Children who are naturally going through learning their emotional expression over the course of the first seven to ten years of their life,
They're naturally pretty resilient and they bounce back so long as their parents are in a permissive and approving place with it.
But if you wait until you're an adult and you try to start feeling anger or vulnerability or grief or loss or frustration or overwhelm and you've never felt it in your life because you've done everything you can to avoid it in your relational connections and in your environment and then you start to feel it.
It's terrifying because everything that you have conditioned yourself to believe over a period of,
I don't know,
30,
40,
50 years,
Maybe sometimes longer,
Has told you that this is the danger zone.
You're about to die when you allow yourself to feel those things.
And your body and your nervous system responds accordingly.
And sometimes we don't even know that that is how our bodies are responding to that particular fear.
Because we're so conditioned to shut off or go into some kind of paralysis about it or project our experience onto someone else.
Because it's incredibly uncomfortable.
It's incredibly uncomfortable to allow ourselves to feel overwhelmed.
And if you're feeling it for the first time when you're 40-something,
It's not going to be pretty.
It's not going to be like what we talk about in our fancy theoretical conversations about what emotions look like.
It's going to be a transference experience.
It's going to feel just as real as the last time you shut down when you felt it,
Which is probably when you were like five.
If you've managed to completely sequester it and eradicate it from your life because you don't want to associate with it,
When you start to become aware that it's there,
It's going to knock you out for a period of time.
And then you have to do what Alexandra lovingly calls befriending an emotion.
Because under normal circumstances,
An emotion does last 90 seconds,
90 seconds to two minutes,
If you feel it.
You're not thinking about it but you're feeling it.
But if you have been disconnected energetically from an emotion that has been riding along in your past seat without you being aware of it for a really,
Really long time,
When you bring your consciousness into that place,
It could knock you out for three weeks.
And you need to be prepared for that.
And that's one of the reasons why so many people avoid this work is because no,
It doesn't go away immediately when you first feel it for the first time after never feeling it at all.
