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Feel Your Own Feelings

When I repress my emotions, my stomach keeps score... 1
John Powell

''I used to facilitate groups to help people deal with their feelings,'' says the wife of an alcoholic. "I used to openly
express my emotions. Now, after eight years in this relationship, I couldn't tell you what I was feeling if my life
depended on it."

As codependents, we frequently lose touch with the emotional part of ourselves. Sometimes we withdraw emotionally to
avoid being crushed. Being emotionally vulnerable is dangerous. Hurt becomes piled upon hurt, and no one seems to
care. It becomes safer to go away. We become overloaded with pain, so we short-circuit to protect ourselves.

We may withdraw emotionally from certain peoplepeople we think may hurt us. We don't trust them, so we hide the
emotional part of us when we are around them.

Sometimes we feel forced to withdraw our emotions. Family systems, suffering from the effects of alcoholism and other
disorders, reject emotional honesty and at times appear to demand dishonesty. Consider our attempts to tell a drunk how
we felt about him or her smashing up the car, ruining the birthday party, or throwing up in our bed. Our feelings may
provoke unpleasant reactions in others, such as anger. Expressing our feelings may even be dangerous to our physical
well-being, because they rock the family boat.

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Even families that have no history of alcoholism reject feelings. "Don't feel that way. That feeling is inappropriate. In
fact, don't even feel," may be the message we hear. We quickly learn the lie that our feelings don't count, that our feelings
are somehow wrong. Our feelings are not listened to, so we quit listening to them too.

It may appear easier, at times, to not feel. We have so much responsibility because we have taken on so much
responsibility for the people around us. We must do what is necessary anyway. Why take the time to feel? What would it
change?

Sometimes we try to make our feelings disappear because we are afraid of them. To acknowledge how we really feel
would demand a decisionaction or changeon our part. 2 It would bring us face to face with reality. We would become
aware of what we're thinking, what we want, and what we need to do. And we're not ready to do that yet.

Codependents are oppressed, depressed, and repressed. Many of us can quickly tell what someone else is feeling, why
that person is feeling that way, how long they've felt that way, and what that person is probably going to do because of
that feeling. Many of us spend our lives fussing about other people's feelings. We try to fix people's feelings. We try to
control other people's feelings. We don't want to hurt people, we don't want to upset them, and we don't want to offend
them. We feel so responsible for other people's feelings. Yet, we don't know what we are feeling. If we do, we don't
know what to do to fix ourselves. Many of us have abandoned or never taken responsibility for our emotional selves.

Just how important are feelings, anyway? Before I answer that question, let me tell you about when I was in treatment for
chemical dependency at Willmar State Hospital, Willmar, Minnesota, in 1973. I was faced with kicking a ten-year habit
of alcohol, heroin, dilaudid, morphine, methadone, cocaine, barbiturate, amphetamine, marijuana, and any other
substance that even remotely promised to change the way I felt. When I asked my counselor, Ruth Anderson, and other
counselors how to do this, they replied: "Deal with your feelings." (They also suggested I attend Alcoholics Anonymous.
More on that later.) I did start dealing with my feelings. It felt terrible at first. I had emotional explosions that I

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