Not What Good Girls Feel

Occasionally in a reading with a client, I say something that makes me sit up and take notice.  It's as if someone is screaming at me - Ali!  This is for YOU (too)!  LISTEN!

This happened the other day when I said something like 'your emotions don't make you good or bad.'  I can logically know this to be true, but in that instant I knew that I was suppressing certain emotions because they are not what 'good girls' feel.  On some level I believe that certain emotions made me a bad person.  What kinds of emotions?  Hatred, anger, shame, doubt, confusion just to name a few.  And on the other side of the spectrum, it held true that some emotions make you a good person - compassion, generosity, love. 

For years I have been telling myself that emotions are not good or bad.  In my truth, emotions exist, and adding a judgment (good or bad) to them does not make the experience of feeling them better.  Often I think it can pile on and make whatever emotion you are feeling - feel worse.  So I really tried to become conscious of that little voice that told me anger was a bad emotion to feel.  I tried to parent and help my kids with their emotions with acceptance and humility.  I made myself create a new language around emotions.  I talked about how emotions can be uncomfortable (grief, fear, judgment, doubt, shame), but they aren't in an of themselves 'bad' (or good).  Eventually I came to believe that for emotions to heal, it is really about feeling them.  All emotions are valid, simply because we are feeling them, whether we label them as 'good' or 'bad'.  

So with that backdrop, when I said 'your emotions don't make you good or bad' - I was shocked that I had missed this nuance.  What I discovered in the reading was that emotions don't make you good or bad.  It wasn't that the emotion was uncomfortable and I was judging it as bad,  but rather I was limiting my emotional experience to emotions that 'should' be felt (by 'good' people).  The little voice in my head was not only labeling the emotion as something bad to feel, it took it a step further and said I shouldn't feel it, because I won't get to heaven or I won't be a spiritual person, etc.

I know I'm not the only one who had it ingrained in them what good girls/boys should feel.  We have entire generations of men who were simply not supposed to feel anything at all.  And generations of women who were taught to be afraid of or limit 'big' emotions.  We are here to feel.  All of it.

I'm sitting with the uncomfortable emotions, and letting them be with me even if they aren't the 'good' ones.  I am the compassionate witness.  I get it, I understand why I would feel hatred.  I understand why I feel doubt.  And I trust that if I feel into whatever the emotion is, that it will heal.  I am not a victim to any emotion.  As a result, I feel more free and safe to experience the full spectrum of emotions and to a much deeper level.