Hi Everyone,

I hope you read my last blog, because it was Part 1 of Breaking Down Your Barriers to Intimacy- The Beliefs Barrier. It would be great to have a quick read of that, if you could. Today’s blog is Part 2 of Breaking Down Your Barriers to Intimacy- The Feelings Barrier.

How could feelings be a Barrier to Intimacy, you might ask? I thought feelings were intimacy – you might say to yourself. Well, sharing feelings is very much an aspect of intimacy, but when the feelings you are experiencing within a relationship are toxic, then you have a serious barrier.

A quick recap, in my experience, professionally and personally, I’ve discovered three key Barriers to Intimacy. To make these 3 Barriers easier to remember I’ve given them the acronym – B.E.D. (after all the topic is intimacy).

So what does B.E.D. stand for?

It stands for :

1. BELIEFS -False Fixed Beliefs;

2. EMOTIONS – Toxic unresolved emotions; and

3. DEFENCES – Defence Mechanisms – or behaviours that block intimacy.

Today, we’re focusing on how to take down the Emotional/ Feelings Barrier, or at least minimise that.

Your False Fixed beliefs about yourself, form an unholy alliance with a series of negative or toxic emotions such as toxic shame, unresolved grief or pain; repressed guilt or anger; underlying anxiety; hidden loneliness; or denied joy. Feelings that have been unacknowledged or buried become toxic to your wellbeing, on many levels, and form barriers to intimacy.

Toxic feelings affect your personality; the way you engage with others in the world; your self confidence, your mood, your ability to function in an empowered way and feel fulfilled in your life.

Look at the word Emotion: E- motion that is energy in motion. Healthy emotions are an energy that moves through you in response to your mood, circumstances or relationship with self and others. They act as self regulating signals of pleasure or pain and inform you of what brings you joy and what causes you discomfort. Many emotions are uncomfortable – shame , pain, loneliness, fear, anger, guilt – to name a few core feelings. When these emotions move through you in an organic way and are expressed or released appropriately they provide a feedback benefit and a visceral experience of your world. For example, healthy shame helps you become aware of thoughtless, inferior or unloving behaviour and helps you improve for the next time. “Oh, I yelled at my son and he looked terrified, I feel awful about that, I don’t want to traumatise him, so I’ll find another way to discipline him.” Healthy shame.

Toxic emotions, are where those very same feelings such as fear, pain, shame, guilt, anger, grief, loneliness (and even joy) are not moving through you because they’re denied or repressed for various reasons. You might think “out of sight, out of mind” or you might say, “I’ve got a tough skin, nothing bothers me” or “I don’t need passion in my life, I’m too old”. but if you haven’t actually processed those feelings, or released them in some way, then rather than moving through you, they are getting internalised in your cellular memory; becoming stored in your cells, so to speak, and playing a role in shaping your self story – your identity. “ Gee he’s an anxious guy”; “Wow she’s an angry woman”; “Golly – he’s miserable, or depressed, or always apologising for himself.”

Now we have a backlog of unexpressed emotions stored in the body, and just like when you don’t use your bowels for an extended period of time -toxicity builds, so too when you don’t express these emotions- emotional toxicity builds.

One further thing, toxic feelings, can come from your own personal past experiences or they can be carried from your mother, father or other significant figure from your past or even from previous generations who pass on their unresolved and toxic feelings. For example, people who come from races that have been subjected to displacement or prejudice or genocide, can carry that pain, anger or shame with them on a racial, cultural or ancestral level. These are known as carried toxic feelings. Being a witness to someone else’s pain, can cause you to experience vicarious trauma or pain and if you don’t get to debrief or release it, it gets stored in your cellular memory- that’s what somatic therapy helps with . “The issues are in the tissues”.

Make sense? Let’s look at how we break down the Feelings Barrier.

HOW DO YOU BREAK DOWN THE FEELINGS BARRIER?

We use our 3 Step Process that we discussed in Breaking down the Beliefs Barrier, but with a twist for emotions:
1. Recognise

2. Release

3. Restore or Re-story

Recognise:

When you are in a particular situation and you get uncomfortable or overwhelmingly emotional, and you sense something is not quite right – find an opportunity to pause and ask yourself which emotion is being activated in you? Is it shame, sadness, fear, pain, guilt, loneliness, anger, despair, or denied joy which I call hysteria (or a version of those)?

Now, you must establish if this emotion is healthy or toxic: how do you know if the emotion is toxic? It’s toxic when its excessive or disproportionate to the current circumstances. Part of me wants to say , no emotion is ever toxic, its all just energy – so when I say toxic, I mean is it old, unresolved, disproportionate and running the show because it has been denied, neglected or hidden.

To find the answer to this you ask yourself: what is the present day event or trigger for me feeling this way? Is my reaction proportionate to what’s just gone on? If not, you then put yourself into an even more reflective state, in a quiet place, you grab your pen and paper and you write down the emotion and you ask yourself, these questions:

What is the earliest age you remember feeling that way?
What was happening then?

Once you’ve accessed the earliest memory or the strongest one, you’re free to write the best answer you can, from your intuition (using your non- dominant hand sometimes helps).

If you connect with a deeper truth you’ll organically be moving into the second step of the process which is Release- perhaps you’ll notice yourself sighing or breathing out ,recurrently. This is an emotional detox. You might get angry or teary or distracted. These are also emotional detoxes. Notice these emotions or states and keep writing until you feel empty. They signify that you’re on the right track. Don’t quit because it feels heavy, continue until you feel empty, for the time being, anyway.

After you have done that initial writing, try and ask an additional advanced question:
Is this negative emotion something, I often saw one of my caregivers display or sensed that they were hiding or repressing ? This will give you a clue as to whether you might be carrying the unresolved feelings for your parents or someone from your past?

So how do you release toxic shame or other toxic feelings whether carried or not?

Release:

Now that you’ve brought the subconscious into consciousness through the reflection and writing process.

1. Here are a few techniques to release it:
   In your writing you would have experienced feelings coming out on paper. This is your first layer of release. You may have also noticed yourself breathing out/sighing. These are also emotional releases. Talking to a wise trusted friend and maintaining eye contact, asking them to acknowledge and paraphrase without advice, also is a release.
2. The mouth rinse – Connect with that toxic feeling through writing or talking and then once connected, wash your mouth out with water and spit out the toxic emotion – it should taste bitter. Keep doing this until the water starts to taste neutral again.
3. Recycling- breathe out the feeling and breathe in the opposite emotion.
   Breathe out the word letter by letter pointing to the ground; then raise your head towards the sky and breathe in the alternative do these a few times. Breathe out Fear – breathe in Faith. Breathe out Frustration- breathe in Surrender.
4. Doing somatic therapy, body work and psychodrama is a release.

Then we Restore or re-story:

What does this mean?

Re-store means you restore yourself to an energetic balance by having processed your emotions and moved into a greater state of calm. From that space you can then create a new story or a new possibility for yourself.

You should feel lighter, less burdened, after the release. Now its time to visualise life without that toxic emotion and invite in the alternative emotion- remove toxic shame replace with healthy respect; remove bitterness replace with sweetness. Visualise and rewrite your perspective of the situation or your experience from this healthier emotional state.

Prayer, meditation and gratitude are also useful for re-storying . Thanking the Universe in advance for the profound intimacy it is designing for you.

I hope this helps you release some toxic feelings and remove some of your Barriers to Intimacy. Watch out for my upcoming blog on Breaking Down Your Behavioural Barriers (defence mechanisms) to Intimacy. If you want some help, please contact me for one on one coaching: Subscribe to my newsletter here: https://www.gracegedeon.com/ then email me at [email protected] to book your session at 30% off.