Hay Fever: It’s Not the Pollen

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

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

Emotional Expression Part 1: An Introduction

Hi Everyone,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For some backstory on my history with emotional expression:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Divine Truth videos about emotion

Divine Truth videos about facade

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

Did you express anger around them?

Cry in front of them?

Were you ever very emotionally messy?

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

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

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

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

Thanks and until the next post,

Courtney

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Photo 1 – Annie Spratt via Unsplash

Photo 2 – Xinyi Song via Unsplash

Photo 3 – Nsey Benajah via Unsplash

Some Recommended Resources

Hi Everyone,

I wanted to share some resources that have been helping me with recognizing more truth in my life and also feeling emotions.

1. 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!

Link to Eloisa’s YouTube channel

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.

Link to Bex’ website of music and 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.

Link to The Place We Find Ourselves

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!

Here’s a link to my “emotions songs” playlist on Spotify in case you’d like any ideas for songs. It’s a big mix of topics and genres.

xo

Courtney

Photos by Daniel Anthony and Akin Kaniker via Unsplash, and Kristina Paukshtite via Pexels

Healing Animal Allergies & Divine Truth

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:

 

Click here for Divine Truth clips on causes of physical problems

 

Bye for now from a now-feline-enthusiast,

Courtney

 

Top photo by Ash Edmonds

Healing Mother Emotions and Injuries: New Videos

Hey Everyone,

Greetings from chilly London! I wanted to let you all know I’ve recorded the first videos in a bit for my God Love and Truth youtube channel, to start a series of videos about mother emotions.

This has been a big area of focus for me in the last couple years, and I’m now starting to see some of the benefits of facing truth and feeling emotions on this topic. Also, I’ve been lucky to get lots of feedback and personal truth on my issues with women stemming from my mother and on my relationship with her in my childhood and recently which I’ll share in future videos.

So this series is to share what I’ve learned and experienced in hopes it may encourage others to look at injuries and beliefs from their mothers and to check out more Divine Truth material from Jesus and Mary on it as well. For info J&M have shared on mother injuries, please click here.

Here are the first videos, if you want to get them automatically you can subscribe to the channel by clicking over to youtube as well. It seems sometimes the embedded videos don’t come through in people’s inboxes and so you can click the titles below to be taken to the videos as well.

Divine Truth & Mother Emotions: Intro

Divine Truth & Healing Mother Emotions: Why It’s Important

Love,

Courtney

New Video: Sexual Orientation Confusion P2

Hi Everyone,

I decided there was more to say (and maybe there is still yet more to say) on the topic of injuries and sexual orientation. So, this is the second video in the series where I discuss emotional injuries which caused my own confusion about my soul’s makeup and my attractions.

In this video I discuss more about dreams, others’ addictions to wanting to prevent people from working through sexual emotions, sexual bartering and manipulation, fears, and potential childhood root causes.

Sometimes the embedded video hasn’t been showing up when the post goes out to people subscribed, so in case that happens and you can’t see the video below, you can view Part 2 by clicking here. And for Part 1, click here.

Love,

Courtney

Sexual Orientation Confusion & New Youtube Channel

Hi there,

I’m excited (and a bit self-conscious, I’ll be honest!) to announce I’ve made my first me-only video relating to Divine Truth, sharing more in detail my experience with being confused about my sexual identity and my soulmate makeup. I talk about how that happened, the insanely helpful feedback Jesus and Mary have gifted me which has helped me unravel it so far–I still have more to go–and DT video recommendations to learn more about the subjects of sexual projection, error-based versus pure attraction, and soulmates.

I plan to upload videos on many different topics in the future which will relate with my experiences with Divine Truth or just things I’m inspired by from Jesus and Mary’s teachings, even if I don’t have much experience with them yet! You can subscribe to the youtube channel by being signed into a gmail account and clicking the red “subscribe” button. I’ll announce new videos here, too.

If you want to get in touch to ask questions or clarifications about my experiences I describe in the video, feel free to email your questions to me at godloveandtruth@gmail.com.

Love,

Courtney

My First Divine Truth Video + More

Greetings, Friends! I’m stoked that the videos recorded while I was in London are now up!

The first is the video Perry and I did on “Removing Parental Emotions Towards God”, wherein we “discuss the relationship between the emotional injuries we inherit from our family of origin, how we automatically project those same injuries towards our true parent God, and the process of removing our parental emotional injuries so that we can start to develop a real relationship with God based on Truth.”

It was a new experience for me as I’ve never talked to a camera before, but I had so much fun chatting about these topics and absolutely loved the experience of making the video. I love talking about Divine Truth! Makes me want to create a channel. Hmm…

Next, check out Peter, Perry and Nicky’s first public, recorded divine truth seminar, “Introduction to Divine Truth” and after that, the Q&A. I shared a bit about watching them prepare for this seminar behind the scenes and my reflections on desire and taking action; if you want to read that blog, click here.

Happy viewing!

Courtney