Emotional Expression Part 3: Dad and Me

To read the previous posts in this series, click here for Part 1 and click here for Part 2.

This is Part 3 of this series about what I’ve learned about emotional expression in the last couple years. This blog post will be about experiences I’ve had with and regarding my dad in the last couple years, that has helped me to understand his affect on my struggle with emotional expression.

As I mentioned in my first blog of this series, I have never expressed anger with my dad, and rarely has he seen me cry. Being around my dad has always sent my anxiety sky-high and I would fully “freeze” in his presence. I’d barely breathe, my body would go numb, my throat and belly would clench and I’d often struggle to talk at all, much less emote. I would get quite stiff and quiet around my dad which I now recognize as terror. I think I have often totally gone out of body and dissociated when around him.

I have been aware of my dad’s unloving behavior since I was a teenager, when I had a short stint in therapy, and the therapist was the first person to help me see my dad was abusive.

Growing up with my dad, he sometimes would grab me roughly or shove me, and would scare the family by slamming fists on tables or slamming doors or suddenly yelling etc. He also spanked me a few times but this was considered normal in my Christian upbringing. Because his physically aggressive outbursts weren’t daily or weekly, and didn’t leave me bruised or bleeding, no one thought they were an issue. One time in my childhood he grabbed me and kissed me on the lips and it completely freaked me out. Often I would notice him looking at me too long and it made me feel terrified and ashamed.

Later in my adulthood, more stories about my dad came out. My mom told me that when I was a baby in the car with them, my dad purposefully drove into the curb to scare everyone because he was angry about some destination direction mixup. She also said that once after I left for a school dance as a teenager, my dad remarked that I looked “smoking hot”.

So I already had some awareness of his creation of my struggle with emotional expression in my childhood. My dad is very narcissistic and abusive, and gets a sadistic sort of pleasure from pulling down others, wants power and control over everyone in his environment, and desires to harm people emotionally. He is very manipulative and blaming.

In the years since I was a teenager, my relationship with my dad was on and off and overall rocky. We would often be in touch for a short period of time before he attacked and I drew a boundary and then sometimes we were not in touch for a few years.

Because of my fear of my dad, nearly all my correspondence with my dad has been over email, letter or text. I have always been too afraid to even confront him live on the phone. His responses to my confronting him via email or letter have always been the same: that I am the abusive one, I’ve harmed him severely, I am to blame and he hasn’t done anything wrong.

One time in my early twenties I told him I’d only attend his wedding if he went to a therapy session with me, so we went to one. I tried to share how I felt but his emotional abuse was so bad that the therapist couldn’t keep him civil and herself seemed terrified of him.

Prior to the events I’ll share from a couple years ago, I had come to terms with the fact that my dad was abusive. I had also realized he had sexually predatory feelings towards me. I had known for a long time that a real relationship with him was not possible, and unlike with my mom, I never really tried or hoped for one. I didn’t try to convince him about issues, and I didn’t have the same feelings of desperation that he see what he’d done and validate it like I felt with my mom. I think I had just given up on that a long time ago.

However, because the experiment with my mom had helped me access previously repressed emotions and revealed some really important truth, I wanted to see if I could also experiment with my dad. However, I knew it was a long shot that he’d even agree to see me at all.

But wanted to try, so I texted my dad, which was the our first contact in about 5 years, to ask if I could meet up with him before I moved to England to discuss our relationship. He texted back only, “Not unless the first words out of your mouth are apologies.”

This is one of his abuse tactics, so I knew I would not be able to meet up with my dad unless I groveled and admitted I was horrible, which of course I wasn’t going to do. However I wanted to try to experiment with emotional expression with him somehow. So, a few days later I decided to try to call him. I knew he very likely wouldn’t pick up, especially knowing it was me calling, but it was a huge fear to call him and risk a live conversation, so I wanted to see what would happen for me emotionally if I did.

It took me an hour to call him. Every time I’d get close to calling, I would nearly pass out. My hands would shake and my throat would close up, I felt like I could throw up and then I felt lightheaded. I kept cycling through all these physical sensations of fear. This was only the second time I think I’ve properly felt fear in my life, with the first time being with my mom.

In the process I realized it was a different sensation and a different kind of fear than with my mom, though in both cases I was feeling terror. With my dad, it was like a terror of physical danger and of physical violence, like I could be physically attacked and die. Whereas with my mom, I am not afraid for my life with her, however I did feel terror of a different kind with her. It was an odd thing to experience this terror with trying to call my dad, because he didn’t know where I lived and couldn’t access me, so why would I have this seemingly mortal terror of physical safety?

I eventually called and he did not pick up, but I left a short, shaky and teary voicemail saying I wanted to deal with issues but he needed to want to as well, and that what he’d done to me wasn’t ok. I had rarely shown that kind of emotion with my dad, even if it was for only a short voicemail. I cried for a while after leaving the voicemail, and it was good to get some more sadness out.

A few weeks later and unrelated to this attempt to contact him, I found out that a couple years prior, my dad had nearly choked his then-partner to death after years of physical abuse including other choking incidents and threats to kill her. He also told this woman that when my mom decided she wanted to divorce my dad, that he considered killing my mom and himself afterwards.

I also found out that years ago he’d been physically violent with some young boys, sons of some of his friends, which of course, had caused fallout with those friends.

This was all earth-shattering for me to learn.

Why?

Well, reading this you might not be that surprised given the background I gave before, but I had no idea my dad was capable of this. My parents were together for about 23 years and he had never choked, hit, or threatened to kill my mom or my brothers and I. I thought, my dad was definitely toxic, but not like this.

I say I had no idea he would do this, but then when the revelation came out that my dad had nearly killed a woman, I realized I’d always known this. Suddenly it made sense to me why I’d always had this level of terror with my dad, and a feeling that my dad could kill me or be incredibly violent. Over the years I would sometimes think to myself or tell friends that I suspected my dad could kill me, but I’d dismiss myself as paranoid and dramatic. My family also always reinforces that I make things up and exaggerate everything and am crazy. So my self-doubt had been huge.

I realized that the only reason he hadn’t choked or nearly killed us was that we were extraordinarily subservient and submissive to my dad. We never stood up for ourselves. We were truly like meek cult followers in the Christian household I grew up in, with my dad at the helm as the cult leader. In particular for my mom and I as the women, it was accepted that he was the superior and we were the inferiors and that we were lucky to be in his presence. Our roles were clearly defined and we obeyed.

In contrast, the woman he abused was not as subservient and she did stand up for herself to some extent and called out his behavior, which he responded to with severe violence. My dad has been far more severely violent with women than men, and so it also confirmed my suspicions that I grew up with a dad who hates women and is a misogynist and chauvinist (also evidenced by many other patterns of behavior that he has).

Additionally, I found out that my dad had even made comments in public situations about my body, telling people how great he thought it was that I had bigger boobs than my mom did or how hot I looked at times. So I found out what I had always suspected but also self-doubted about, which was just how sexually predatory my dad was towards me. This had always been a topic of confusion for me as I wasn’t sexually abused in the traditional sense. I might not be remembering something, but my sense is that I don’t have any forgotten memories of overt sexual abuse. Rather, it helped me realized the sexual threat was severe and was there constantly, and this is why I have had some of the symptoms of sexual abuse victims.

So while I didn’t get to experiment with emotionally expressing myself with my dad like I did with my mom, I still learned a lot. And anyway, it wouldn’t be safe or self-loving to put myself in his presence unless it was in a public or safe setting where he couldn’t physically harm me. But a lot of emotion flowed before and after the attempt to call him to emotionally express myself, and a lot of emotion flowed following the truth I’d found out about my dad.

The truth coming out like this helped me realize that if I had emotionally expressed myself with my dad in my childhood, particularly about any of his issues, or his treatment of me, the threat I was under was severe physical violence and even death.

Because our family were so perfectly pandering to him, we didn’t see the truth of what he was actually capable of; what was actually in him all along. Severe violence was always a second away, but it didn’t come out for many decades due to the pandering we did. He didn’t need to be violent, because we were already so successfully oppressed in our emotional expression.

I think there is a lot in this for many people out there to consider about their parent(s). I am not saying all parents are under-the-surface murderous; of course not all are on the end of the spectrum that my dad is. But how many of us tell ourselves, Yes, ok, I was spanked a few times. I was yelled at a bit too. But my parent wouldn’t have killed me.

Or how many of us tell ourselves, Yes, ok, my parent looked at my body a bit too long at times as I was growing up, but they weren’t sexually predatory towards me.

It is so easy to tell ourselves stories about what our parents are and aren’t capable of, when really we don’t know because we haven’t honestly emotionally expressed ourselves with them.

All of this furthered my understanding that my dad also influenced me to have a facade of emotional control and “niceness”. I was the safest with him if I had zero emotional expression of any kind.

And while the big revelation with my dad at this point was that the threat to not emotionally express myself was violence and death, I have also continued to reflect on other aspects of his emotional oppression of me. My dad is completely shut down emotionally and sees emotions as indulgent, and unnecessary. He violently hates and detests emotion. To him, fear and sadness in indicate weakness and mean that you’re a failure of a human, most definitely not respectable. These judgements extend to both women and men.

However because my dad also has significant chauvinistic and misogynistic feelings towards women, if a woman cries around him, his feeling is, Of course, a woman crying again, just typical behavior of the weak, pathetic creatures that they are. He projected disgust at my crying and generally feels women crying are whining and moaning. He feels that emotionally expressive women are unattractive and ugly. He has only ever been cold, rejecting, abandoning, and judgemental towards my sadness.

As a child, he would often make fun of my fears, and make me feel stupid and weak for having them. He would laugh at them and make jokes about them and it would make me feel incredibly small and dumb. At other times, he would say or do things in order to purposefully increase my fear, in some kind of sadistic taunt, even though he wasn’t afraid of that same thing. He often seemed to get pleasure from making me even more afraid.

And now I know that an emotional expression of anger from me could have been met with physical violence or death. In addition to the physical threat, my dad would also have projected an angry woman is evil, shocking, unattractive and disgusting. He, like my mom, projects that my emotional expression is hurting him and illustrates that I am a bad person.

This has been a very emotional thing to come to terms with my dad, but also indescribably validating in explaining so many of my issues.

In the next and last part of this series, I’ll share a bit more about what I’ve learned from these experiences with both of my parents about emotional expression, self-doubt and facade.

Love,

Courtney

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Photo 1 by Karl Fredrickson via Unsplash

Photo 2 by Peter Lloyd via Unsplash

Photo 3 by Reymark Franke via Unsplash

Emotional Expression Part 2: Mom and Me

For Part 1 of this series, click here.

This blog is about the experiment and experiences with emotional expression in my relationship with my mom a couple years ago. For a couple years, I’d been aware that I was resisting dealing with mother emotions, in particular anger at her and how she has treated me over my life. Jesus and Mary had helped me see I was wanting to stay in an angry place and not wanting to feel the pain underneath it all. I am still in that place to a large extent, though not as stubbornly as I was, and have now been able to access some other deeper feelings too.

I knew that my not dealing with my mother-based emotions was affecting my relationships with other women as well as with emotional expression, my self-esteem, facade, creativity and more.

I also was planning on moving to England to be with my husband Perry, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to see my mom in person for at least a few years or longer. So I asked her to meet up in the hopes I could make some progress with some of these emotions I still had.

As I mentioned in the last blog, I realized I had never once emotionally expressed myself with my mom. However, previously, my mom and I had had a number of conversations over the years about the issues between us. These talks went nowhere, with her always denying and gaslighting. I always wanted a lot from the interactions; I wanted her to see what she’d done, understand it, and validate my pain. I wanted her to change and stop doing the same things now, and basically, to love me and hear me. Of course, none of this has never happened, and so holding out for it and demanding it got me nowhere.

The previous discussions I had with my mom about the issues between us were much like a political debate. I was physically stiff, didn’t really make facial expressions or gesticulate, and was also monotone and didn’t cry or display emotion. My mom has similar facade and desire for emotional control and so she was this way in the interactions as well. The talks were about very serious issues but we were really just doing this intellectual competition debate thing with each other. We had had a few hours-long discussions in this manner, just arguing really, but in this extremely “calm” and controlled way.

With her I always wanted to appear like a “together” and “respectable” grown woman. I wanted to win the intellectual debate, to strategize my arguments into an analysis and conclusions that she simply couldn’t deny. I wanted to win the competition with her that she had began with me as a child, about who was the more mature and impressive woman. I also wanted to take back the power she’d always had over me. I never could.

The facade my mom taught me is that women should never be angry, because being angry means you’re a bad person. Anger is shockingly evil and horrible, especially in a woman. Being emotionally messy in any way, including with sadness, is unattractive and shameful. Fear should be justified or downplayed but never felt properly. Always portray that you are pleasant, only ever have lovely feelings, and have it all together.

In the past, my attempts at discussions with my mom never helped me get into deeper emotion because my motivations to make her understand and change were all wrong, and my desire to get power were just to prevent feeling small and helpless and bad about myself. I wanted to take anger out on her. I now realize that I wanted to enter the discussions to avoid emotion, not to feel it.

So I knew I had to do something different to what I’d done before. I needed to go into it with a completely different motivation: I needed have the sole desire to get emotion out of me, and challenge some of my own addictions. I needed to give up trying to get power or win a competition. I needed to have no expectation that she understand or change in any way. I also realized that if anything was going to be different, I needed to express myself with my whole body and self, not just in the words I said. I felt that my sole desire had to be to get suppressed emotion out of me so I could keep healing myself. In some ways, you could say it had to not even be about my mom at all.

The emotional expression part is what terrified me the most. I felt that emotionally expressing myself with her was overdue since I was about 5 years old and I had no idea what would happen if I finally did it. I didn’t even know if I could do it. I have always felt shackled emotionally, locked in a stranglehold, and I didn’t know if I’d be able to do anything different. I didn’t feel confident at all.

I also had no idea what it would look like. Would I cry? Would I be angry? Would I gesticulate? What would I say?

I prayed a lot to God and journaled a lot in the week leading up to it. The prayer was pretty much just to do something different than I always had and get some emotion out. During the “prep” for this, I realized that I had been so focused on the fact I had anger with my mom that I needed to resolve and get underneath, that I had completely forgotten I might still have fear in my relationship with my mother. I had not been focusing on fear at all. But the thought of expressing myself in a more real way with her was incredibly terrifying, and leading up to meeting her a lot of fear started to kick in.

We arranged to meet in a park, and by the time my mom walked up to the blanket I’d set up, I was shaking like a leaf. My whole body was reacting involuntarily and I had never experienced this before. I was shaking and sobbing at the same time, and her initial reaction was disgust. She offered to rearrange the chat for a time when I wasn’t so emotional.

I had no plan going into it but I began to just say how I felt. Rather than arguing points in a philosophical way or debating about things that happened, this time, I just said how I felt. It felt completely different than before. Rather than trying to be an adult woman peer of my mother in a power struggle with her, I gave up the power struggle completely and just remembered that at one time I was her little daughter and she was my mommy and I am devastated about our relationship.

Throughout I just said things like,

“I’m feeling really scared of this chat.”

“I just feel like you’ve always hated me and I don’t understand why.”

“I feel like you never listen to me.”

“I’m so completely heartbroken about my childhood.”

In just saying how I felt, the emotional expression also flowed more.

The whole time I was sobbing and shaking, I had snot running down my nose and was gesticulating. At times I was yelling and crying and shaking at the same time. Beforehand, I had no idea what would come out of me but I now think I felt terror, anger and grief almost all at the same time (or at least all within this short span of time). I felt a kind of a childlike hysteria and emotional desperation, broken-hearted and devastated and raging and terrified. I found that just praying to express myself and then saying how I felt, without trying to argue any points, naturally meant the emotions came out better.

My mom tried to get us back on the philosophical arguing points and continued to do a lot of attacking and blaming and denying. I didn’t take the bait of getting back to intellectual debates, I just kept praying to God to feel my emotions and express myself truthfully. During the interaction, other emotions I felt were helpless, powerless, small, and out of control — all emotions I’d never felt when trying to be adult-like rather than childlike.

Twice my mom walked away in the middle of me talking and went back to her car, returning after a few minutes to tell me why I was wrong. It was an odd behavior from her that I didn’t expect, but now I can see was her wanting to punish me with abandonment, but then deciding she couldn’t leave until she had me back under power and control.

I was taken aback at the total coldness and the rage and condescension coming from her. I was sitting down on the ground sobbing and she stood over me the whole time, never sitting with me and never touching me. At one point she threw tissues at my feet, as if to say, get yourself together, you disgusting disgrace of a woman. The feeling she gave off seeing me on the ground sobbing, shaking, screaming, snotty, hair messy and red-faced, was utter disgust and pure rage.

I had thought she might have some concern for how upset I was, to show some empathy or have some response to my vulnerability, but instead she was more cold than she’d ever been.

Finally, for the third time, she suddenly walked away from me while I was saying something and sobbing and shaking and screaming, got in her car, and drove off.

I stayed and cried and shook for a long time. Eventually I left, and started feeling severely spirit attacked and began spiraling and worrying I was an evil, abusive person. I talked with a dear friend who was utterly kind and just encouraged me to not self-attack and worry but rather keep feeling about how my mom had responded to my emotional expression and vulnerability, and that this has told me a lot about my childhood. In the following days, quite a lot of emotions continued to come out of me.

This experience with my mom (especially right before and during the interaction with her) was the first time since listening to Divine Truth that I’ve ever properly felt fear. Mary has a great blog called “Let Yourself Fall From the Plane” and for the first time I understood what she wrote in that blog because that is exactly what it felt like.

Since then, I have been able to access some sadness and grief about my relationship with my mom. Previously to this experience, I felt only anger and was not aware of having any sadness or grief with her at all. I could not access it whatsoever. Now some of that sadness flows at times, which is really important for me to continue allowing. I also still have a lot of anger, but am far more aware of grief and despair and heartbreak that I feel with her.

One of the things that I felt in retrospect was that in the previous controlled and “polite” discussions with my mom, that I was projecting way more rage at her than when I was in the park actually yelling and swearing. I could be wrong here (also something I’m still working out) but it felt like when I was hysterical in the park, though I was loud with my sobbing and yelling and even swearing, my emotion was flowing and was somehow more contained, and less was actually coming out towards her. In the park I was just concerned with getting stuff out of me, and discovering some more truth, whereas previously my real desire was only to punish my mom and force her to listen to me.

So it felt like an important lesson in that I can be sitting, hands folded in my lap, talking in a “polite” way without any swearing, voice never raised, and project more rage at a person than when I’m owning my emotion and yelling and sobbing and gesticulating wildly making a commotion. In my family the seemingly-polite-but-underhandedly-raging manner of relating is considered nice, respectable and reasonable, wheareas emotionally expressing like I did is considered evil and shocking. And so to my mom, my emotional expression was far more offensive, and yet I feel I was projecting less at her than when I was more in the facade that she approves of.

One of the other striking realizations that came from this experience with my mom was thinking about how little she could handle of my actual emotional expression. In the controlled debates we’d had before, she would sit for as long as four hours with me, or engage in many very long back-and-forth emails and seemed comfortable, even though I was saying very confronting things. Before the park, we had discussed our issues to death already and completely exhausted the topics of concern between us. In this interaction in the park, I wasn’t saying anything new that I hadn’t said many times before. And yet, when I was fully emotionally expressing myself, she couldn’t even handle talking to me for 15 minutes.

In other words,

Me saying things without emotional expression – mom will stay for four or more hours, for numerous debates.

Me saying the same things with emotional expression, just once in my entire life – mom won’t say for fifteen minutes.

This was a huge revelation for me about why I have struggled with emotional expression and facade. I’ll discuss more of these reflections in later blogs.

The truth is, how my mom reacted isn’t really how I expected her to. Because of her facade about loving her kids more than the world, and the kind of person she presents herself to be (and my investment to still believe that facade), I truly thought she would have a more heartfelt response, but there was no warmth. This is part of what triggered more sadness for me in the days following. It felt like her “true colors” had now come out only when I expressed emotionally and hadn’t ever before this.

More thoughts to come on what this taught me about emotional expression, facade and self-doubt. The next blog will be about the experiences I had with my Dad with regards to these topics.

Love,

Courtney

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Photo 1 – Will Truettner via Unsplash

Photo 2 – Will Paterson via Unsplash

Photo 3 – Nathan Dumlao via Unsplash

Emotional Expression Part 1: An Introduction

Hi Everyone,

It’s been a while. I’ve wanted to write some blogs for a long time about some of what I’ve learned about honest emotional expression, self-trust, and facade, based on experiences I’ve had with my family in the last couple years.

I am hoping that my experiences might help others with their seeking truth about their childhood, and learning about how their emotions became shut down from their childhood experiences. I also wanted to share about topics of self-trust and “intuition”, which is something I think many people struggle with in reflecting on what really happened in their childhood. And lastly, also I wanted to touch a bit on facade as well.

I decided to break this post into parts as it ended up being quite long for just one post. So instead it will be a series of posts, with this first post being the introduction.

The Divine Truth teachings, as well as personal feedback to me gifted from Jesus and Mary, have helped me to realize how shut down emotionally I’ve been in my life. At only age 17 I was diagnosed with severe depression and eating disorders, and for many years I struggled with fantasies of suicide. My life is so much better than it used to be, thanks to the emotion that I have felt so far and the truths I’ve learned.

Anyone who has had that level of depression and suicidal feelings knows how incredible it is just to get to a point where you feel well enough to care for yourself financially and perform basic tasks of day-to-day life. However, I have so much more to go in terms of opening up to honest emotional expression, especially in front of others, but even just with myself.

I’ve also always had a lot of self-doubt that comes up in certain areas, and particularly this has been true as I’ve tried to sort out the truth of my childhood and my parent’s emotions towards me. I’ve often dismissed my suspicions about their intentions and downplayed the trauma of my childhood.

Facade is also a big issue for me. I don’t like people to know I’m angry, and I don’t like to cry in front of them. I prefer people to feel I have things “together” and am not messy or out of control. Due to this my anger has often been passive aggressive and underhanded towards others, and I’ve downplayed and hidden my sadness. I often pretend I have different emotions than I actually do. There are many times I’m even just in facade with myself and convince myself that I don’t have emotions that I actually do have.

My current understanding of what honest emotional expression is (and this is just my definition based on my current understanding), is that it is when our real feelings in our soul, and the feelings that we display outwardly, match. This is what it means for it to be honest; there is no discrepancy between them. Also, it seems to me that the emotional expression part is really expressing the emotion like a small child does, where their voice and their body also express the emotion in an unbridled, full way.

For some backstory on my history with emotional expression:

I grew up in a stereotypical American Christian military household, and emotional expression was not allowed, particularly from me. My dad was the only one allowed to feel anger, and he had angry outbursts where he would insult, cut with sarcasm and pull-downs, and threaten punishments. He would get moody and mopey, and slam the occasional door or fist on the table. My mom was passive aggressive and underhanded, and most of her suppressed anger was taken out on me in the form of criticism, punishments and control. Nobody really cried except on the occasion of a tragedy, when a few tears might be allowed from the women.

I was supposed to be a poised, polite, and totally silent and obedient Christian girl, which I mostly succeeded at. I often describe myself in my childhood as having felt like a doll on the shelf in a corner, in a frilly dress with blushed cheeks, smiling but with dead eyes. I felt I was not supposed to have much more of a presence than an actual doll on a shelf. I was meant to look pretty but be silent. My opinions and personality weren’t wanted, and certainly my emotions were absolutely not welcomed. As a very young child I was often called “strong-willed” and “independent”, but not long after, when my parents successfully suppressed me, I began being praised by others outside the family for being “well-behaved” and “mature”, polite and quiet.

Growing up, when I would watch TV shows or movies where a child or teenager openly disagreed with a parent, got in a fight with a parent, or otherwise expressed their emotions, I would marvel. Sometimes the child would yell, run out of the room, slam the door to their bedroom, or cry and sob. I always gawked at these scenes because I absolutely could not imagine ever expressing myself like that, and indeed I never did, not even once.

With my dad, I have never showed anger in front of or at him, and rarely have I cried in front of him. I’ve never really discussed with or displayed fear with him either. I have always interacted with my dad in a way where I’ve been completely frozen and without personality or emotion. I now recognize this as terror.

With my mom, I’d also never showed anger in front of or at her. When I was a child we would have disagreements, but I was always punished for “sassing”. I can now see that what my mom called “talking back” was really just me saying some words of truth about the injustices. I wasn’t yelling, or calling names, or throwing anything, in fact I was relatively calm. But I was punished for speaking up at all, and so didn’t really display emotions with her either. Crying about specific issues external to the family (like a breakup) was ok, but she felt it should be brief and then be done.

A couple years ago, I realized that I hadn’t ever emotionally expressed myself with my parents. By this point I had consistently and quite bluntly told them them that I felt we had many issues in the family. I had told my dad about issues I felt existed via email and letters, and with my mom via emails and some in-person conversations. Because I had *technically* called out issues in our family, I was characterizing that in my mind as having really confronted my parents. But I realized that I had never actually expressed emotions in front of them.

What I mean is, I had said words, but I’d never allowed emotion to come through my body and my voice, and I’d never at all looked like a child expressing emotion. I never wanted to be messy or appear like I wasn’t “together”, and I wanted them to take me seriously, so I was always very controlled, calm, and monotone when I spoke with them. I didn’t want to seem childlike, I wanted to seem like a “respectable” adult who could win the argument of logic.

I was also afraid they would feel I was evil if I expressed anger, weak if I cried, pathetic if I was terrified. I also felt I simply wasn’t allowed to express in these ways. I didn’t even know why or what the consequence really would be, I just always had this sense that I was not allowed.

But I realized that “saying words” was not the same as emotional expression. Don’t get me wrong, just saying the words, even in the controlled, adult-like way that I did was so confronting for my parents that I’d had turbulent and intermittent relationships with them for many years and been attacked and blamed a great deal. But I didn’t have any idea what would happen if I emotionally expressed myself. However, I started feeling curious about why I was so afraid, and why I had never felt allowed. And I sensed this block to emotional expression was preventing me from accessing important deeper emotions, and from understanding the full truth about my childhood.

I thought, what if I did honestly emotionally express myself with my parents, which I’ve never ever done? What would have happened if I did as a kid? Why have I always felt this is simply not allowed?

So, a couple years ago I did some experiments with my parents, and also the Law of Attraction brought me some truth that really helped me as well. These next few blogs will be about what those experiments were and what I learned about emotional expression.

(For clarity, my parents have been divorced since I was 17 and have no relationship with each other, so my processes with each of them have been separate from each other.)

I do want to add a disclaimer and say that these blogs aren’t meant to be taken as instruction on what you should do with your parents. I’m not writing these blogs to tell anyone that they should confront their parents the way I did. I am not sure that I was loving all the time, or if it was the best/only way to arrive at the understandings that I did (maybe it was and I’m just worried, or maybe it wasn’t, I’m still working that out). The reason I’ll share the specific stories is to explain the bigger picture realizations that arose about emotional expression, that I hope might help others. But all the choices I made were my own ideas to experiment with, and shouldn’t be taken as a reflection of what Jesus and Mary recommend. I just do know that I’ve had a bit of growth and understanding from it about certain concepts that I want to share.

I do also have to give Jesus and Mary all the credit for all the growth I’ve had though, because I wouldn’t have even known I had an issue with emotional expression without Jesus and Mary and the Divine Truth teachings. Without them I would be completely lost and wouldn’t be aware that I had issues with facade or with self-doubt. I’d also be in way more delusion about my childhood than I am if it weren’t for them.

On that note, in case you’re new to this blog or haven’t watched much Divine Truth material about emotional expression, I would at this point like to recommend some Divine Truth videos that might help with understanding some of these concepts and phrases. They’re much better at explaining the concepts than I am and so I really recommend watching them:

Divine Truth videos about emotion

Divine Truth videos about facade

What has helped me, and what I’d recommend, is to reflect on what emotions you openly displayed in front of your parents as a child, if any. Not just the words you said (though that’s a part of it), but the full, unedited, unrestrained expression of emotion.

Did you express anger around them?

Cry in front of them?

Were you ever very emotionally messy?

Were you allowed the expression of some emotions but not others?

Was it different with one parent than the other, or with your other caregivers?

Did you ever notice a difference in your freedom to emotionally express compared with your friends’ families or portrayed on TV?

These are some of the questions that helped me realize something happened where I never felt allowed to emotionally express, and that there might be something important for me to explore.

Thanks and until the next post,

Courtney

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Photo 1 – Annie Spratt via Unsplash

Photo 2 – Xinyi Song via Unsplash

Photo 3 – Nsey Benajah via Unsplash