A place for our feelings

"There's a place for all our feelings."

YES!  That's what swept through me, first reading these words by someone I greatly admire.  The sheer truth of it.  

One of the greatest challenges my own dear mother faced throughout her life, even at the end when so many other things had become clearer to her, was letting all feelings have a place within her.  Like so many of my older friends, she was uneasy with any feeling other than happiness.  Like too many of them, she tried to bend all emotions to happiness, even when they were poles apart.  Emotions were 2-edged swords, to be handled with great care, always on the edge of being dangerous.

To Mom, negative feelings were bad.  She never could grasp that car batteries need both negative & positive charges to turn over & start.  There were a lot of expanding new ideas & different perspectives that she embraced in her closing years, but letting all feelings find a place in her was never one of them.  

The sad & sorry thing was in seeing how brushing them aside & holding them off complicated Mom's life.  Pain & sorrow seemed past her ability to acknowledge.  I have distant memories of my father falling to pieces when my brother, Ian, was killed at 11, but can't recall Mom even crying.  She certainly didn't when Dad died at the tragically early age of 63 - years later, after I pressed her on that point, she explained that she didn't want my sister & myself to hold back from loving someone if their loss brought so much sorrow.  

Intellectually, Mom did seem to ultimately get it.  She was able to write about how the place where a broken bone or torn skin mends is stronger than before.  But what her head could process & accept was light years away from what her heart was capable of acknowledging - in her heart of hearts, she never accepted that it was safe to feel all emotions, that feeling them wouldn't somehow define her.

That's a challenge I find with a lot of my older, especially significantly older, friends.  Some sort of fear that if they let themselves fully feel a less-than-upbeat emotion, it will leave its mark.  Instead of feeling it, then letting it pass through them, they balk & ignore, holding the difficult feeling within rather than letting it out.  

All I can do is create as safe a place as possible for my friends, especially older ones, to be at rest with themselves.  Then step away.  Like I did with Mom - instead of focusing on her inability to accept, acknowledge & deal with pain, I saw the areas where she did accept less-than-sunny emotions.  

We were brought up in very different eras.  I am squarely a child of the Therapeutic Age, while she was the child of Victorian parents who believed in burying feelings, squaring shoulders & soldiering on.  It's important to me to be able to allow a place for all my feelings, to acknowledge pain in order to overcome it, to see hurts in order to heal them;  it was just as important to Mom to do the opposite.  

To the end of her days, I never was able to get all the way through to Mom about the value of feeling all emotions.  Too unsafe.  But to the end of my own, will always have a deep sense of awe for just how far Mom did let herself come.  All the way?  No.  Not even close.  But a far distance from where she started.  Here's hoping we all can make such progress as we "trip the old-o-meter" into our 90s!