiated by authentic or consistent interest, our old wounds of shame and abandonment usually open painfully" (231). Denial protects abused children from the overwhelming, undigestible reality that their parents are not their allies" (17). We suffer many dire consequences when we are unwilling to feel. The price of emotional repression is a constant, wasteful expenditure of energy that leaves many of us depressed and taciturn. Perpetually enervated, more and more of us sink into the apathy and ennui of the “seen that - been there - done that” syndrome. When this occurs, we forfeit our destiny of growing into the vitally expressive and life-celebratory beings we were born to be. Our war on feelings forces our emotions to turn against us. Much of our unnecessary suffering is caused by the ghosts of our murdered emotions wafting into consciousness and haunting us as hurtful thinking. Denied emotions taint our thoughts with fearful worry, dour self-doubt, and angry self-criticism. We also risk “acting out” our emotions unconsciously when we are unwilling to feel them. Sarcasm, criticality, habitual lateness, and “forgotten” commitments are common unconscious expressions of anger. Ironically, these passive-aggressive behaviors leave us in even greater emotional pain because they cause others to distrust and dislike us. The epidemics of overeating, over-medicating, and overworking that plague America are also rooted in our mass retreat from feeling. When we are feeling-phobic, we are compelled to distract ourselves from our emotions with mood-altering substances, workaholism or constant busyness. Many of us, as Anne Wilson Schaef points out in When Society Becomes An Addict, are addicted to at least one self-destructive substance or process.”

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have yet to acquire the full emotional, relational, and self-expressive capacities of mature adults. The repression of the so-called negative polarities of emotion causes much unnecessary pain, as well as the loss of many essential aspects of the feeling nature. In fact, much of the plethora of loneliness, alienation, and addictive distraction that plagues modern America is a result of being taught and forced to reject, pathologize or punish so many of our own and others; normal feeling states. Nowhere, not in the deepest recesses of the self, or in the presence of one's closest friends, is the average person allowed to have and explore any number of normal emotional states. Anger, depression, envy, sadness, fear, distrust, etc., are all as normal a part of life as bread and flowers and streets; yet they have become ubiquitously avoided and shameful human experiences. How tragic this is, for all of these emotions have enormously important and healthy functions in a wholly integrated psyche. One dimension where this is most true is in the arena of healthy self protection. For without access to our dysphoric feelings, we are deprived of the most fundamental part of our ability to notice when something is unfair, abusive, or neglectful in our environments. Those who cannot feel their sadness often do not know when they are being unfairly excluded, and those who cannot feel their normal angry or fearful responses to abuse, are often in danger of putting up with it without protest.

The toddler that bypasses this adaptation of the flight defense may drift into developing the freeze response and become the “lost child”, escaping his fear by slipping more and more deeply into dissociation, letting it all “go in one ear and out the other”; it is not uncommon for this type to eventually devolve into the numbing substance addictions of pot, alcohol, opiates and other “downers”. Thus, while it may be fairly easy to like oneself when feelings of love, happiness or serenity are present, deeper psychological health is seen only in the individual who can maintain a posture of self-compassion and self-respect in the times of emotional hurt that accompany life's inevitable losses, disappointments and unforeseen difficulties. Pete specializes in helping adults who were traumatized in childhood, especially those whose repeated exposure to abuse and/or neglect left them with Pete's first book, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness Out of Blame, is now also an audio book. It has been acclaimed by many therapists and clients as a powerful, compassionate and pragmatic tool for guiding recovery. Alice Miller, author of The Drama of the Gifted Child, wrote: "Pete Walker wrote a book about his own recovery from emotional numbness. The author passionately explores as thoroughly as possible the role of emotions in human life. The result is not only a moving, honest recount but also an informative guide for people who want to become more aware of their buried feelings. Walker's well explained concept of 'reparenting' will help them go through this fascinating process in a safe, protected way."Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-01-12 11:10:18 Boxid IA40321503 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier humanity. Industrial societies treat feelings as if they are obsolete parts. The Tao of Fully Feeling The price of emotional renunciation is a constant, wasteful expenditure of energy that leaves us depressed and taciturn, imprisoned in the apathy and ennui of the "seen that, been there, done that" syndrome. When we surrender and soften to our feelings, we reconnect with our inborn vitality and with the invaluable instinct and intuition that our feelings naturally carry. likely to ignore the adverse effects of their childhoods. Nonetheless, most of the adult suffering I

Many survivors live their whole lives in denial about how much old spiritual beliefs have hurt them and continue to curtail their lives. Barely conscious feelings of guilt, shame, and fear constantly inhibit them from enjoying the normal, life-celebratory aspects of human existence" (199). not imply that adult survivors of dysfunctional families act childishly. It refers to the fact that urn:lcp:taooffullyfeelin0000walk:epub:219d2b37-4f7a-40e7-b5ac-048e90207a39 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier taooffullyfeelin0000walk Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2j9jrxb7vp Invoice 1652 Isbn 0964299607 Lccn 94096296 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-1-g862e Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.14 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-1200275 Openlibrary_editionIn this vein, the degree of an individual's wholeness and integration is often seen in the degree to which s/he can love and respect the self and others, in a myriad of different feeling states. Equanimity with the self and real intimacy with others depends on the ability to lovingly be there for oneself and others, whether the feeling experience is dysphoric or harmonious. Those who can only be there for themselves or another during the "good" times show no constancy, inspire little trust, and are only "fair weather friends" to themselves and others. Most individuals, who choose or are coerced into only identifying with "positive" feelings, usually wind up in an emotionally lifeless middle ground - bland, deadened, and dissociated in an unemotional "no-man's-land." Moreover, when an individual tries to hold onto a preferred feeling for longer than its actual tenure, s/he often appears as unnatural and phony as ersatz grass or plastic flowers. If instead, s/he learns to surrender willingly to the normal human experience that: good feelings always ebb and flow, s/he will eventually be graced with a growing ability to renew the self in the vital waters of emotional flexibility.