The Viable Alternative

Hey, I’m back again with this being inhibited and stifled stuff.

Dealing with that is a bitch ain’t it?

In my last two blogs, I shared how you may be inhibited and stifled due to the fact that you’re disconnected from your body, or due to past instances where you chose to suppress certain parts of you to survive in the environment you were in (I don’t only mean physical survival, but also emotional survival).

But I’m writing this because there’s more.

Look at your life and ask yourself, was there ever a time where you went through something so emotionally painful that you decided that you never wanted to experience such an emotion again so you decided to suppress your ability to feel or numb your feelings altogether?

You may have also decided to avoid situations that you see as a potential to trigger those feelings.

One particular area where such things are common is love and relationships.

Maybe you were once head over heels in love with a girl and she dumped you or betrayed you by getting knocked down by a group of dudes who you thought were your friends and as icing on the cake, left you with an STD.

Or you were at one time one of those clueless guys who dealt with a ton of rejection with women whose love and affection you tried to buy with gifts and favours, only to find out there was a snowball’s chance in hell of them ever being with you.

When you finally found that one girl who you thought was “it” and made up this whole relationship fantasy with her in your head, after chasing her for months she winds up shutting you down HARD.

It could also be that you lost several people close to you in a short span of time or ONE person really close to you and the grief was just unbearable.

Whatever the case may be, the situation was so painful that with little emotional intelligence you had at your disposal, you decided that in order to protect yourself, you were going to suppress your emotions.

The problem is, when you decide to suppress your ability to feel one type of emotion, it suppresses your ability to feel ALL emotions across the board, including the so called “good” emotions like joy, happiness, freedom, awe, fulfillment, worthiness, etc.

Oh, you may be able to “feel” them at some level, but you won’t be able to enjoy them to their fullest extent.

The flow that comes with you being fully self expressed requires that your being able to fully accept and feel all the emotions across the spectrum – the “good” ones and the “bad” ones or, to put more accurately, the pleasant ones and the unpleasant ones.

I remember the story a childhood friend and former podcasting co-host told me about the wife of social media personality and performance coach, Preston Smiles, named Alexi Planos.

Apparently, she was the victim of sexual assault before she met her husband, and, as a coping mechanism, she decided to suppress all the pain from that experience.

Some time later she had decided to put together some event. My memory is foggy as to what it was. I believe it was some charity or fundraiser for some less fortunate group. Or it may have been that she had gone to present said group with some gift that was truly helpful. Nonetheless, at the event, while everyone was feeling joy and gratefulness, she said that she couldn’t share in the joy of others or enjoy the fulfillment of putting on such a successful event because by suppressing the pain of her trauma, it also muted her ability to feel joy and happiness.

This was when she decided that it was time to go on a healing journey to heal from her trauma.

If you want to fully be free, you have to be willing to feel everything on the spectrum fully. This doesn’t mean you let these emotions control you and you become wildly emotional and reactive.

It means that you can experience these emotions on a visceral level and allow them to go through you. After all, they are just sensations in our bodies. What makes them “bad” is the story we attach to them in our heads.

In order to fully enjoy the highs of life, you also have to be able to fully feel its lows. In essence, to really appreciate heaven, you have to first go through hell.

This is why you see a lot of millionaires and billionaires who live in abundance talk glowingly about their journeys to success. Although it wasn’t fun at the time going through the struggle and hardship they met along the way, the contrast of what they experienced then helped them to appreciate what they have now.

You can’t fully open yourself to the freedom life has to offer if you’re not willing to expose yourself to the risks as well that come along the way of attaining that freedom.

You can’t enjoy the full delicacies, riches, blessings and healing of being in a loving relationship with a women if you’re not willing to open yourself up to the potential dejection, heartbreak, abandonment, and inner turmoil that may come with it.

Ironically, it’s what you suppress out of a fear of feeling is what is keeping you from fully living and BEING.

This The Viable Alternative.

I got one more for you. Stay tuned.

Hope this helps.

Ike Love