Part 3/3: Just Feel It
First, a reminder that my next live course, Intuitive Leadership & Living begins June 22. You will complete the course with a stronger intuition than you start. That’s an asset for anyone. For leaders, it’s required. Dojo membership prices go up from $129/mo to $159/mo on 6/22, so now is the time to get in at the lower price for a year.
Today, I’ll let you in on a hidden truth about the severe limits of mainstream psychology and the lies you were taught about “coping skills.”
In part one of this series, I reframed the victim-enabling concept of good versus evil with the relatively new idea of unconscious contributions to behavior. In part two, I took the victimhood out of triggers and focused the responsibility and on the triggeree, without absolving the triggerer to look at their contribution, all as a means for everyone involved to heal emotional wounds.
Mainstream psychology would reject my point of view for a few reasons. Most forms of psychology are not about healing wounds the same way most of western medicine (its parent) isn’t about healing root causes. Instead, most psychology is about symptom abatement and improving coping mechanisms. But because the shadow of science includes its arrogant assumption that it can understand everything via mind, it can’t admit the stark difference between “treating” and “healing” someone, and so conflates the two.
The frame I’ve presented is about healing the reason coping mechanisms are needed in the first place and is a deconstructive (removing layers of coping skills) rather than constructive (adding layers of coping skills) approach. As such, it’s a higher bar for responsibility, and a higher reward for soul embodiment. You get what you pay for. As with so much of western medicine, the promise of healing is dangled like a carrot but “treatment” is what’s actually offered, that makes things less bad rather than good. That’s the implicit frame for the desired end result: less bad. e.g. If you can get out of bed and go to work, you’re not clinically depressed, but being in love with your life isn’t a criterion because they don’t know how to get you there. Great.
This is because of the very frame for what psychology considers “healthy.” Psychology generally conflates functionality and emotional health, and measures it by the former. There are actually no agreed upon criteria for emotional health in psychology as it pertains to healing. I just googled “What is emotional health?” and the first hit was Webmd, offering: “It is your ability to cope with both positive and negative emotions…”
[Record scratch]
What if there is no such thing as a “negative” emotion and we only think of them that way because we don’t know what to do with them?
What if all coping mechanisms are unhealthy ways of repressing wound symptoms, even if it feels good for a while to do so?
What if a healthy person no longer needs to “cope” with their difficult feelings, because they’ve processed their childhood wounds and completed the development of their emotional digestive system? In this way, we don’t just cope, over and over again, we actually process, digest, and integrate the hurt.
Coping isn’t necessary when you can feel an emotion all the way to the core. You don’t need to sweat it away, binge watch TV, or look for answers in a bottle of anything, and you definitely don’t need to project it onto your spouse.
You. Just. Feel it.
That’s what we’re designed to do, but unless your parents were deeply heart-connected with you in such a way that you felt they were right there with you and you were never alone with a difficult feeling, then you’re like every other person on the planet and have a lot of work in front of you.
But if your coping mechanisms are working for you, then keep at it! It’s your choice, of course. For most people, it isn’t until their coping mechanisms dead-end that they can get curious about what’s really going on in their unconscious. Then your life becomes very interesting, indeed. It leads to the evolution of your very soul, which leads to yet another reason mainstream psychology enables victimhood: it’s a non-spiritual paradigm.
Psychology, as a subset of western medicine, is part of secular humanism, which is based on assumptions that the individual is the sole author of their life without the influence of past lives, destiny, or any kind of Divine influence. From a spiritual perspective, this is self-empowered narcissism as it excessively separates the individual from larger contexts.
Even unsophisticated and outdated spiritual perspectives see the interweaving of individuals and their destiny paths as a necessary part of learning for everyone involved and don’t neatly reduce situations to 100/0% assignments of blame.
Lastly, psychology as a part of science has the highest criteria for proof, rejects intuition and feeling as organs with which to perceive reality, and so is always the last paradigm to know the truth. The positive side of this is that its rigor filters out ineffective methods, but the negative side is that effective methods don’t necessarily show up as measurable by their criteria.
Whereas mainstream therapy focuses on behavior change and communication strategies in order to “make a relationship work,” an emoto-spiritual process focuses on what wounding inhibits love to move freely between people in the context of why they got together in the first place.
This perspective precludes 100/0% other-blaming because it starts out with the spiritual perspective that people are drawn together to learn something, which doesn’t always feel good, but is in everyone’s best interests to complete. Too often, relationships end before those lessons are learned, so parties are destined to repeat the same mistakes until they learn them.
This is exactly why people so often choose the same kind of partner repeatedly, though they consciously attempt not to. Their unconscious draws wound-mates in order to heal, and the soul knows it’s good for them even though it can feel awful.
Any modality that doesn’t fully appreciate and access the deepest levels of the unconscious that reveals the codependence in all relationships, and the domain of soul that reveals how we are guided by unseen forces, can’t help but focus merely on superficial understanding and behavioral change, and miss the mark. The result is that suffering lasts far longer than it needs to and the difficulty inherent in all relationships is rendered largely unproductive.
For all of these reasons, a mature person desires to learn everything they can from their partner before they give up, because whatever you miss, you’ll inevitably have to face again. If not this life, then the next.
In the end, there is no judgment for those not yet called to examine their lives this deeply, for we all must dead-end what isn’t working before we have the courage to depart dysfunctional norms and foray into the true unknown. But that is always where the greatest aspects of ourselves wait for us to reclaim what we’ve always been, but never have been able to be.
It is to that process that I’ve dedicated my life. Interested in trying it? I look forward to hearing from you when you’re ready.