Emotional Expression Part 4: Reflections

This is part 4 on my series about opening up to emotional expression. To read the previous posts in this series, click here for Part 1, click here for Part 2, and click here for Part 3.

It’s now been about 2 years since all of these incidents. I was able to feel through a heap of emotions in both of these experiences with my parents; fear for the first time, and also anger and grief. I don’t know how soon I would have gotten to those emotions otherwise.

I still have many emotions to feel about these events and about my childhood, and I still have many issues with emotional expression and facade, but these experiences helped me and taught me a lot.

I want to reiterate that this blog is not meant to be a prescriptive suggestion for what you should do in your interactions with your parents. All these choices to confront and express with my parents were ones I made on my own as experiments. But I wanted to write this to share what I feel the experiences showed me about issues that we all face.

The Aftermath

My dad never got in touch to see me before I moved. He told everyone that I have fabricated everything I’ve ever said he did to me or to others. He has convinced my brothers and his side of the family of this as well. He has not been in touch with me in the last 2 years and I suspect he has blocked my phone number and email.

My grandmother on my Dad’s side passed and I was not invited to her funeral nor told at all about the death by anyone in the immediate family. I found out later, accidentally.

My mom has also stopped talking to me completely in the last 2 years. She also didn’t want to see me before I moved countries, and she has not responded at all to the few emails and texts I’ve sent her since then. I’ve had a grandparent, an uncle, and a cousin die on her side of the family and I wasn’t invited to any funerals, nor was I told that they passed. Rather I found out later from cousins.

My parents both sought out my brothers to get them on their “side” after these events, which is a pattern they’ve engaged my whole life. I did not tell my brothers about any of the interactions with my parents nor involve them at all. My parents hate each other, but both feel the same way towards me, and have wanted my brothers and other family members to attack me. I also had an interaction with my grandfather where I shared in an email how I honestly felt about family dynamics. After hearing about all these interactions with my parents and grandfather, one of my brothers sent me a few emails saying things like,

“The most abusive person in the family, most angry, delusional and damaging person I’ve met in my life is you. I truly wish you figure out what’s making you so unhappy, but honestly hope I never hear from or about you again. You bring nothing but pain.”

“Like a child, you make things up to put others down to build yourself up. This is good bye, good luck, I don’t miss you and I don’t plan ever to hear from you again. I can’t think of a time in the last 15 years you’ve made anyone’s life better. If anyone chooses not to sever ties, that’s their choice but this is the last conversation I’ll have with or about you.”

This brother has since had a child of his own, again which nobody told me about nor has invited me to meet. My other brother just stopped talking to me without any direct confrontation.

While these messages from my brother are harsh and I do have hurt to feel about it, I recognize that my siblings are only reflecting the precise emotions that my parents have towards me. Both my parents saw these emails from my brother and didn’t say anything, and the reason for that is that they have trained my brother to feel this way about me and so these are their feelings towards me exactly. My parents (and grandparents) feel glad when my brothers attack and reject me. My brothers were also abused in many ways and I am older than them, so I saw the pain created in them as little boys, that they now want to avoid.

My brothers are attacking and rejecting me in an effort to avoid their own pain with our parents and about their own childhoods. I have compassion for that. That being said, I am grieving the loss of my brothers and still miss them a lot.

My family’s preferred mode of punishment and abuse has tended to be to initially attack me and tell me that I am a terrible person, and then after that, to completely ignore me. The “You’re dead to me” projection is the primary punishment in my family, and my dad has even said that to me directly in the past. My mom has the same feeling, but due to her heavy facade, hasn’t said the actual statement, but her behavior has been much the same as my dad’s. This has been their response to my honest emotional expression.

So since all of this, most all of my family has cut me out, with the exception of a couple of cousins. I am also in touch with my 9 year old half-sister. But that is it.

I am finding it extremely difficult to work through being hated by most of my family, but I have to say that I don’t regret any of the efforts I went to finding out what the truth really is. While losing most all my family has been so hard, it has absolutely been worth it. It’s not worth keeping our family “close” and together if it means living in delusion and having our emotional expression continue to be suffocated. It now feels obvious how awful of a trade that is to make.

Opening to Emotional Expression

Now I’d like to share some of what I learned from these experiences with my family, and how I feel that it might be relevant for others in exploring their issues with emotional expression. Everyone’s situation is unique but I wanted to share to encourage exploration and maybe save others some time and heartache.

Some of what I learned:

1) I can trust my intuition as to what I suspect my parents’ real motivations and feelings are, rather than self-doubting.

Not only was I bang-on in my intuition about what my parents’ real feelings were towards me, it was even worse than I had thought. So not only was I not exaggerating or being paranoid, in fact the suspicions of what I thought the truth might be, still didn’t go far enough.

When I had these experiences with my parents, I’d been listening to Divine Truth for 9 years and I’d had personal feedback about my parents from Jesus and Mary. I started unraveling the truth about my dad when I went to therapy 16 years prior. So after 16 years since starting on looking at childhood stuff and 9 years listening to DT, I really thought I understood the truth of what happened in my childhood and I really thought I accurately saw my parents for who they are. I thought I got it.

But even after that amount of time studying my family and listening to Divine Truth, if you would have asked me if my mom would be cold and cruel in my deepest moment of vulnerability with her, and after only one sole time expressing my emotions with her, totally cut me out of her life, I would have said ‘No, she’s not that bad. She wouldn’t do that. She’s my mother after all.’

If you would have asked me if my dad was capable of killing women, of severe violence and abuse, I would have said ‘No, he’s very emotionally abusive, but he’s not going to kill someone. Just because he gets angry and spanked me doesn’t mean he’s murderous.’

If you would have asked me if I thought my family would eventually not invite me to funerals and not tell me about family deaths or births, and appear to decide to never talk to me again, I would have said ‘No, they’ve got major issues but they’re reasonable people.‘

But I was wrong about all of that, even after all that time and study and feedback. I am not judging myself for being wrong about it. Rather I’m emphasizing this to help others reflect on the potential that they might think they know the truth about their parents, but don’t actually know. I needed to trust myself and not doubt any of what I suspected, because in the end all of what I suspected was true. If I had trusted what I thought might be true, it would have allowed me to explore what the truth was, and access emotions sooner. From what I have observed, most everyone downplays the truth of their parents’ feelings and demands on them.

2) Not knowing the full truth of my parents’ motivations and feelings towards me cut me off from accessing and feeling important emotions for my growth.

I could not access certain deeper emotions unless I knew what the truth was about the threats I’ve always been under since conception, and what the real motivations and feelings were from my parents towards me.

During the experiences as well as in the last 2 years, I have been able to get into layers of rage and sadness that I would not have been able to access had my parents’ true feelings not been exposed. Their true colors were only fully exposed when I emotionally expressed myself. The truth did not get exposed to anywhere near the same level when I just talked and said (albeit confronting) words, but controlled all of my unbridled, messy emotional expression.

Before these experiences, I truly believed that emotional expression wouldn’t expose any additional emotions within me. I thought, “I’ve already confronted my parents and told them the issues, what more could come out emotionally now?” What would be the difference, really? But I was so wrong. The difference between emotionally expressing and not, could not be underestimated. Heaps of emotion poured out of me only when I finally faced some terror of emotionally expressing myself.

Also, there were so many patterns and tendencies that I have which I was quite confused about before these experiences, but which I now understand so much better. It is a huge relief to feel much more clear about yourself and why you do what you do, feel what you feel, and have the problems that you have. So many more things in my life and my past now make sense. This also means I feel certain issues are far more solve-able than I felt they were before, because I was just so damn confused. It’s helped my clarity and faith a lot.

3) What my parents said to me about always loving me and the kind of people they say they are, was never true. It was a complete lie.

I was still, to some extent, believing what my parents had always said to me. As I mentioned before, an issue in my family is heavy facade, even within the family, behind closed doors. As a child, my parents, particularly my mom, presented a huge facade about their love for me, while their treatment was very different. They also have very heavy facades about being great people generally. And so even as of a few years ago, I somewhat still believed what everyone said. I believed that my dad would never threaten my life, that my mom would never abandon her children. But the things my parents said about how they cared about me didn’t have a shred of truth.

It is emotional to come to terms with the fact that your entire childhood and relationship with your parents simply wasn’t real. It was a house of cards that the truth could have easily blown over in an instant. But the truth is helping me heal and helping me with opening to a relationship with my true parent, God.

4) The threats, judgements, and projections towards me about my emotional expression are a part of what created my facade.

There have been so many teachings I’ve imbibed about emotional expression, such as that an emotionally messy woman is disgusting, pathetic and utterly unattractive. An angry woman is the the worst kind of woman. Having anger of any kind makes you a shocking, abusive person. You are a horrible person if you’re upset with your parents. You must hide your emotions from others and be respectable. I have felt that crying means you’re weak and can’t handle life well and demonstrates you’re a bit of a failure of a human. My family views my emotions as evidence in their beliefs that I’m mentally ill and crazy.

I have internalized these beliefs and judgements about my own emotion and about similar emotional expressions in others as well. This is a part of what created the facade I ended up having, involving appearing “nice”, “together” and “mature” etc. As a child this facade helped me avoid anger and grief, and helped me avoid a lot of fear and terror related to the threats from my parents if I didn’t have this facade. My facade was in many ways a huge protective barrier for perceived safety. A lot of scary things would have happened if we emotionally expressed ourselves as children.

I can see the logic that now I don’t need that facade, I am not a captive child in my parents’ home. So now I can deconstruct my facade if I wish, which is something I’ve done a little bit of but still need to really decide to do. But in any case, I have a bit more compassion about my facade than I did before. These experiences helped me see that there are reasons I have and want a facade, it’s not just that I’ve got some weird dark problem of wanting to be fake for no reason, or that desire for facade is a personality flaw. It is inevitable I ended up with a facade, given the threats about emotional expression that I was under and the judgements I was systematically attacked with. I do not need to condemn and judge myself for wanting and having a facade, rather I need to just learn about how to get rid of it now.

I also have more compassion for myself and my rigidity and desire for emotional control. I have a little more compassion for the immense rage I’ve carried my whole life, and I have a small sense of how life-changing it will be for me when I am willing to get more into the grief of all of it. Judging myself a bit less and having some more compassion is helping things progress emotionally.

Final Thoughts

The likelihood is that my parents will never talk to me again on Earth. So now I try to visually imagine my parents in front of me and try having emotional expression and see what comes up. I also find it helpful to think of situations throughout my childhood and teenage years when I shut my emotional expression down, and re-imagine that exact same scenario if I had expressed. This has exposed more truth about what resulting abuse would have been likely, and also an opportunity to feel the emotions I never got to feel and say what I never got to say. I will say that this strategy has not brought up the fear that came up when I was actually in front of my parents, but has helped to get to some anger and sadness.

It seems the threats from our parents if we honestly express our emotions can be immense. We can be cast out, rejected, blamed, shamed, accused of fabricating everything, and told we are horrible people. They may never talk to us again for our whole lives, they may want to physically harm, rape, or kill us. They might want to sabotage our life in some way. Our parents’ true colors often do not come out until we are honestly emotionally expressive. I didn’t at all understand the true conditions I was placed under with my parents until I was expressive.

It has been revolutionary for me to consider that God doesn’t feel about my emotional expression the way my parents feel about it. I have always, without realizing it, assumed God would be as horrified and disgusted by my emotional expression as my parents are. It is strange and liberating to feel like God doesn’t judge me screaming my head off in the woods, or feeling scared, or crying hard and often and easily.

I want to acknowledge Divine Truth and Jesus and Mary as the teachers of Divine Truth for sharing the information they have and for assisting me with personal feedback. I’d never have gotten to the emotions and truths that I have without their teachings. Truly, all that I’ve experienced and realized with my family has been thanks to the fact I’ve heard Divine Truth and been given personal assistance by Jesus and Mary.

To wrap up, I wanted to give some journaling prompt ideas and also video recommendations.

First though, I wanted to mention that I’ve had a couple of questions emailed to me about my experiences I’ve written about in these blogs. I am thinking about possibly doing a Part 5 of the series that would be a Q&A, if there are any additional questions to the ones I’ve received. If your questions are about emotions or facade generally, it would be much better to watch the Divine Truth material than to ask me. But if you have questions about my personal experience and process then I am happy to take those and maybe answer them in another post. So if you do want to send, please email me at godloveandtruth {at} gmail.com

If you’re interested in learning more about emotions and the fear of emotional expression, the Divine Truth videos that I recommend are:

Facing My Fear of Emotions videos

Videos about facade

Emotions and Feelings FAQ playlist

I am a big fan of journaling prompts, and so here are some of my ideas that you could journal about with regards to the topics I’ve talked about in these posts:

If you were to not doubt yourself, what are your suspicions of the worst case scenario of what your parents really feel about your unedited emotional expression?

If you were to not doubt yourself, what are your suspicions of the worst case scenario of what your parents might have done to you if you had consistent, unedited emotional expression?

What emotions did you openly display 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 your parents? Did you cry in front of them? Were you ever very emotionally messy with them?

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?

Why might you be hesitant about or resistant to the idea of emotionally expressing?

What judgements towards yourself (and others) do you have about being emotionally expressive?

In what ways might not knowing the truth about your parents’ threats and conditions be limiting your growth and your life?

Well, I think that’s it for now from me on this series. I just want to recommend being careful about your self-doubt, and also recommend looking at the judgements and fears you have about emotional expression. I am so glad that I understand more now and have more truth and have been able to access emotions that I couldn’t before. It’s much better!

All the best,

Courtney

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Photos 1 and 2 by stormseeker via Unsplash

Photo 3 by Tarek Correa via Unsplash

Photo 4 by Faris Mohammed via Unsplash