The Choice

find our unique purpose and our strength.
ere is no one-size-ĕts-all template for healing, but there are steps
that can be learned and practiced, steps that each individual can weave
together in his or her own way, steps in the dance of freedom.
My ĕrst step in the dance was to take responsibility for my feelings.
To stop repressing and avoiding them, and to stop blaming them on
Béla or other people, to accept them as my own. is was a vital step
in Captain Jason Fuller’s healing too. Like me, he was in the habit of
cutting his feelings off, of running from them until they got big enough
to control him, instead of the other way around. I told him that he
couldn’t avoid pain by avoiding his feelings. He had to take
responsibility for experiencing—and eventually expressing—them
safely, and then for letting them go.
In those early weeks of treatment, I taught him a mantra for
managing his emotions: notice, accept, check, stay. When a feeling
started to overwhelm him, the ĕrst action toward managing the feeling
was to notice—to acknowledge—that he was having a feeling. He
could say to himself, Aha! Here I go again. is is anger. is is
jealousy. is is sadness. (My Jungian therapist taught me something
that I ĕnd quite comforting—that although it feels like the palette of
human feelings is limitless, in fact every emotional shade, like every
color, is derived from just a few primary emotions: sad, mad, glad,
scared. For those just learning an emotional vocabulary, as I was, it’s
less overwhelming to learn to identify only four feelings.)
Once he could name his feelings, Jason needed to accept that those
feelings were his own. ey might be triggered by someone else’s
actions or speech, but they were his. Lashing out at someone else
wasn’t going to make them go away.
en, once he was there with the feeling, he was to check his body
response. Am I hot? Cold? Is my heart racing? How’s my breathing? Am
I okay?