Feeling in three waves

When I was very young, I learned that there are good emotions (loyal obedience, approval of authority figures) and bad emotions (anger, sadness, simply feeling down) and that I had to avoid expressing the latter. That trains in incredibly unhealthy emotional reflexes. Before I have even properly felt what comes naturally, I have begun a frantic plan to behave the right way externally. So, for example, if I feel fear, even before I have fully felt it I am feeling guilt and shame about feeling the wrong feeling. Perhaps most oddly of all, when the underlying emotion is already more than I can handle, somehow the extra guilt and shame can be even stronger. I have put years of effort into breaking that long-trained instinct to rapidly interrogate and suppress ‘wrong’ feelings. It has taken literally years of practice to simply be able to feel and identify my original feelings, holding back the impulse to jump immediately from feeling their beginnings to implementing an instantaneous…