I wanted to let you know (in case you didn’t) that I write a lot of posts about healing addictions with food, on my business website. Many of the posts would suit this Divine Truth blog since I often talk about Divine Truth in them, but I post them on the other site as it’s my business’ main focus.
Overeating was my major physical addiction and something I’m passionate about teaching people about how to heal it. On my blog I also talk about a vegan diet and how to make an emotional shift into being vegan.
Like foie gras, where the geese are grabbed by the head, mouths pried open and force-fed massive amounts of food by a tube inserted in their throat,
You forced me to take in all of your bullshit, Mom and Dad.
Just like the goose forced to take in foreign food that is way too much for its small liver,
You pried me open, and force-fed me all of your rage, your fears, your insecurities, your unresolved issues externalized.
And a whole bunch of other awful stuff that I don’t even know what it is yet.
What I do know is that had I take it all in, swallow it all.
By tubing your torrent into me, you got to keep feeling like a good person. Innocent. Your conscience was clear. You maintained your power and control.
You got to feel light, unburdened, free.
Meanwhile burden and heaviness was my everyday existence, feeling trapped a constant feeling.
And then you told me it was all of my bullshit. It’s not yours, it’s mine.
I’m the one with the problem. I am to blame. I am responsible. Everything, always, is my fault.
Okay, yes, I agree now.
And now, just like the geese whose organs fail from the burden of their stomachs being pumped full of way too much food and their livers expand up to ten times their normal size,
I am also bursting at the seams, my spiritual “organs” failing, buckling with the burden of taking it all in.
But now I force-feed myself. Don’t worry, you don’t need to do it anymore, I’ll voluntarily put the tube in my throat myself. I’ll willingly swallow it all, you don’t need to make me anymore.
But I have to stop, because it will kill me if I don’t.
I am handing you back your shame, your rage, your fear. All the other stuff you wanted me to take in that I don’t understand yet.
I’m giving you back your tube.
This shit is not mine, it is all yours. I am not to blame. I am not responsible. It is not my fault.
I don’t care what you do with it; that’s not my problem to concern myself with. It’s yours.
I deserve to feel free, unburdened, light, and happy.
Daddy pulled your pants and underwear down and spanked you?
You’re fine. Stop exaggerating.
Mommy made you stand in the corner again?
You’re fine. Stop exaggerating.
Daddy said that Tigger backpack you want is stupid?
You’re fine. Stop exaggerating.
Mommy said she bets you’d be happy if she died?
You’re fine. Stop exaggerating.
Daddy grabbed your face and screamed at you?
You’re fine. Stop exaggerating.
Mommy made you write “I obey Mom” 200 times?
You’re fine. Stop exaggerating.
Daddy kissed you on the lips?
You’re fine. Stop exaggerating.
You told Mommy he kissed you on the lips and she said you misunderstood?
You’re fine. Stop exaggerating.
Daddy left and took all our money?
You’re fine. Stop exaggerating.
Mommy made you her therapist and emotional spouse?
You’re fine. Stop exaggerating.
Daddy said you looked “smoking’ hot” and that he liked your big boobs?
You’re fine. Stop exaggerating.
Mommy was disgusted when you got fat?
You’re fine. Stop exaggerating.
Daddy considered killing mommy and himself?
You’re fine. Stop exaggerating.
Mommy has ignored you for years now?
You’re fine. Stop exaggerating.
Daddy nearly killed a woman?
She’s fine. Stop exaggerating.
.
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This poem was inspired by feelings I’ve had in the last few years. A few years ago, I found out that my dad had nearly choked to death his partner at the time, after years of physical abuse. When she regained consciousness after passing out from his strangulation of her, my Dad said to her, “You’re fine. Stop exaggerating.”
I realized that what my dad said to this woman after he nearly killed her is the same judgement and demand that has always come from both my parents about their abuse and mistreatment of me. This attitude is also now one that I tend to still perpetrate towards myself about my emotions and my experience, which I am trying to work through.
When I was a kid growing up in the state of Vermont in the USA, I had severe hay fever all the time. I didn’t breathe through my nose for the first 14 years of my life because my sinuses were backed up all the time, day and night, winter and summer.
On a good day, I’d be congested and breathing through my mouth, even when sleeping. On a bad day, I’d sneeze so continuously I could barely do anything else. I remember counting my sneezing episodes and having times where I sneezed over 30 times in a row, uncontrollably. My eyes would sometimes water and puff up and itch.
I have many memories of laying on a couch or bed with a cold washcloth over my eyes, head tilted back to try to drain my nose. I even had hay fever in the winter, when never-melting blankets of snow covered everything and it was usually below freezing temperatures. I would take antihistamines during the bad flare-ups, but I don’t recall them making a huge difference.
When I was a child, my mom took me in for an allergy test where many plant species were scratched into my back. I was allergic to all of them, and my mom used to say that during this test, my back had “lit up like fireworks”. My symptoms were so severe and continuous that my mom used to joke that I was “allergic to life”. My parents even considered getting a surgery that would widen my nasal passages to make more room. I guess the reasoning was that maybe my nasal passage was too narrow to handle my snot (spoiler: it isn’t).
Some of you will know I wrote a blog a while back on how my cat allergy has healed, which you can read by clicking here. I also had the cat (and horse) allergy during the time I had hay fever, but the cat allergy only flared up when I was around cats at other people’s houses; we never had a cat at ours. But the hay fever existed continuously outside of the cat allergy.
Me as a child in Vermont with our family dog
Unlike the cat allergy, my tendency towards hay fever has not fully healed, though it hasn’t been continuous for a long time like it was in my childhood.
In a number of Divine Truth videos, as well as personal chats I’ve had with Jesus and Mary, they’ve shared that the soul-based cause of hay fever is feeling resistive to crying about how emotionally oppressive a person finds their environment. I can’t remember which videos specifically have this info but a good place to start for any physical issue is the Soul Causes of Physical Illness video.
I am still working out exactly what it means to be “emotionally oppressed” and also what that specifically meant for me. My feelings on it at this point are that it has to do with feeling oppressed around expressing and feeling your own emotions, and also around being yourself in your real personality and nature, following your passions and all the important aspects that make up our soul.
My understanding from Divine Truth is that all of our physical problems are emotionally caused, including all allergies including animal allergies, food allergies, plant allergies and all other kinds of allergies. So in the case of hay fever, while the body can be reacting to a plant in an allergic manner, the question is why is the body reacting badly to that plant? If you’re allergic to ragweed, why is your body responding that way? If you’re allergic to mangos, why are you allergic to them? If you’re allergic to dogs, why?
There is a soul-based reason as to why the body is responding negatively to something (a plant, animal or natural food) that God created. It’s not logical that our bodies would be so incompatible with something else that God made which we are interacting with in a very natural way, like just breathing it in our environment or eating a fruit or being around one of God’s creatures.
Instead, something is going on in our souls emotionally to create an allergic reaction in our bodies, and theoretically we should be able to stop our bodies responding in an allergic manner if we work through the causal emotions.
Back to my story: after having had blocked sinuses and hay fever my whole childhood, and having assumed that is how the rest of my life would be, when I was 14 years old we moved from the state of Vermont to the state of Utah. My hay fever went away completely. For years after that, I chocked it up to the fact the flora and pollen in Utah is totally different than Vermont; their climates are very different. Vermont is a humid environment in the northeast of the country and Utah is a desert environment far more west. I thought, I must have been allergic to the flora in Vermont but not the flora in Utah. Or as an alternative, I thought, maybe I just grew out of the allergies.
Utah has a much drier climate.
I didn’t have any hay fever flare ups after that for about 15 years, and I thought I might never have them again. (I did have other health issues at times over those years indicating the repression of certain emotions, but not hay fever).
Then, almost 7 years ago, there were a couple times in that year where the hay fever came back, at times severely. This was odd to me as I thought I would never see it again. Upon learning the emotional cause of it, which is as I mentioned, resistance to crying about how emotionally oppressive you find your environment, I began analyzing.
It seemed that when I was in the company of people that my soul found oppressive, I would get hay fever. Often I wanted to think that the person wasn’t oppressive, so I had to do some deeper reflection on those relationships or who I was with. That being said, Jesus and Mary have mentioned to me that it can happen if I think I’ll be oppressed and start getting sort of stressed out. I’m not sure if that means it can happen with those who aren’t actually oppressive; that part I’m not clear on. I do find though, in retrospect, that most everyone I’ve had hay fever around were indeed oppressive.
In the last 7 years, the hay fever has been on and off. I’ve had it severely at times for weeks or months with people I’ve felt oppressed by, and then had long periods of many months with no hay fever or stuffiness at all. Both having hay fever and not having it has happened in multiple different countries (at least 3 continents, in fact) and many different climates, in different seasons.
Then, a few months ago came the opportunity for a very interesting test about my hay fever.
I decided to take a trip back to Vermont, where I had unbearable allergies every hour of my childhood. I didn’t go back to test my hay fever (haha), but rather to revisit the places of my childhood to access emotions generally, as I hadn’t been back for 20 years. So, I was going back to the same climate, plants and flora that I was supposedly completely allergic to as a child, as shown by my childhood medical allergy tests. I went in the late summer, when all the plants are still well in bloom in Vermont.
Because I knew Divine Truth now, I suspected that I would not have hay fever when I went back, because none of my family still live there; we all moved from the state 20 years prior. I would be there by myself and I thought my suspicions would likely be confirmed that hay fever and allergies have emotional causes, and so I wouldn’t have it. But still I wondered, considering how continuous and severe it was as a child. I also had it very recently in England before going to Vermont, so I obviously hadn’t grown out of it.
And so I went to Vermont. And as you might guess, I had no hay fever at any point over the full week that I was there. I sat on grass, I walked in the woods, I was outside most of the time. Even though I suspected as much, I was kind of blown away.
Back to Grand Isle, Vermont, after 20 years away.
Now, when I think back to why my hay fever went from being severe all day, every day in Vermont as a child, to being totally gone without so much as a sniffle after we moved to Utah, I think I can see why. When we lived in Vermont, while it was a gorgeous place in terms of the scenery of the countryside, we lived very rurally, on a large island in a town with a population of 2000 people and lots of farmland. I only had one friend within walking distance, and there was nowhere to go and hang out; it was one of those towns with one gas station and one school and one church. We didn’t even have a grocery store on the island.
But the bigger factor really was that my parents were quite possessive of me in my childhood; they always wanted me home so I always was home, and they were always home too. My mom was focused on raising my brothers and I and caretaking the home and doing cooking and cleaning, so she was always home. My dad worked full time but if he wasn’t at work, he was at home. My parents, particularly my mom, were very controlling of me in terms of my physical whereabouts and I was rarely allowed to even leave the house, even just to go on a walk. I was always inside with them.
They didn’t really socialize with others and we didn’t really have people over often, so it very much felt like this contained, claustrophobic environment that I couldn’t leave and where my parents always were too. If we left the house it was always as a unit: if one of my brothers had an event, we all had to go watch it whether I wanted to or not. If I had something, the whole family went. If one of our parents had something, we all went. It was all of us, always, together.
And this also meant there was no reprieve from my parent’s emotional oppression of me. Again, I’m still working out the question for myself, “What did being emotionally oppressed by my parents mean? What did that feel like?” And for me I connect with the fact that my parents never wanted any of my emotions; I was not allowed to feel feelings. I was also not allowed to really even speak up or talk or have any personality. My desires and passions were often shut down and ridiculed. In this blog have often shared how I think of myself in my childhood as a doll on a shelf. So really, every aspect of my soul was actively oppressed by both my parents. And because of their controlling nature and the isolation they created in my life in Vermont, it meant I was always receiving their projections.
When we moved to Utah at age 14, it was right in the transition between middle school and high school for me; a pretty big change for kids. We moved to a bigger town with a bigger residential population and a large ongoing tourist population. To me, it felt like I’d moved to a booming metropolis with tons of people!
Park City, Utah – a much bigger town than I was used to!
In high school there were lots of new opportunities that I took part in, including extra sports, art, and music. I suddenly had more activities to go to. I had places to go and things to do. I made more friends than I’d had in Vermont, and spent time with them. I went to my various activities related to school. There were places to hang out that weren’t home now; I could go hike mountains, go snowboarding, I could hang out with friends at local cafes or see a concert at the ski resorts nearby. Our new neighborhood was a more typical suburban development with lots of people you could walk to to visit.
My younger brothers’ worlds also opened up in moving to this new place and they had a lot more activities and friends now too. My parents began doing more things away from the house. My dad was away more, which now I know was a lot due to developing a double life, which I have lots of other feelings about, but when it came to oppression, the simple fact is he just wasn’t around as much, which was a relief in many ways. My mom was still a stay-at-home mom when we first moved, but her attention was now drawn in lots of different places with my brothers and her own activities, and so her distraction was also a relief for me.
My parents’ oppressive emotions hadn’t changed at all, but the change in their ability to keep me at home as much, as well as their increased distractedness with other things, meant I felt a lot less trapped than I did in Vermont. I felt so much more free. I think this is why the hay fever stopped. And it’s why I didn’t have any hay fever in returning to Vermont last year even though I’ve not grown out of the hay fever, because none of my family were there with me. I felt free being in Vermont for the first time.
I’m not sure exactly how hay fever and allergies work in the sense of, there must be something in me that is the reason it still reoccurs when I’m in situations I feel oppressed, and perhaps when I work through that, I won’t get hay fever even around oppressive people. I suppose it must be the resistance to crying about the oppression; it must mean that I’ve not yet resolved those childhood emotions fully.
But I write this blog to help others who may struggle with allergies and hay fever to see that it is not the pollen or the flora that is the real cause of our suffering. Rather, there are emotions in us and dynamics happening in our relationships with others, which need to be looked at. These emotions are what cause our body to have allergic reactions to any of God’s creations: any plants, foods, or animals. Rather than getting all caught up with which plants you need to avoid, worrying about medications and natural strategies for allergy relief, or choosing even the location that you live based on minimizing allergies, we can refocus our attention on the real root causes, which are emotional.
So, if you do have allergies, I wish you all the best in getting to your sadness about emotional oppression, and looking at your relationships, past and present. I’m doing the same.
All the best,
Courtney
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Photo 1 of dandelion by Artem Beliaikin via Unsplash.com
Vermont photos by me
Photo 2 of Utah by Dakota Corbin via Unsplash
Photo 3 of Park City by Olivia Hutcherson via Unsplash
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:
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!
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.
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.
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:
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.
I wanted to share some resources that have been helping me with recognizing more truth in my life and also feeling emotions.
First off, in case any of you aren’t aware of it, Eloisa, a director of the God’s Way Organization, has a fantastic YouTube channel with resources for parents and children as well as videos on other topics too! While I’m not a parent, I do have a much-younger sister and am wanting to learn how to be a good big sister.
And certainly, I was a child of a parent and so I find her parent and children videos really helpful from that angle too. And aside from parenting, I find that Elo’s discussions about principles of living God’s Way, and her own experiences, give me a ton to reflect on for my own life. Thank you Eloisa!
2. Also, I wanted to share my friend Rebecca Johnstone’s music and poetry. Rebecca (I call her Bex) loves Divine Truth too and has created some incredibly moving music and poetry. I love her song My Heart Was Never Bulletproof. Few singers and songwriters are willing to really go there with mother-relationship based pain and heartbreak, and so I really appreciate and love this song that Bex has written, as well as her other songs and her poetry.
I consider Divine Truth to be the ultimate, most-helpful-ever resource out there and the only material in the world that has completely God’s Truth and is fully accurate. I always check everything I hear or read from other resources back with Divine Truth teachings.
That being said, I have found some other resources that have been helpful for getting into emotions and realize more truth about my childhood, my family and why I feel the way I do.
The resources below are not sourced from Divine Truth or God’s Way, and so will not contain full truth and they do have various errors in them. They contain material that is not God’s Truth and may lead to problems if followed. However I have found many of them to also have some really helpful insights, and to contain stories of others which have in turn helped me reflect on my own stuff.
3. A couple months ago I was searching the podcast world for material on emotional and covert incest. I happened across a podcast called The Place We Find Ourselves, hosted by a therapist named Adam Young.
It is categorized under Christianity, but is a therapy podcast that discusses trauma healing and injuries from childhood. Not all the episodes make Christian references, but some do and because it is Christian some of those mentions about Jesus and God are erroneous. So please keep that in mind.
But it is quite fearless in stating truth about what happens in families, and I feel that the host Adam is incredibly compassionate and kind. His guests are really open with their stories, and there are some things said about God that I feel are true and they are very moving and I really love listening to a therapy podcast that talks about God. I have gotten into lot of emotion with this podcast.
You can listen to the podcast below, or you can search “The Place We Find Ourselves” on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Spotify.
4. I first learned of the author Susan Forward from Jesus and Mary’s seminars where they mentioned her book Toxic Parents. Indeed, it is an awesome book and discusses many kinds of toxicity in families. Since then, I’ve also been exploring other books by her, and found them to be really helpful as well. Again, not all the info is true and not all the recommendations advisable, but there are great gems and truths. The three I’ve read/am reading and recommend are:
Toxic Parents
Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them
Mothers Who Can’t Love
5. I love music and find it really helpful for getting into emotions. If I understand correctly, there’s a lot of music that does get us sort of stuck in emotions, or is kind of validating an addiction, and so I’m sure some of the stuff I listen to is that way. Some of the songs though I think are pretty sincere and helpful.
I also find that “breakup” or romantic relationship heartache songs typically feel a lot more accurate to my relationship my parents than any others, so that’s the main way I listen to those!
Growing up, the notion of ever cuddling a cat felt as impossible and far away as the notion of my traveling to the moon (in fact, probably cat cuddling was less likely to happen).
I had severe cat allergies for all my childhood. Just being in a home where there was a cat, even if I never petted it, and if the house was very clean and kept-up, within minutes my reactions would start: sneezing fits where I’d sneeze 30 times in a row, eyes relentlessly itchy and watering to the point of swelling up so I could barely see, face swollen and blotchy. I would get to the point I couldn’t function and would have to leave anywhere with a cat. It would often take ages to recover: long showers, laying on a couch with a cool damp washcloth over my eyes, and medications that never seemed to make much of a difference. It became something my family and I had to work around: I couldn’t really go inside the homes of friends with cats, my family couldn’t stay with other family who had cats.
But in my late teens, it started to change. I noticed if I was in a house with a cat I seemed to be mostly ok — though I was still too afraid to pet one. For years after this change, I thought it was because I had gone vegan. You see, I’d read suggestion that there may be some correlation between consuming dairy (being inflammatory and mucous-producing) and the exacerbation of allergies.
A few years after, I came across the Divine Truth teachings, wherein Jesus and Mary discuss how suppressed emotions in the human soul are the cause of physical problems in our bodies. While the notion of a connection between emotions and the body wasn’t entirely new to me at the time, I had more thought of emotions as a possible player in physical issues, but wasn’t really sure about the idea they could be the entire cause — including the entire cause of allergies — until I came across the following video below. In this video, Jesus shares a personal story about how he also was allergic to cats, and he discovered the root of this being the fact that his father hated cats, and he felt he wouldn’t be loved by his father if he loved cats, and that going through this emotion cleared his cat allergy:
It was then I started reflecting on this turn in my life from years before, differently. You see, it was the exact same time that I went vegan, that I was also opening up to some of my emotions for the first time in years, and facing truth about my family for the first time ever.
At that time in my late teens, my family had fallen apart in my parents’ divorce, and my father had taken some extreme, abusive, hurtful actions in the process. Truth about him was coming out left and right, which was a shock for me as my Mom previously had hidden things he did from me and I fully believed the family facade that he was an awesome dad and great guy. I was in a sort of state of shock that preceeded emotions finally flowing. I was in therapy for the first time, something my mom had set up to support my brothers and I through the divorce. I had an amazing therapist who I still credit with starting the beginning of some big healing for me, who was incredibly compassionate and did not shy away from facing how parents can really be towards their children. He helped me to start to see that I actually had a very abusive father who was treating me terribly, and who in fact always had. He helped me understand what my dad was doing was far from normal, and he helped me understand and validate feelings that nobody ever had before.
All my illusions about my dad were crashing around me, and the intense pressure of so much truth coming out all at once, plus the permission the therapist gave me to voice and consider my feelings, led to some rage and fear and grief coming out of me, after not having cried for so many years. For the first time ever, I started recognizing my father’s oppression and treatment of me, my terror of him, and my sadness at not being loved by him. This kicked off a few years of heavily focusing on “dad stuff”.
And my dad hated cats. Growing up he’d talk about how useless they were, how stupid people who liked them were, and how dogs were much better (we had a dog, and I wasn’t allergic to dogs). When a cat died for whatever reason, he felt it was a good thing. He thought they were pointless animals and the world would be better off without them. I always had to pretend to agree with him, or I’d get the rage, judgment and condescension that happened if I ever had a different opinion or preference about
something than my dad.
Courtney & stuffed animals
If I had loved cats, my dad would have projected that I was stupid and ridiculous, even to the point of feeling hate and rage towards me. There was so much terror of him, and I felt so much shame about loving things he didn’t love, that I even convinced myself for years that I didn’t like cats either, even though deep down I wanted to play with them just like I loved playing with every kind of animal, and despite feeling sadness when I saw someone having a moment with a cat. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my favorite stuffed animal as a child — and I had a LOT of stuffed animals — was a very realistic-looking cat.
Though I’d noticed that my cat allergy had changed over the few years in my late teens, I was still too scared to actually touch a cat, for fear there was still a mild allergy there that might flare up. But also, I realized recently that somehow the law of attraction has been such that I have very rarely ever been in environments with any cats for years.
But a month ago, an opportunity to cat-sit and house-sit was presented to me. I was scared… What if it flared up again? What if living with a cat full time brought it out? Would I still not be able to touch cats?
But guess what? NOTHING HAPPENED.
Every day I’ve been with the cat in the pictures below, which has been for almost a month now, I’ve had no allergy to her at all. I have been incredulous every day, thinking back on how my cat allergy would render me bed-ridden every time I simply shared air in a house with a cat, and yet now I can pet this cat, I can touch my face and eyes after, I can bury my face in her furry back, something that would have been apocalyptic in my childhood. Now, it’s the same as it’s always been with dogs for me, which is to say, absolutely nothing happens.
I now believe that, while I feel going vegan probably helped, as I think inflammatory and mucous-producing foods might make allergies a bit worse, this was not the cause of my allergy in the first place, nor were dietary changes the reason it healed. I feel the allergy was created in my soul similarly to what Jesus described: if I loved cats, my dad wouldn’t love me. And while I wasn’t thinking about cats or my allergies at all when I was in that phase in my late teens, I was heavily focusing on my feelings about my dad, often raging, often sobbing and feeling some grief about my relationship with him. So I now feel that what healed my allergy to cats was seeking truth about my dad’s oppression and his demand for me to agree with all of his opinions and beliefs, and feeling some of the suppressed terror I had about the threat of his rage and disapproval, and sadness at his harshness and lack of love, that healed my allergy to cats.
(That all being said, this isn’t to say I’ve healed all those feelings about my dad — I definitely still have a lot of all of those feelings above that I’ve yet to feel though — but I suppose I’ve felt enough at least to heal my cat allergy).
I loved dogs too, and was not allergic — dad liked dogs!
If you have any allergies to animals, please check out the Divine Truth material and feel about what the causes in your family might be!
I wanted to clarify as well, that my understanding also is that the human desire for pets and relationships with animals is often addictive and about avoiding emotions. So my emotions towards cats (and dogs and other animals) may not be pure from God’s Perspective, and I don’t want to present that they are the right feelings to have. I just wanted to share a story about the truth about animal allergies, and how they can heal, after such a crazy experience that I’ve had.
Also, it could be another blog post entirely, but if you have hay fever and allergies to pollen and plants, there is also emotional correlation for them. I also had hay fever, and once as a child got a plant-allergy scratch test where my back lit up like a fireworks show. The “joke” in my family was that “Courtney is allergic to life”, because it wasn’t just cats I was allergic to, it was also horses and trees and grass and pollen. My hay fever was so bad that I didn’t breathe through my nose for probably the first 13 years of my life because I was always stuffed up, even in my house where there were no cats. Even sleeping at night I’d have to breathe through my mouth.
My understanding from Divine Truth now, is that hay fever is about suppressing the grief about feeling oppressed. For me, I feel this kind of oppression came equally from both my mom and my dad. The hay fever has changed a lot, and I am glad to say it no longer is a constant as it was in my whole childhood, though it does flare up every once in a while. When it does, I’ve noticed there’s typically a correlation to someone I’m spending time with, that I actually feel oppressed by, and am not allowing myself to feel about that oppression. So please look into Divine Truth if you have any kinds of allergies, whether to animals, plants, whatever!
Here are some videos in addition to the above video I’d linked, for you to check out:
God, Love, and Truth 