Hello …
After this post, I will not be serving as a GoodTherapy.org Topic Expert. I will be moving on to other ways of communicating with people about their relationships with power, individually and with regard to how our individual relationships with power affect our towns and cities, our country, and our world communally. This is of crucial import in our world and becomes so more and more with the passage of time and the developments that are occurring.
From the individual outward into the communal … each one of us who is unable to feel his or her feelings safely ends up contributing to the disconnection, the alienation, the projecting, blaming and scapegoating, and the violence in our world today and in the future. Each one of us who cannot discern which feelings need to be safely acted upon in the here and now and which need to be followed to the there and then long ago, for our healing compounds whatever numbing, deadening, burying of violence, cruelty, wounding, and pain occurred long ago and reenacts it somehow in our world today—whether outright or by feeding it in others.
And from the communal inward to the individual … our society does not value feeling. It values functioning, being strong, being brave in a puffed-up way. Our society does not value emotional vulnerability. It values toughness. Numbness. Thinking. Doing. Our society does not value really taking the time to feel and grieve. It values a symbolic ritual, a short time to pay tribute, and getting on with it—perhaps by going back to normal or a new normal, perhaps by taking all the feelings that are part of the cauldron of grief and funneling them into a fight against what supposedly caused the grief.
So the individual’s fear of feelings contributes to society’s not valuing feeling. And society’s not valuing feeling interferes with the individual’s allowing himself or herself to feel. A vicious cycle that more than most people can imagine definitely contributes to and feeds the misuse and abuse of power in our world.
My hope and my prayer as I move on is that each person who has read or who reads my posts will take them to heart, be touched and inspired by them, let them move you to take another step in your own healing and in your own relationship with power, and pass them on to others you know.
Thank you, each of you, who has read my posts and has participated with me through your comments. It has been an honor and so meaningful to me.
Many blessings to you all …
Judith
© Copyright 2013 GoodTherapy.org. All rights reserved. Permission to publish granted by Judith Barr, MS, LPC, Power: Healing to the Root Topic Expert Contributor
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