Feelings

This is a hard one.  The way I feel changes all the time, not just day by day or even hour by hour, but even as quickly as minute to minute.  I can be happy and feel secure and in an instant, for no apparent reason, I find myself in the depths of despair and wondering whether it is worth the effort to carry on.  It is hard to explain all the emotions I experience every day and I should imagine it is even harder for the people around me to understand.  Heck, even I don’t understand it sometimes.

But someone said something the other day that has really struck a chord – ‘You are entitled to feel the way you feel’.  

Such simple words that at first glance don’t mean very much.  Even to me, at first I didn’t really get the meaning.  Then I thought about it and it was as though I had been hit by a speeding bullet.  Entitlement!  People take so much for granted in their lives and it is only when we think about it that we realise how much we have and all the things that we feel are our right.

Like most victims of Child Sexual Abuse, my feelings traverse a highly convoluted course, winding their way through happiness and calmness to terror and agitation and passing through panic and desperation in the blink of an eye.  And underlying many of these feelings is the guilt.  

Guilt because I feel like crying and people around me are sympathetic.  Guilt because I feel insecure and my friends and family take a moment to reassure me.

 

And worst of all is the feeling of guilt when I succumb to the depression and just want to sit and wallow.  Because for some reason it is hard to accept that I am allowed to feel this way.

It all comes down to the fact that we generally do not feel that we have the right to impinge on other people’s lives.  And of course, the deeply ingrained belief that how we feel does not matter, we are not important.  This belief that has been taught to us by our abusers, who constantly tell us that we must consider other people – ‘think how angry your mother would be if she found out’, ‘how do you think your parents would feel if you were taken away and put into care’, ‘what do you think people will call you when they find out what you have done’, the unending litany of scarcely veiled threats used to keep us quiet.

So for me, to suddenly be told that I am entitled to feel this way comes as something of a shock.  Because I realise that it is true.  One of the gifts that God has given us is the ability to feel a huge range of different emotions, an ability that does not seem to be shared with other living creatures on earth.  Yes, animals will feel basic emotions such as fear, cold and hunger, but the gamut of emotions that are evident in a human being is unbelievable when you really think about it.

And if we have the ability to feel all these differing emotions, then surely it is alright to feel them?  My head is spinning as I consider the possibility that it is alright for me to feel frightened and insecure, sad or even angry.  Naturally, it isn’t pleasant, but the added burden of guilt is unnecessary.  That is something I have never considered before.

I have always made every effort to hide my true feelings, for no other reason than I feel guilty about it when I have so many other wonderful things in my life, like my work and my children.  I don’t want people to be supportive and kind because I don’t believe I deserve it when there are so many others out there who are worse off than me.

So I know that I now need to stop and think. To remember those amazing words – ‘You are entitled to feel the way you feel’!