…I had never felt anything like that in my life. I hadn’t cried since I was 11 and it wasn’t nearly as deep of a cry as this. When I looked into my head, there were no thoughts there creating it. And even though this emotion would probably be classed as a negative emotion, I somehow really enjoyed it. It felt warm, loving, nourishing, and rewarding. I felt alive. It felt rich. I had spent my whole life basically being taught that emotions are bad and that I should meditate to be in peace. Then I wrote a whole book on how to get rid of negative emotions. But this experience threw everything on its head. Peace was great, but this experience showed me there’s something more. That maybe negative emotions weren’t as bad as I had been taught. So in that moment I decided to make it my mission to try to access and fully feel every possible negative emotion. To discover what they really are and why they’re here. No more trying to stay in peace.

My whole life, I had lived completely in my head, with no access to actually feel my emotions. So, it took months to start being able to feel a little. Step by step, I was resensitizing to experience the emotions I had unknowingly suppressed my whole life. At first, I could only feel mild emotions about things happening currently in my life. But, over time, I started to be able to feel the emotions I suppressed in high school, then middle school, then early childhood. I thought I had a great happy childhood growing up in Westchester NY, in a beautiful home, in a beautiful town, with present loving parents. But, it turned out there were so many “normal” things that happened which created a lot of trauma and suppressed emotions in me.

Every time I felt a suppressed emotion, it released from my body, and left me feeling more happy, relaxed, and loving. So I became extremely obsessed with this inner work. It’s hard to explain just how much time and energy I put into feeling my suppressed emotions. It was basically my entire life from morning to night in every moment that I wasn’t in sessions. I wanted to feel and release every single emotion stored in my body. Eventually, as I became increasingly sensitive, I could even connect with all the feelings I had as a baby and in my mother’s womb. Then, I spontaneously started to see and feel many of my past lives. Then, I started to detect what buried emotions in me actually came from my parents and grandparents.

This whole time, I was doing all my emotional work on myself without any outside guidance. I was just relying on my own intuition, along with trial and error for how to feel, release, and heal my emotions. To be honest, I didn’t think there was anyone wise enough to support me.

Then, in 2017, I started to need help. I was in a relationship with a woman I loved very much. But I was getting intensely triggered all the time. I gave everything I had to her, but nothing I did ever felt like enough. I was drained. We got in fights almost every day. I often got defensive and yelled at her. And I had existentially deep fears of losing her. After one particularly bad fight, I realized I can’t do this on my own. So I found a wonderfully old wise regression therapist in the Netherlands. She expertly guided me through resolving some of my worst traumas in such clever ways I had no idea about. I realized that just feeling my emotions wasn’t enough to actually resolve many of my triggers and issues. I actually had to find ways to unwind, unravel, or unhook them.

In addition to getting outside help, it was basically my full-time job to work on healing my emotional triggers in my relationship. This was partly motivated by a desire to alleviate painful feelings and treat my partner lovingly. But, on a deeper layer, it’s more honest say that I was mostly motivated by a deep shame that I was failing to be a “happy person”. Growing up, I was modelled and taught that I only deserve love if I’m happy and unemotional.

Through a lot of inner work, plus a lot of help from many different types of practitioners over the course of a few years, my relationship triggers faded away until there was basically nothing left. For many years now, my relationship is so easy, enjoyable, and loving it’s ridiculous. I literally don’t have any of the triggers or difficulties I used to have. No fights, no inadequacy, no caretaking, no bad reactions, and almost no time working on issues because we simply don’t have any.

While the relationship issues were intense for a couple of years, they actually got resolved fairly quickly and easily compared to my other two big themes: Unworthiness and anxiety. From my teens to my twenties, my identity had always been that I’m smart, happy, funny, and cool. I had always been successful, people usually liked me, and life came quite easy to me. Therefore, it was really surprising to me when I started to find many feelings of inadequacy within me. And as I allowed them to come up more and more, they just got increasingly intense. There were just so many layers of unworthiness, self-hatred, and self-attack I never would have guessed would be inside of me. So, even though I only had positive thoughts about myself my whole life, and then had no thoughts about myself for many years, I still had deep feelings of unworthiness from my childhood.  

The problem with all my unworthiness wasn’t that I walked around feeling worthless all the time, but rather that it created 2 important byproducts.

1) Since I was subconsciously terrified to acknowledge and feel my worthlessness, it put a tremendous pressure on me to always be great. Any mistake, judgment, rejection, or failure could potentially trigger unworthiness or self-hate. But, since I lived with that pressure my whole life, I didn’t even know it was there. Now though, I became increasingly sensitive to the massive fear I had of triggering my unworthiness. Social situations and work tasks that used to feel normal had become really scary. For a while this caused me to be almost non-functional in my procrastination of regular tasks, and caused major social isolation.

2) The buried unworthiness was also putting an upper-limit on how good I feel in a wide variety of ways. Since a part of me felt unworthy of love, it limited how much I could really receive and let in the love of my girlfriend and clients’ gratitude. Because a part of me felt inadequate, I could never let myself fully relax without needing to be productive and improve myself. Since a part of me hated myself, I couldn’t allow myself to fully feel happy and grateful for the goodness in my life, from wealth to beautiful views.

With every layer of unworthiness that arose within me, then left my system, I just naturally became more relaxed, more open-hearted, and more happy. The feeling of “I’m worthless” didn’t get replaced with “I’m so great”. It’s more like as the layers of worthlessness unraveled, what remains is increasingly more a natural sense of “I am enough” and “I deserve to feel good”.

Separately from all the manifestations of fear caused by the potential to feel unworthiness, I also had to increasingly feel and release a lot of primal fear. Throughout my years of healing, some of the most intense experiences were the terror of rejection, attack, and abandonment. And these required me to have the courage to allow the terror to move through me that was too big for the little me when I was yelled at, spanked, or left alone as a child. With every little piece of fear that left my body, I increasingly felt more solid within myself, more feeling like a man, and less feeling like a fragile boy.

I have now resolved enough stuff within me that I no longer have a strong mission to clear out every little trauma, belief, and suppressed emotion inside of me. I can just relax, enjoy my life, and follow my desires. My normal daily life no longer has any of the issues I used to struggle with.  

Now my growth mostly happens through upper limit blocks rather than through painful triggers. For example, when my wife gives me more love than I’m used to, I may notice that I want to run away. When I’m looking at beautiful nature, I may notice that after a certain number of minutes, I’ve reached a limit on how much I can let in the beauty. These are my invitations to explore what unresolved stuff inside me is blocking me from fully enjoying life.