FEELINGS
which are suppressed



Sometimes these are hard to identify--you think you feel.

Sometimes not feeling is sensed as an awareness of lack or of hollowness. There are a lot of suppressed feelings around!

To begin to contact these, start from your earliest childhood memories.

1. Write down a list of the feelings you remember that you have had.

2. Write the feelings that you think you might have had if you had allowed yourself to express them.

3. Be aware of times when you felt proud to have controlled your feelings by not feeling them.

4. What did you do to suppress each feeling? How would it have felt if you hadn't suppressed it?

5. Feel the feeling or imagine you can feel it.

(If you would rather not do this in writing, you could tell all this to a trusted, empathic friend. Maybe you could both do it for each other.)

6. Locate current feelings which you don't want to express and write down without any critical thought or attention to grammar, punctuation or spelling, exactly how you see it to be and how you think about not expressing them.

7. Name all those feelings.

8. With each feeling that you know or suspect is being suppressed ask the following questions replacing the feeling used as an example with one you have named.

Q. How does it feel to be ..........(angry)?
A. ...................(Stupid.)

Q. How does it feel to be ..............(stupid)?
A. ..................(More angry.)

Q. How does it feel to be ...............(more angry)?
A. ................(Hurt.)

Q. How does it feel to be ..................(hurt)?
A. .......................... (Lonely).

. . . . and so on. Keep asking "How does it feel" until you are actually feeling how it feels.

If there is difficulty ask "If this was another person, how would I imagine they would feel?"

When you find you are feeling an emotion--Consciously create it and feel it more.

Enjoy the experience of feeling.