Creative Ways to Transform Challenges:
Dealing With Feelings

Why Is This Happening To Me?  A. J. Moses, Based on her book, Emotional Rescue (Powerbase Books, 2002)

 

When misfortune strikes and your peaceful happy world is suddenly shattered, you will likely wonder, “Why is this happening to me? What did I do to deserve this?” Or, you might be a person who has only known struggle and suffering in your life. And you may wonder, “Why don’t I have an easy life like other people do?”

 

There are no simple answers, but there is a way to use your life challenges as a stepping stone to growth and your future happiness.  For within the unhappy occurrence, there is an opportunity to learn about yourself and to build upon your inner strength. In this article, you will be provided with a process which will help you answer the question, “Why Is This Happening To Me?” in a way that will provide lasting benefits in your life.

 

1. Has This Ever Happened To Me Before?

Often when a life challenge comes rushing into your life, it may appear that it has come out of the blue – that nothing like this has ever happened to you before. It may seem so, but on closer examination, you may find that you are being confronted with a “variation on a theme.” 

 

Take Bernice’s story. Bernice was involved in a committed relationship with a man she loved. She had been living with Ralph for 5 years and was planning to get married. The relationship had been emotionally demanding as Ralph was dealing with a painful divorce during this time, and Bernice really had to help him build up his battered self-esteem. As a result of her love and encouragement, Ralph regained his self-confidence and began to prosper in his career. Just at the time when Bernice felt that all would work out well, Ralph suddenly sprang the news – he wanted out of the relationship.

 

Bernice was both stunned and horrified. How could this be? she thought. She had given so much love, and she was being repaid with a cold indifference. It took some time for Bernice to begin looking at her pain. When thinking about it, Bernice had initially insisted that such an occurrence had never happened to her before. But with some self-reflection, she realized that she did have a pattern of giving out a great deal of love without always getting it back. For Bernice usually ended up in the caregiver role. She enjoyed nurturing her friends, and was generous with her time and helpfulness. She had rarely asked for much in return because she had felt that her friends’ appreciation of what she gave was all the love she needed.

 

And so beyond Bernice’s conscious awareness, she was setting up a pattern of being exploited. Although she was acting in good faith and out of love, many of her “friends” saw her as someone who was easy to take advantage of.  So although Bernice was shocked and devastated at Ralph’s unkind actions, she eventually came to acknowledge that what Ralph had done to her was not an isolated incident.

 

Events rarely happen by chance. It only appears that way, the reason being that when things are working out for us, we don’t stop to consider that we’re operating with certain patterns which may be harmful to ourselves in the future. For Bernice, giving to her friends without receiving back the same attention wasn’t problematic until Ralph presented her with a reality that she could not ignore. To move forward in her life, she had to take ownership of her challenge by asking herself the question, “Has this ever happened to me before?”

 

2. What Emotional Pain Am I Avoiding?

Once you make the decision to look at the challenge, the next step is to analyze how the pattern started. For most of us, the source of the pattern begins with the buildup of emotional pain from childhood – heartache, shame, guilt, self-blame, fear, rage.  For Bernice, there existed a huge backlog of heartache and shame, having been an unwanted child who had been “blamed for being born.” Her dad had shown indifference to her while her mom had torn down her self-esteem through never-ending criticism. Bernice, as all children do, craved love, and in her adult life, felt desperate for love. She formed many close friendships which on the surface provided her with the love she craved. But because she had been shamed as a child, she lacked the self-esteem to ask for the respect and equality she deserved. And so she fell into a pattern of giving more than she received, eventually being confronted with a rude awakening.  

 

For Bernice, her avoidance of facing her buried heartache and shame ended up manifesting in a dramatic disruption to her life. But for others, the manifestation may tragically come in the form of a life-threatening illness. This happened to Paul, a wonderful man whose life was filled with a large circle of friends who valued him greatly. Paul had felt that his life was perfect until he was confronted with a heart attack.  He just couldn’t understand how his health had failed him in that he had been so health conscious and physically fit.

 

It took Paul some time to look at his emotional life, but when he did, he discovered that he was struggling with a deep-seated rage that masked his buried heartache, shame, fear, and self-blame from his childhood. Sadly, both of Paul’s parents had treated him in a very abusive way. His mom didn’t like being a mother and felt justified in beating him for “being such a difficult child.” His dad, although he had wanted a son, regularly took his frustration out on poor Paul in the form of verbal abuse.

 

As an adult, Paul wanted to bury his past and create a happy life. He loved being around people, and surrounded himself with family and friends. He masked his true feelings and was the “life of the party.” But privately he felt enormous rage about the way he was treated as a child. His rage in turn masked his vulnerable feelings which appeared too extensive to ever resolve. Paul believed that he could avoid facing his emotional pain, but it eventually erupted in the form of a heart attack.

 

3. Emotional Processing

Emotional pain - heartache, self-blame, guilt, shame, fear, rage – is at the base of most unhappy life challenges. At first glance, it isn’t always obvious, but if you have the courage to look for it, you will begin to recognize its existence as did both Bernice and Paul. What do you do once you identify the vulnerable feelings which are troubling you? You process them. This means you start breaking down what those feelings are about:

· What happened to cause you to feel this way?

·  Who were the people involved?

·  Was this a one-time occurrence or did it happen every day?

·  What feelings resulted from the way you were treated?

·  Did you feel you had to hide your feelings? Why is that? 

 

Emotional Processing is similar to journal writing except that the goal is to come to a definite resolution so that you are able to permanently release your negative feelings.

How it works is this. When you have strong feelings of vulnerability, be it shame, self-blame, guilt, heartache, and/or fear, you will secretly feel that these emotions describe who you are, rather than their being a historical response to events that happened so long ago. For example, if in childhood you were treated badly by your parents, your mom/dad, teachers, authority figures, or siblings, you will have concluded that you were to blame for the bad treatment, that in fact, you weren’t worthy of good treatment. If, as an adult, you secretly continue to “buy into” this type of self-blame and shame, you will adapt your behavior as did Bernice and Paul, to compensate for the deficits you believe you have. When you do so, you will often be sowing the seeds of a future life challenge.

 

When you choose to emotionally process, on the other hand, what you will discover is your own innocence. In doing so, you will be able to let go of the negative self-beliefs because you will now recognize that they are, quite simply, not true. For example, if your mom had low self-esteem which she bolstered by humiliating and degrading you as a dependent child, in having been on the receiving end of such negative treatment, you would have concluded that you were inadequate. When you emotionally process, you will come to see the truth of the matter - that your mom was unjustly using you as an easy way out to avoid facing her own emotional pain. In other words, her treatment of you had nothing to do with your worth.  

 

The Power of Emotional Processing

By the simple act of being honest about your true inner feelings and exploring their origin, you will start feeling an inner power that may always have eluded you. What you will discover is that a great many of your negative self-beliefs are simply not true and/or were imposed upon you in your childhood to serve the needs of those who were more powerful than you. In identifying the source of issues in your life that continue to trouble you, you can begin to free yourself from the emotional pain which you are carrying.

 

When you free yourself from your emotional pain, you will begin to make more and more positive choices in your life which will sow the seeds of your future happiness. When Bernice emotionally processed her heartache and shame, she was able to recognize more quickly when her relationships lacked equality and true respect. In this way she was able to make adjustments early on so that she would no longer be confronted with the hurtful ending she had experienced with Ralph. When Paul emotionally processed his rage, he soon began to see that his rage was masking his vulnerable feelings in having been an abused child. Although it took Paul some time to work through his extensive emotional pain, he was able to let go his rage by working on the source emotional issues. In this way, he was able to ease up the tension in his body, thus beginning the process of physical and emotional healing.

  

Right Here, Right Now

You can begin the process of overcoming your life challenges by honestly asking yourself, “Why is this happening to me?” You have the answers within yourself. By listening to your true feelings, you will be setting in motion the process of building a very happy life.

 

 

“Why Is This Happening To Me” is based on the book Emotional Rescue-Healing Your Pain & Creating Inner Peace by A.J. Moses. Filled with stories of people’s life challenges, Emotional Rescue helps you identify your specific issues and guides you through the process of creating an abundant life. Andrea J. Moses, M.S.W., is a psychotherapist and author of 3 books on self-healing, including Emotional Rescue. To learn more about Emotional Rescue and Andrea’s work, please visit www.pbperform.com/life_challenges.htm or www.pbperform.com/empowerment­­_books.htm.