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Emotional avoidance is something that plagues a large majority of our population.  Although it is prevalent in the world at large, it is also at the root of personality disorders such as narcissism and borderline.

We live in an emotionally repressed society and at the root of our emotional repression is addictions, mental health issues, character disorders and physical issues.  We eat, drink, drug, sex and work our way through our days in order to drown out the sounds of our inner cries.

Although men and women handle emotions differently both are a product of an emotionally repressed society.  Women may cry more and be more in touch with how they feel, but there is still a lot of repression because most women also don’t know how to be with their emotions in a healthy way and there is still a lot that is buried from childhood.

At the first onslaught of painful emotions the question is raised “how to I get out of pain” or “how do I get rid of this?”  There is often self loathing, rather than self loving when it comes to accepting our emotional reality.

People don’t really want to feel the full spectrum of emotions in their emotional body.  They want to feel good and anything that feels “bad” is avoided at all cost.

Our advertising models are all about what you need to buy or have in order to make you happy.  Happiness is the elusive carrot that everybody seeks.  They seek happiness through money, status, prestige, material possessions, relationships and sex.  Addictions are another avenue that people seek happiness by drowning out the cries of their pain.

Neurosis was actually a psychological diagnosis but was eliminated from the DSM or Diagnostics Manuel around 1944.  Probably because it was becoming so normal to be neurotic.  Now it seems the majority of our population, less a few enlightened souls suffer from some kind of neurosis.

Our neurosis is that voice in our head that is constantly finding fault with ourselves and the world around us.  It is the voice that tells us we should do this, or we should be doing that, or we shouldn’t do this or that.  This neurotic voice is constantly holding us up to a standard that is somewhere “out there” and not where we are.

The late Alexander Lowen, a Psychiatrist who wrote the books Narcissism and Fear of Life tells us “Neurosis is Fear of Life.  The neurotic person is afraid to open his heart to love, afraid to reach out or strike out, afraid to be fully himself.”

In our neurosis we look for solutions “out there” in the world through buying something new or learning from the various self-help gurus what we “should be doing” to have what we want, or how to get rid of what we don’t want.  If we aren’t finding happiness in this life, we might align with a religion that promises we will find it in the next life, as long as we do everything right.  We then become neurotic about doing the right thing.

We distract ourselves with busy-ness, working long hours, filling every moment of our day, or zoning out on television, the Internet or some other distraction.

We live to eat, rather than eat to live, and pollute our bodies with substances that are marketed as food, but that have little or no actual food value. Our physical and mental health suffer as a result.

We spend energy chasing dreams and either living in the past or fearing the future, but rarely ever are we in the now.

Underneath our busy-ness, our addictions and our distractions, we are sitting on a world of anxiety, fear, sadness, grief, frustration, dissatisfaction, anger, rage, depression, and loneliness, to name a few.

These are the feelings, most people don’t want to feel and yet unlocking the emotions you are avoiding can be your key to health, happiness and true well-being.  It may not be immediate, but our emotions are here to inform us of our inner reality, and if we continue to avoid our inner reality we will be shut off to our true hearts desire.  We will fail to listen when our inner reality informs us that something isn’t right.  We aren’t living true to ourselves, we are doing what we think we should and dodging our fears instead of doing what would truly bring us freedom and satisfaction.

We may fear change and fear the unknown to the point we stay stuck in an undesirable reality.  We may feel stuck in a dead-end relationship, job or living situation and really need to make a change, but our fear keeps us stuck in what we know, even if it is misery.

You may even have a life that looks pretty good from the outside and so you convince yourself that you have a good life, still something is missing; something is wrong; you aren’t fulfilled.

You may be struggling with depression and/or anxiety on a regular basis and don’t know how to change your circumstances.  Therapy doesn’t seem to help and none of the seminars, workshops or relationships you’ve tried are offering any kind of lasting solution either.

You may be hyper-focused on your appearance, your body, the food you eat, and the clothes you wear, in hope that if you achieve your ultimate attractiveness, you will then be happy.

You may be hyper-focused on your health because it is poor, or you have some kind of auto immune disease or condition that robs you of your vitality.  You may be thinking “if I only had good health, I would be happy.”

You may be hyper-focused on money, bills, and financial stress, believing if only you had more money, you would be happy.

You may be lonely, sitting around at home night after night wondering when you are going to meet that someone special or have closer, more meaningful relationships.

You may have found your greatest companion in a bottle of alcohol, a pint of ice cream or a steady stream of weed.

There are so many different ways we distract ourselves from our current reality.  But what you need to realize is the only way to change your current reality is to accept it, move deeper into it and face the emotions that are there.

Many of you might be saying “Kaleah, there is no way I am going to accept my current reality.  I don’t want to stay here.”

Let me make something very clear.  Accepting your realty is one of the best ways to change it.  Because you have to move into the thoughts, feelings and beliefs that are creating your reality the way it currently is.

Often you won’t make a change in your life because you are afraid to.  The fear is overwhelming.  So what do you think would happen if you actually moved into your fear and allowed yourself to feel it?

Fear is one of the most powerful emotions we have.  In fact, most of our darkest emotions are a product of fear.  We live with our fear of inadequacy, our fear that we aren’t enough, our fear of failure, our fear of being abandoned, our fear of being rejected, and our fear of not being attractive enough or sexy enough, or smart enough, or strong enough.

Hatred is even a product of fear.  You may find that you hate someone who has rejected you, abandoned you or treated you poorly because you fear the behavior of the person who hurt you is directly related to worthiness.  You may hate someone who finds you unworthy, because it triggers your own fear that you are unworthy.

All of these unworthiness and inadequacy fears are centered around your core wounds from childhood.  These wounds are usually formed from birth to age six and many are completely unconscious, meaning you don’t remember them.  Nevertheless, they are there, running the show from the deep subconscious.

You can clue into what your core wounds are by the reactions you have today to the things that trigger you.

In my experience those coming out of narcissistic abuse or other toxic relationships, are put in touch with their core wounds because they are highly activated.  The mistake most people make is believing all the pain and fear they are feeling in their body is new and directly the result of their current circumstances. This is not the case.

The pain and fear are a product of core wounds that have been activated or rather brought forth from the subconscious to your conscious awareness.  You are now aware of the pain and fear you’ve been suppressing for ages.

Think about the energy it takes for the body to suppress all that emotion.  It numbs you to life.  It numbs you to joy and the feeling of aliveness.

The good news is, you can only really heal that which you are aware of.  So with your pain and fear being highly activated, you are most definitely aware of it.

When we become aware of the intense pain and fear within us, we need to first accept that it is our inner work to heal the pain, or rather transmute it.

Just for the record, if you are an empath, much of what you are feeling may not be yours, but you may be actually picking up on the repressed pain and fear of someone you are close to.  But if you didn’t have your own repressed pain and fear, you wouldn’t likely have been attracted to that person in the first place.  Sad but true.

One thing Alexander Lowen says, is that we are destined to be attracted to partners where we re-live the painful reality of our early childhood with our Mother or Father.  He tends to focus on the opposite sex parent as being the dynamic we model in our relationships, but it could also be the same sex parent.

The reality is, our first love is always the Mother and around the age of three, for little girls, there can be a transferring of that love to the Father where it is normal for little girls to fall in love with their Fathers and want to marry them.  The same goes for boys who develop fantasies of marrying their Mother’s.  Of course, most of us don’t remember the intense emotions of our first loves and our first heartbreaks when we feel rejected by our first loves.

Loving parents never intend to reject the child, but are doing what they feel is right and appropriate, such as weaning a child from the breast before he or she is ready, or kicking them out of the parents bed and making them sleep alone.  Or dropping them off with strangers at a daycare center.

You may have memories of having a happy and nurturing childhood and aren’t aware of any early childhood discord.

Everyone is a product of our dysfunctional society and our parents often do what they feel is culturally appropriate, believing it is what is best for the child, but can create painful separation and rejection wounds for that child that cause that child to develop defenses to protect him from being hurt again.

We all do our best, but our best is directly related to our own parenting and the programs that are running in our subconscious.  The more aware we become of these programs, the more consciously we live our lives.

Many of the clients I have worked with do remember having very painful childhoods and having an abusive parent or parents.  They remember a parent being mentally ill, alcohol or drug addicted, sick and unavailable, narcissistic, borderline or workaholic.

When you grow up with any of these extremely dysfunctional and toxic circumstances, you are destined to fall in love with someone where you have the same kind of dynamic.  Until you are able to resolve the deep, painful rejection and abandonment wounds in your subconscious, you won’t change this pattern.

Some of my clients who have grown up with very toxic parents, end up marrying a kind-hearted and caring person and they come to me to deal with a toxic parent or sibling, or worse yet, they are having an affair with someone who brings up the same feelings they had in early childhood with that toxic parent or parents.  That dynamic is still playing out in some way in their lives and often if they don’t have it with a significant other, they are still attracted to a toxic lover.

This is actually quite common, in my experience.  I have counseled countless women who are having an affair with a narcissist and feel extremely guilty because they have a loving husband and family at home.  They felt they couldn’t help themselves.  The attraction to the narcissist was very over powering and they found they couldn’t resist.  They felt an excitement and connection they didn’t have with their spouse. They may have even felt “alive.”

It is easy to pass judgement on someone in such a circumstance but remember that one is destined to fall in love with someone where the same dynamic of early childhood is produced.  If one marries someone who is nothing like her parents, she may report that he was kind to her, but she was never truly in love with him.  She loves him, he is a good man, a good father and a good provider, but she never really felt the fireworks.  Sex may be dull and unfulfilling.  When she meets the narcissist it is all romance, passion and fireworks.  She can’t resist the energy.

Now we may attribute all of this to the charisma of the narcissist, but there is much more going on beneath the surface.  There is a child, for a moment in time, fulfilling the unrequited love of the unavailable parent, but then being cast out again, thereby re-enacting the original wound of rejection and abandonment.

As I’ve talked about before, when a child feels rejected or abandoned by the parent he or she intensely loves, the child assumes it is because there is something wrong with her.  She is unworthy.  She is unlovable, she is bad, and she feels shame and guilt.

In adulthood when the rejection and abandonment wound is activated the result is feeling deep shame and/or guilt.  One feels unworthy, bad, and unlovable.  These are the core wounds rising to the surface of her awareness.

Unfortunately, modern day psychology offers little help and support to heal these core wounds.  They do an excellent job of probing into one’s past and unearthing the wounds and the cause of the wounds, but not in healing them.

This is because modern psychology is a product of modern society.  And modern society is deeply emotionally repressed.  We are a very mentally focused society and psychology is very mental.  The definition of psychology is “the scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behavior.”

I always say a psychologist can only take you as deep into your pain as he or she has dared to venture into his or her own pain.  Otherwise the psychologist will unconsciously guide you away from your pain and into a quick fix solution, such as medication or meditation, positive thinking, EMDR, EFT or other techniques.

I spent the majority of my adult life visiting different therapists with no real, lasting results, only temporary fixes.  I was lucky to find a very good therapist who helped me to cure my eating disorder, when I was 19 years old.  He was a real gem and I did have lasting results, however I never truly healed my core wounds.  In fact I got into a very abusive relationship while I was in therapy.

After my last long-term relationship ended over seven years ago, I saw a therapist, who wasn’t a licensed traditional therapist and didn’t follow traditional protocol.  She asked me to stop all other therapies, techniques and reading self-help material while I was in treatment.  She didn’t want me being confused or continuing to seek outside solutions to my deep pain.

This happens a lot with my clients.  They may be seeing several different therapists, reading different books, watching different YouTube videos and trying different techniques that may clash with what I’m doing.  In fact, I’ve had many clients tell me what they have learned about narcissism from various YouTube video’s that are being made from people who have had a narcissistic relationship but don’t have the years of experience in the field and the therapeutic experience helping thousands of people, and so their opinions are formed mostly by their own unique experiences.  When they say “a narcissist will do this,” they are often saying “the narcissist that I was involved with did this.”  So people end up being very confused because there is so much conflicting information out there.

So back to my therapy.  The therapist was all about getting me to tolerate my pain and gave me tools to be able to sit with it.  She didn’t psychoanalyze me, but rather helped me to unearth and allow my current painful reality to be there, taking out all the distractions.  Other modalities of therapy were just distractions.

I made more progress in my work with her than any other therapist, other than the one who helped me to heal my eating disorder.  She is retired now but I have implemented what I learned in that therapeutic relationship into my own practice.

I wasn’t magically healed but I slowly learned that my pain wasn’t my enemy and I needed to be able to welcome it and breathe through it rather than seek distractions from it.  I faced the lion’s share of my pain and when I found myself in painful circumstances I could move through it much more quickly.  I had a few more relationships after that, that ended very painfully, but I was able to end them, knowing I was still attracting from the residual of pain in my subconscious.

These relationships never lasted long, which meant that I was catching on.  I was still attracting dysfunctional men into my life, but whenever I experienced behavior I felt was crazy making, I would immediately end the relationship and deal with the pain on my own.

I haven’t been in a committed relationship for years.  I am no longer attracted to dysfunctional men and haven’t had much luck finding available, healthy men.  To be honest I’m not looking very hard.  I have grown to love myself and enjoy my own company.  I just got back from a three and a half month solo adventure, traveling and living out of a mini van.  If you are interested you can read about these ventures at flyingsolo.me.

When we are no longer needy, seeking someone outside of ourselves to fill the emptiness within, we become very discerning about who we get involved with and will choose to be alone rather than get involved with someone who has not done his or her inner work and can’t take responsibility for his or her own issues.

Having an extended period of time alone is part of the healing process and when we decide to stop being in relationship with toxic and dysfunctional partners we eliminate the Lion’s share of available partners, because our society is so dysfunctional.

There is a lot of healing happening right now and this is great.  Women are much more likely to seek therapy and do their inner work than men, but more men are jumping on board the healing train, because they too are burned out on attracting toxic and dysfunctional partners.

My counseling practice is still 80 percent women and twenty percent men.  Fifty percent of the men I work with are Gay.  That means about ten percent of my counseling practice are straight men.

My personal counseling practice may give some indication of the percentage of men who are willing to do the deep work necessary to be healthy and have healthy relationships, but I also have noticed that whenever I go to any kind of workshop or healing seminar it is largely women and the majority of men who come, come with a woman.

We also can’t make the mistake of believing because someone is in therapy, or going to workshops that they are emotionally healthy and available.  Healing work is hard work and not for the faint of heart.  Many people will leave therapy when they get close to a breakthrough, because there is deep pain involved and the defenses to protect against feeling deep pain are strong.

If one has the courage to go forward and move through their pain they will find many rewards and have a much richer, more authentic experience of life.

Authenticity is the key here.

Alexander Lowen says:

“Regardless of how well we perform, we are failures as people. I believe most of us sense the failure in ourselves.  We are dimly aware of the pain, anguish and despair that lies just below the surface. But we are determined to overcome our weaknesses, override our fears and surmount our anxieties.  This is why books on self-improvement and how to do it are so popular.  Unfortunately these efforts are bound to fail. Being a person is not something one can do.  It’s not a performance!  It may require that we stop our frantic busi-ness, that we take time out to breath and to feel.  In the process we may feel our pain, but if we have the courage to accept it we may also have pleasure.  If we can face our inner emptiness, we will find fulfillment.  If we can go through our despair, we will discover joy.  In this therapeutic undertaking, we may need help.”

Being authentically yourself is really about removing everything that is superficial.  It is about accepting all of your feelings, and accepting where you are right now and who you are right now.  It is about allowing yourself to be who you are, rather than who you think you should be.  It is about listening to the still, small voice within and following its guidance rather than following the expectations of others.

Your feelings are never right, wrong, good or bad.  They simply are….  The less you avoid your emotions and the more you embrace them, the more you will find your authentic self and live a life that is true, deep and fulfilling.