In my therapy group the other night we did an exercise. The exercise was to remember a painful experience from our past and try to enter into the feeling space of it. We closed our eyes for a few minutes and focused on the experience. Then we were to share the experience with the group in a certain way. We were to express our experience in a phrase, "I felt _______" and communicate, as best we could, the full emotional content of the experience in our uttering of the single phrase.
The reason for the exercise was that we often, in our telling of our "story", have the words actually block our access to the feelings which relate to the story. Here, we were to focus simply on the feeling associated with the experience, and not in sharing all of our thoughts.
The phrase I spoke was "I felt betrayal". I will go into what that meant to me later, but first I want to talk about the gesture I made while I was saying it, and what the group mirrored back to me about that gesture. I was clenching my fists and thrusting them downward. It was a fight-or-flight kind of gesture. It was me "bracing for impact". The impact of betrayal.
What the group communicated to me also had to do with one of the primary reasons I am there: I have challenges in forming and maintaining friendships. I have talked about this in group fairly often. Group members shared with me how they saw this gesture of mine as a shield I hold up around me. It is a shield of protection, and a shield that keep others at a distance.
So what is the nature of this shield? What is it made of? One thing for sure is anger. Deep down I am very angry. It is also about fear. I am deeply afraid of being attacked or abandoned. There have multiple episodes in my adult life when I have felt a sense of betrayal. When I feel this I have a very strong reaction. I want to get away as fast as possible from what I determine is the source of the betrayal. My reaction is often irrational and can overwhelm my higher intention for myself.
This sense of betrayal lives so strongly for me that I think I must project it out to people I am meeting and getting to know. "Don't get too close" is the message I am likely sending to others under the surface. I am a basically likable person, but clearly send people mixed messages at a subtle level. I don't want to be sending those messages for the rest of my life. I really want to overcome this challenge of mine.
One thing I have learned is that as one ages, our unexamined and/or untransformed "stuff" can either become stronger or weaker. Its influence becomes greater or lessens, but not so likely to stay the same. Our stuff becomes stronger if we don't cop to it and work on it. Our stuff becomes weaker if we really set ourselves to understand and transform it. It takes a lot of honesty and work. And it takes time.
Standing where I am today (with loads of issues still left to work on), I can easily say that my own striving to transform my "stuff" is well worth the effort.
Your comments are welcome.
Warmly, Ben
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