Unleashing The Beast

I've come to a conclusion that anger is my most repressed emotion. I am a "goodist" with a STRONG superego, a lot of rumination and OCD about symptoms, a fear of exercise, and a VERY enraged and caged ID. I feel like my TMS is my inner "beast" (ID) rattling the cage of superego, and that he has been cooped up in that prison of guilt for a LONG time, perhaps most of my life, and certainly in the last 16 years, since the loss of my parents. I had a private conversation once with one of the beloved grand eagles, and he told me he had a "Vicious Superego". I found this fascinating and it really resonated with me. I feel like my Superego is CONSTANTLY bullying me. Does anyone else resonate with this? And how do I fix it? Do I "unleash the beast" of ID, and allow him some voice through journaling or some other safe way of anger expression or do I strengthen my ego more? How do I tell my Superego to take a hike and allow my ID to come out? The more I coax the "beast" (primal feelings) out of their cage, the less my TMS hurts. For me, it is my upper back, shoulders, neck. My upper back muscles are in a constant state of freeze, like a cat with it's hackles up. I feel like I am carrying so much tension and I just want to let go. I want to begin a dialogue with this inner tension, in a deep way and let the beast know it's ok to come out. I have so much rage, and it scares me, but a part of me knows it's the key to healing. I "know" intellectually that my anger is causing this physical pain, but when I try to "feel" angry, the pain just gets worse. It's like a disconnect, as if the Superego has muted the ID for so long, it cannot come through. Thoughts? Do I sound crazy? Even as I type this, my neck is going into spasm. SOME part of me is DESPERATELY trying to keep my inner anger down. As TMS therapist Nicole Sachs says, it feels like I am trying to hold an inflated beach ball of my feelings under the water...stay afloat...and my shoulders and neck are killing me. I can't stop "thinking" my feelings. And that has gotten me nowhere good. I think, think, think, hurt, hurt, hurt, and I feel like my feelings are encased in ice. My shoulders and neck are the frozen physical manifestations.

 

I've been where you are and have come out the other side. There are two things that strike me from your words. The first is that you can't try to feel emotion. Emotions are natural responses and have their own rhyme and reason. All you can do is get very good at allowing the physiological sensations when they happen. People with TMS excell at choking down these bodily surges. There is a gigantic error made in healing where instead of actual feeling our feelings, we intellectualise them. It's a variant of fake-it-till-you-make-it, where we borrow an emotional vocabulary to describe our cognitions and perceptions of emotions instead of our actual emotions. We create quite a remove and tools like journaling help us build bridges to these feelings. When you try to feel angry, all you will achieve is a ramping of tension and then a ramping of pain. You cannot feel unconscious emotions, what you can do though is honour their existence by becoming a master in feeling your emotions in real time. In doing so you are not adding to the pot.

Anger has been a big thing for me and I had quite a tussle with feeling it, accepting it and then learning how to deal with it. It is an appropriate response and emotion, and it is vital that we are able to feel and express it in a healthy way. Here is a link to a post I made yesterday. While it is a reply to a question about anxiety, it actually applies to all emotions and feeling states.

This changed everything for me. If you are in pain, pls read:

The second thing that occurred to me is that you really need to release some of the physical tension. I got absolutely nowhere in my healing before I did this. I had the same upper body tension (brilliant description you give of this) as a result of bracing and guarding against trigeminal neuralgia. The only way I have found to reduce this is swimming. A few weeks of this wonderful activity took my tension levels off boiling point and I began feeling ease and calm in those muscles. The combination of tangibly lower tension levels combined with an ever-growing awareness of how emotions feel have been huge keys to healing for me. I believe one of the reasons why exercise is so important is because emotions demand life and expression, and when we move and use our bodies we get better at tolerating uncomfortable sensations. Anger in particular necessitates action. I always move when I am angry. A walk (with accompanying subvocal rant) or a primal dance while listening to rock music or such. I know that sounds like pillow thumping but sometimes we need it. The better you get with experiencing anger, the better you get at modulating these responses. These days it is usually enough for me to feel the surge of anger with no need to act-out or act upon it.

You also mention the prison of guilt. Do you allow pleasure in your life? Pleasure is a massive player in the soothe to pain ratio Sarno talked about. You need to incorporate more soothing activities into your experience. Again for me I find this at the pool. After swimming I like to relax in the hot-tub and let those bubbles do their thing. It's a great place to socialise, flirt and generally put the world to rights. Creating time in my life where I religiously do this for myself has been a challenge but I have achieved it and I have robust boundaries regarding it.

I hope this lends a few insights.

From the trenches,

Plum x

 

Plum's response is brilliant as usual. I will just add that I believe you are engaging in over-thinking and over-analyzing your state of being. This has always been a problem for me, so I can relate. I think I've made this point to you before, but all that mental activity creates tension. It's like an overheated engine that's running too hot. What has helped me is that when I am aware I am engaging in over-thinking, I tell myself to "STOP THINKING", and I try to "just be in the present moment". This is best accomplished by focusing on your senses--sight, sound, touch, and as Plum mentions above--movement can also work to take us out of our heads, as long it is engaging enough. Also effective is being in a state of "flow", which is when we are completely absorbed in an activity. Sometimes these suggestions are referred to as active mindfulness meditation. Rather than sitting and watching your thoughts, I've found that for those of us with overactive minds, it is easier to drop into the present moment by switching our focus to our senses, movement, or an absorbing activity. This provides rest and space for our minds--that much needed break. And it reduces physical tension.

Best wishes to you, Donavan.

 

Beautiful responses!

This is the beach ball's tendency to come up, and it comes up against our tension "required" to hold it down.

In essence, your anger, Donavan is asking you to BE more. Wherever that takes you. It is your aliveness ---unbounded, creative, juicy ---essentially mindless. This can be felt and loved, and expressed without too much thinking. There is the fear which comes up when we allow so much unbounded ME-ness. But this fear can be observed, dismissed, and we can go back to feeling full and alive. It seems to me, that this understanding of anger/aliveness/invitation-to-be you, is a deep "TMS teaching" for you. You have found this truth. More of you wants to be seen, and honored, and allowed. Your aliveness is OK, is beautiful, and perfectly safe to be. Anger is the apparent part of your aliveness, because first the boundaries need to be made, and the inner obstacles pushed back, in order to allow more of you to be experienced.

I love Ecstatic Dance, as one way of allowing my aliveness. I can push through the superego and self-image boundaries physically in movement. There are many groups in big cities. The way I treat it is as Authentic Movement, which invites me to be right where I am in my body, moment-to-moment, not having to "dance" or connect with anyone but myself. I can lie on the floor touching my belly or face for a half an hour if I like, then move more if the urge hits. There are no rules. I practice being me with many others who are doing the same for themselves.