Emotional processing may mean challenging your rational voice

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted anything, and I’d like to get back into this regularly. I’m going to start today with a tip that I’ve found helpful, and then I’ll try to be posting more regularly either weekly or, at most, every other week.

Sometimes, the most important voice that you need to hear from is not the part of you that has been repressed: sometimes, the most important voice to hear from is the one that thinks what you’re feeling is wrong.

For me, this solution would often be necessary (and still is) when I had a combination of things occurring, which usually included brain retraining, resistance to feeling an emotion, and often some level of frustration (possibly also repressed) that I was still dealing with an issue that I thought I had already processed.

I bring this up today because I had two recent examples that I thought might be helpful share…

In the past year or so, I, a writer, have been getting writer’s block. I’ve never had writer’s block before, and I know it’s related to all of the other repressed issues I’ve been dealing with and uncovering over the last couple of years.

While writer’s block is better than having physical symptoms, it’s still really frustrating. And the problem is not that I don’t have ideas about what to write, but rather, as soon as I sit down to type them up, my brain freezes and my chest clenches up; or I can type out lots of ideas, but I can’t organize them into a post that can be shared (I have soooooo many drafts of articles that I’ve started by haven’t finished); or, before I know it, I’ve spent hours distracting myself online and snacking, but I haven’t written a word.

Because I know that this is just another symptom, I’ve been using the same healing techniques to work through this. I’ve done JournalSpeak and Parts Work, I’ve done lots of somatic meditation sessions, I’ve tried brain retraining, and so on. Then, recently, I had two instances which have led to some breakthroughs for me.

A few weeks ago, I was trying to do some brain retraining to convince myself that it was safe to write. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but it suddenly occurred to me that the voice that was trying to convince me that I was safe might not be the “true” me. So, to see whether this was the case, I asked the voice how old she was. She told me she was 23. Since I’m 46, it was pretty clear this younger voice was probably not helping in the way she thought she was.

(Aside: If you’re not familiar with Parts Work, I write a bit about it here, and I highly recommend looking up the work of Richard Schwarz, who came up with the idea of “Parts.” Also, if you aren’t familiar with the idea of asking the part of you how old it is, it’s a really powerful technique from Schwarz’s teachings. It was shocking to me the first time I tried it, and the voice that I thought was an adult voice in my head told me that she was just 10. Among other benefits, when you learn the age of the voice, you can start to piece together what was going on at that age and do emotional processing around those events.)

I immediately realized that of course the brain retraining couldn’t work because I was trying to do it with a Part of me that was young and stressed out about my first job, which was not going well. So, I stopped worrying about brain retraining to feel safe with writing, and instead, I did a lot of work around some of the stuff I was dealing with when I was 23. That helped a lot, but when I tried to write again last week, I hit another block.

Again, I tried to work through my block with brain retraining techniques. I have done so much work around fears of not being liked and accepted—which I know is the root of my writer’s block—so I was convinced there was no way that I hadn’t already processed all of my emotional issues there.

I was certain that this time, it was just a matter of rewiring my brain. I reminded myself that what mattered most was what I thought of myself, that I was strong enough to deal with people not liking what I wrote, and other similarly positive messages.

Pretty quickly, I started to get a headache. This was not good. But I was still convinced that I had processed everything emotional related to writer’s block, and so I started to wonder if I needed to try pushing through the pain (which is something I NEVER do, even though I know some people advocate for that approach). And then I had my second “ah-ha” moment.

I suddenly wondered if maybe there was a completely reasonable reason for me to fear writing so badly, and I asked the brain retraining voice why it was so convinced that I shouldn’t be scared of writing or that I shouldn’t be scared of people not liking what I write.

To be honest, my headache got a lot worse when I asked that.

A little bit of background before I go further: I moved a lot as a child, and I had built up a lot of unprocessed, repressed emotions around sadness and grief and loss of friends, etc. I easily accepted that this was emotionally fraught for me, and it was one of the early emotional things that I tackled with JournalSpeak. Over the years, I’ve come back to the grief around these moves quite a few times. However, at some point I felt like I had processed all of the sadness and other emotions around those moves.

Last week, I learned that I had not processed everything. For reasons that are too long to get into here, my brain had connected the idea that people might not like what I write with the loss of so many friends when I was a kid. If I wrote something that people did not like, then it was going to trigger an intense tsunami of grief and rage and inner demons and other emotions that still existed around the loss of those friendships.

My body could not take the risk of releasing those emotions. The resistance to writing and the headache were both symptoms that were trying to keep that pain and grief hidden from me because it felt too big to deal with. Of course, once I finally realized that, I was able to process a lot of those emotions.

I’m sharing this story today because it was such an important reminder to me that often, the voice we think is the rational one may actually be the voice that we need to be questioning.

It was also a helpful reminder that there are always more emotional issues lurking below the surface. As always, this journey is about learning to live our emotional lives differently, and not about trying to get to some point at which we no longer need to deal with emotions.

Plus, now that I’ve just gone through all that hard emotional stuff last week, I need to finally get the brain retraining right, and reinforce the idea that it’s safe to write :-)