Befriending Your Inner Monsters
Turning Toward Difficult Emotions
“At some point, numbness becomes more painful than pain.”
One of my favorite books as a child was The Monster at the End of This Book. In it, Grover, from Sesame Street, is terrified that there is a monster at the end of the book. He doesn’t want to see it. He comes up with the idea that if the reader doesn’t get to the end of the book, he (Grover) won’t have to face the Monster. So he builds increasingly elaborate barriers to stop the reader from turning the pages. First ropes, then boards, then bricks. Of course, as a child, I delighted in turning each page anyway, and seeing Grover laying in the wreckage of the barrier I just demolished.
But at the end, Grover makes a perspective-shifting discovery: he is the Monster at the end of the book. With great relief, he realizes he never had anything to fear.
I loved this book as a child because it made me laugh to smash all of Grover’s barriers and to see him get increasingly and comically agitated. I didn’t realize until later that the book contains a profound metaphor for how many of us (including me) have lived our lives.
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When it comes to feeling painful feelings that try to move through us in response to life’s challenges, we can be like Grover. We don’t want to face those monstrous feelings. The thought of facing them scares us. Terrifies us even, if only unconsciously.
We convince ourselves that we don’t need or deserve to feel challenging feelings. We fear we might succumb to them, be overwhelmed by them, or be slowed down by them. So we build barriers against feeling. We numb out. We distract ourselves. We engage in addictive behaviors.
And in doing this, we pay a terrible price.
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Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. -Rumi
Erecting barriers against feelings is something most of us learned to do as children. Especially those of us who, due to trauma or other highly challenging life circumstances, were faced with feelings we were unequipped to handle as children. We didn’t know how to process such big feelings, so our pre-loaded protection software jumped into action. It numbed us out, and thereby protected us from being overwhelmed.
But even if there wasn’t “big T” trauma in your history, you likely were taught, unintentionally, by your parents, your culture, and your genes, that some feelings are “good” and “OK to feel or express” and others are “bad” and “not OK to feel or express.” As children, we are equipped through systems evolved over millennia to bond with our caregivers. After all, as helpless children, to lose that bond would be fatal: especially if you are a toddler in a hunter-gatherer tribe in the wilderness (which is what we were over the vast majority of our evolutionary species-span). So, without consciously doing so, you began at a very young age to sense what feelings seemed to produce positive feedback from your caregivers and which did not. The ones that didn’t got pushed into your shadow.
On top of all of this, the unwillingness to be with difficult feelings is a legacy that has been passed through countless generations. It is part of our lineage. Your parents held as much space for you to have and process your feelings as they knew how to hold. They taught you what they knew, whether knowingly or not. If, like many of us, you didn’t have parents who modeled how to feel and express the full spectrum of your feelings, you likely pushed them down and turned away from them. They became trapped within you.
Trapped feelings eventually create numbness. And numbness eventually becomes pain.
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I happened to be one of the kids who got exposed to big T trauma. My mother was depressed, alcoholic, and eventually, addicted to the valium her doctors prescribed to her. As she descended into depression and addiction, she clung to me as her lifeline. As a 10 year old, I was enrolled to hold her on the couch, absorb her tears on my shoulder, and listen to her complain about how terrible her life was with my father.
One day I came downstairs to find her passed out and unresponsive. She had taken an overdose of alcohol and valium. Two weeks later she died.
In the small town I grew up in, there were no systems in place to support children like me and my brothers. We received no counseling. There was no talking about what happened with any adults. It all became our shameful family secret. We were left on our own to deal with it.
Thankfully, despite the lack of adult support, I had (as we all do) pre-installed systems to keep me alive and functioning. I learned, without consciously knowing it, to numb the overwhelming feelings. First, through simply not feeling them. Then, as I grew in age and sophistication, by binging on alcohol and engaging in dangerous activities. I also employed more healthy countermeasures, like using my imagination to create fantasy worlds that I could live in safely. It was perhaps my ability to generate a less-harsh fantasy world that allowed me to have the resilience to get through all of it, graduate from high school, college and law school, and create what was on the surface a successful life.
On the inside though, I was not so successful. While I left my teens and my small town behind, I held onto my strategies for “dealing with” feelings into adulthood.
Numbing was my main go-to: it was my ropes, my boards, my bricks. Through alcohol, through excessive work, through constant distractions, I did everything but feel the feelings that were naturally occurring. I hoped that somehow if I kept running, kept blocking, kept avoiding, they would eventually go away.
They didn’t. Life kept turning the pages. My barriers became poisonous.
The numbness I generated eventually turned into pain. And the pain grew. It became more and more pervasive, until none of my strategies for avoiding it worked. I fell into terrible, dark depressions that lasted for months.
There weren’t any apparent life circumstances that justified these episodes in my adult life. I was succeeding in my career. I was making good money. I was married. I lived in a beautiful city. By all surface accounts, I should have been happy. But I was increasingly miserable.
Eventually, my outer world began to reflect my inner world. My first marriage fell apart. I became disenchanted with my career. I became increasingly isolated. It was all coming apart. And I had no idea why.
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If you pursue the path I’m describing far enough, you will likely find that at some point, numbness becomes more painful than pain. When that pain becomes unbearable, you are faced with a choice.
It is at this moment of grace, of opportunity, that your real journey will begin or end.
It ends down the path of hopelessness, sickness, isolation, and even untimely death. It will work its way through your psyche, into your organs, into your bones. Through depression, through sickness, through addiction, if unchecked, the path of numbing will grind you down.
But your journey toward healing begins if, in your brokenness, in your despair, in your sense of having stretched beyond your limits, you at last turn toward that which is wanting to be felt.
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Turning toward your feelings involves taking the time to sit quietly with yourself. Take a few deep breaths, focusing on the sensation of breathing. Allow any discursive stories about what you are doing or feeling to march on by. Don’t attach to those thoughts. Allow them to fade into the background. Adopt, as much as you are able, an attitude of open, loving curiosity toward yourself and your experience.
Then, ask yourself where you feel the feelings in your body. Ever so gently, turn toward these sensations, opening space around them. Allow them to just be there, without any judgment or attempt to change them. Notice the sensations that are present: tightness, heat, shakiness, whatever they might be. Also notice any visual representation that arises as you sit with these sensations.
There may be pain at first. Maybe a lot of pain. But the pain will not kill you. Instead, as you open layer by layer, you will eventually find that the feelings are just feelings. They are sensations. Unbounded by stories and beliefs, they shift and move. They become spacious. Eventually, if allowed to be, without interference, they dissolve.
In their wake you may find they leave a capacity for love, a strength, a knowing of peace, that has heretofore been utterly hidden from you.
Your feelings are wanting this release. They have been held in place, perhaps for a very long time, by your stories, by your fear, by your habitual turning away from them through numbing and distraction. Through the gift of your open, non-judging attention and care, they will finally be able to do what they were designed to do: to offer their wisdom, and then to dissolve, leaving in their wake a cleansed and more vibrant version of you.
The more you practice this, the easier it will become. You may even be surprised at how readily this movement occurs once you start to engage in these practices.
But often, it takes time and effort to reach the point of easeful flow, especially if you’ve been blocked up for a long time, or if you are in the middle of challenging life circumstances. Don’t be discouraged. Take heart at the experiences of others who have found themselves in the same place as you, and found their way through. Pay attention to your breakthroughs. Keep at the practice. It’s worth it.
You may also find that after you experience the moving through and release of difficult feelings, you will feel yourself start to shut down again–to become cynical, numbed out, or guarded. Don’t be discouraged by this. It is simply your reliable defense system reasserting itself. Remember, you’ve been relying upon and strengthening this system of avoiding difficult feelings for a long time. Perhaps most of your life. It is simply fulfilling its original design: to protect you. As a young person, as a child, you needed that protection. But like a robot that continues to run its programming long after its purpose has been exhausted, this system has outlived its purpose–it has become counterproductive. It needs you to disidentify from it and to take over the project of restoring yourself to health: by allowing the natural flow and function of your nervous system. By allowing feelings to come, do their thing, and move on.
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Get support in this practice. It’s amusing to me that most of us readily accept that we need help in learning how to drive a car, to ski, or to solve math problems. And yet we act as though we should simply “know” how to smoothly operate the most complex systems on earth: our human bodies, our nervous systems, and our psyches. Not to mention our interpersonal relationships!
This is madness. If you find yourself having difficulty operating your feeling system, get professional help. Fortunately, we live in an age where great advancements in our understanding of these systems have been developed. Get a referral to an effective therapist and get support when you need it.
If you are dealing with active Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD), or other forms of trauma response, I strongly recommend you get professional support in taking on the practices I’m describing here. Sitting with flashbacks of terrifying or traumatizing experiences can cause retraumatization. The research suggests that the key to healing these held traumas is to “reconsolidate” the traumatic memories. Guidance from a skilled professional is indispensable in this process. Among many books that can help you better understand trauma and its treatment is Rethinking Trauma Treatment: Attachment, Memory Reconsolidation, and Resilience, by Courtney Armstrong.
There are also a lot of other resources available. I highly recommend, for example, Sarah Blondin’s wonderful book Heart Minded: How to Hold Yourself and Others in Love, which includes links to free guided meditations to help you open up to your full experience of being in a mind and body. Kristen Neff is a pioneer in self-compassion practices–there are many YouTube videos of her and others talking about the research-based benefits of developing this mental muscle. See the end of this article for a list of more good resources.
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I’m happy to say that in my experience, as long as there is willingness there is hope. These practices, if pursued with openness and fortitude, work. The more recent chapters in my personal book saw me finally getting help, starting to find my way, and eventually transforming my inner experience. I can now say I honestly am deeply grateful for my life. Even for my difficult history, because it played a big part in making me who I am today. I still have ups and downs of course. I’ve chosen a challenging but deeply satisfying career as a divorce mediator. My (second) marriage is wonderful–and also trying at times. No one I know gets through life without challenges, and I’m no exception.
But what’s changed is that no matter what difficulties arise–and whatever feelings accompany them–I know I have tools to work with them effectively. My feelings have become my allies. They are no longer something I need to fear or avoid. This is very empowering.
“My feelings have become my allies. They are no longer something I need to fear or avoid.”
What a relief to find that there is nothing in the pages of our experience that we can’t be with, to our great benefit. Way to blaze the path, Grover.
