Practicing Detachment

Learning how to detach from our loved ones is one of the most challenging things we experience as humans. We feel this deep and powerful bond to another person and the sense of losing them becomes unbearable. We feel disoriented, cut off from a part of ourselves. Learning how to cope in a healthy way is learning detachment. When we don’t learn detachment we become dependent especially on a person or substance to provide us with the feeling or comfort we need to be providing for ourselves. We then become dependent on another to feel for us. We hand the one thing we have control over (our feelings) to another and we trust that they will take care of it and when they don’t we feel betrayed. When the other can’t provide the need that we don’t even know we need, but are craving, we end up disappointed because our expectations aren’t met. When we don’t get our expectations met we either blame ourselves for not being “good enough” or we blame another because it becomes too much of a burden to carry around the self blame. When we blame we are projecting our unmet needs onto another and giving them the power to control our feelings. This leaves us feeling powerless and in return we try to control another or our current circumstances.

We each have an internal guidance system known as our feelings. Feelings are subjective; meaning that each person feels an emotion to a certain extreme based on their own beliefs and sensitivity. What may be a traumatic experience to one person can look polar opposite and be just as traumatic to another person. To understand another's experience you don’t have to experience the same event or trauma that they did. All you have to do is experience the same feelings they did. It’s our feelings that connect us, that help us to understand what another person may be feeling because at one time we felt the same way. This is how we relate. One person's experience is not worse or better than another it’s only different. Empathy is understanding. We can look at another and say; I don’t comprehend, but I’ve felt a similar way so I can empathize with you. Empathizing is how we make others feel seen. To make others feel seen we must empathize with ourselves and truly see ourselves.

To feel seen is to feel understood. When we allow ourselves to be seen we’re being vulnerable, we are allowing our hearts to be open. When we receive criticism, rejection or abuse this makes us close off parts of our heart. We then use something whether internally such as self talk or we use something external such as substances to fill or distract us from the feeling that we experienced when we opened up and shared our hearts to another and they ridiculed or demeaned us, ultimately leaving us feeling abandoned and rejected. It’s then that we begin to abandon and reject aspects of ourselves and we split our psyche off into different pieces. We learn how to morph our behavior to appease the people we are around. Let's say you cry because you’re upset, yet the person you’re around doesn’t know how to react to another crying so they tell you to “get over it”, this is most likely what this person heard growing up and it was how they were taught to deal with their emotions therefore it’s how they react to others emotions. Hearing the words “get over it” insinuates that the feeling, the pain or sadness or anger is not valid, that it shouldn’t be felt. That there's no “reason” for it. “Reason” is logical and feelings are not. This is where we begin to create a split in our masculine and feminine energies. When we don’t allow our feelings to be expressed whether another believes they’re valid and reasonable or not we repress them and they lay dormant in our consciousness. Later in life when we experience the same feeling. But maybe in a different scenario and those repressed feelings gets activated or “triggered” by the experience or words of another and it’s then we get to choose if we react from the early childhood wound or to see it, sit with it, understand where it’s stemming from and feel it. This is ultimately how we heal the emotional body. As we begin to get to the “root” of the feeling we begin to react to situations in a new way. We begin to see what’s going on at a deeper level. When we can learn to detach from our feelings and observe them without reacting from them we see they move through us like a river flows. Water always takes the path least resistant. When we learn to live from our feelings we learn to let go of control, we learn to accept and adapt. We become flexible to life's circumstances, no matter what they look or how they feel to us. And in the process of learning how to flow we learn how to be resilient. When we begin to allow ourselves to feel our emotions, but detach from them we begin to heal and we begin to see life from a brand new perspective. When we take back control of our feelings we are no longer feel that sense of being “out of control” and we are no longer being controlled by another person or circumstance, this is how we free ourselves. Expressing our emotions is not weak, sharing our stories or experiences through whatever creative outlet we choose is not asking for attention, it’s simply a way to transmute our darkness into light. Shame likes to hide in the dark, it grows and feeds off the dark, but once we bring it into the light it’s no longer sitting inside of us eating us up and turning into hated, bitterness, rage and anger. When we can dance with our darkness it has no power. When we own both aspects of ourselves no one can use it against us, because we see it and we honor it. We send that part of us love and simultaneously know that it’s not who we are, it is only part of us.