So the upside of emotional integration: few or no blockages, awareness of what you are feeling, ability to act on it with crystal clarity.
Downside (and probable utility of stuff like dissociation): this sometimes sucks and is very uncomfortable.
Conversation
Replying to
I get better and better at avoiding lingering harm from feelings that haven't been felt, things not acted on that should have been & emotional confusion.
It doesn't come without its fair share of "wow, there is pain" pulsating really strongly when there *is* pain, though.
1
1
If this was a year ago, I'd be talking about how practices like meditation can crack open a door to some really unsavoury buried emotions.
More and more I find that door is just jammed open. Things rarely fester, but they do hurt. Sometimes a lot.
1
1
Someone you care about said something devastatingly painful? No walls, no boundaries. Just hurt. It passes, but you feel it.
So that is one kind of freedom. No clenched shoulders and passive aggression for days or weeks or years. Just what is there, when it's there.
1
1
But you can probably see why this on its own isn't a great solution for people who have Good Reason to dissociate throughout their day.
2
4
Here's the weird thing:
Society does such a dismal job of preparing you for this - sort of actively attempts to keep you emotionally repressed, actually - that getting liberated is like walking off every map anyone has ever drawn for you. Into complete wilderness.
1
1
I find that I just don't really care anymore when anyone tells me what I should feel. Like, at a deep level, just couldn't care less.
People can say stuff that reveals things that elicit new feelings, but most forms of emotional coercion just seem totally ridiculous to me.
1
When you become inured in this way, you realize a lot of things that feel genuine at times are just tied up in other people's, uh, karma?
As in, the weight of expectation, status games, anxieties about how others see you, etc., control so much behaviour even when it isn't right.
1
So you get this vast net of shadow possibilities.
Some are great and wholesome ("could just walk away from this shitty situation"), some not so much ("could just hit this guy in the face").
It feels dangerous at times. I feel like there is still some work to do on drives, here.
1
A big part of why we have this societal need to repress people's feelings is that some of those feelings are driven by very dangerous urges.
Maybe if we lived healthier lives, this wouldn't be true. But we don't, so it is.
There is some need to come into maturity with freedom.
1
3
This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more
Replying to
Yup, and in cities it's even worse, even if an entire city won't easily collapse since it has so many tributaries.
Just look at all the spree killings in the US as their social myths die. It's still nowhere near as bad as it's likely to get.