....Are you missing your feelings? If so you’re lucky, for a long time I didn’t have any feelings to miss. Well, that’s not quite true. I did have feelings, but they were only for other people, not for me. I was known as a very feeling and sympathetic person. I could only feel sympathetic, sad or angry for others, on behalf of others, as it were. These days I am beginning to feel some of that compassion for myself, but for most of my life it never occurred to me. Even more so when I had children. Having children just reinforced my urge to self-sacrifice. I didn’t look upon myself as a good mother – although people used to tell me I was too good for my own good. I knew in a way they were right, but being that way felt natural. If you have lived most of your life without your own feelings it only occasionally seems like something is missing.
,,,,But now I know I also had a selfish reason for being so selfless. The first time I ever felt angry it surprised and horrified me. It happened in the kitchen when my husband criticized the way I cooked the potatoes. Small enough thing – nothing unusual. But there was a kitchen knife lying on the bench. Something rose up in me and I wanted to plunge the knife into his back. That moment in my mind I actually did it. I ran into the bedroom shaking with fear.
....It was after that experience I started therapy. I soon realised I did have a selfish reason for being so unselfish: I was afraid of myself – afraid, not only of my anger, but any sympathy I might have for myself. In my childhood they called it ‘wallowing in self-pity’. A big no-no. For me, feeling for others was a way of self-preservation. Deep down, the only way I knew to be accepted.
....In my sessions we did a lot of work on the feelings in my body. At first I didn’t know what my therapist was talking about. I got irritable when he asked me to look into my body to see how I felt. That irritability was actually the beginning of a feeling that was already there. Only it turned out to be much more than irritability – it was rage and sorrow.
....Another thing I found out was why I often felt so tired. Eventually I learned that to have my feelings I had to come home. Again and again I had to come home – I mean come home to my body, the place where you are supposed to live. I was always tired because deep down I didn’t want to live, I wasn’t living with myself, for myself. My body was my enemy. It had all the feelings I didn’t want, all the feelings that could have ruined me if they got out. I went through a period where I just couldn’t be bothered with the effort it took to stay alive and cope.
....The only way not to have feelings is to simply vacant. Now, when I meet a person like I used to be, I recognise that ‘no-one-at-home’ look. I feel sorry for them. They make a good show of being alive; doing all the right things; smiling and nodding at the right times. But that’s all it is – a show.
....When I was young I was taught a big lesson: having feelings was dangerous. Nobody said as much, but that’s how it was. I was the youngest with three bossy brothers, a macho father and a useless mother. I had to make a survival choice – hide myself and my feelings or face being ostracised and annihilated. That’s what it was like. Choosing to live took one sharp act of decision: leave home ! Home – the place where all one’s feelings are. Leave them all at home. Leave ones primary home whilst still living on in the family home. Strange isn’t it? One chooses to live and be good; set the body up to make the right noises and look OK – otherwise stand back and just watch yourself pretending to be in the game of life. Watch my body acting whilst having nothing to do with it. All the while knowing somehow one is hiding. I used to do that physically too. I used to hide in the kennel with the dog.
....Today life is much more difficult. Well, perhaps not so much for me, but for others whom I seem to puzzle. Some think I have changed for the worse. Particularly my husband Ferdy. He’s a good man, but he now finds me difficult. I feel sorry for him, but not so sorry that I will give up myself. My main problem with him now is he stifles me. The one thing he hates is me saying ‘I want some space’. I really don’t know whether our marriage will survive and I don’t really know how I will feel if it doesn’t; but I do know I can’t go back to how it was.
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