A True & Effective Healer Respects Your Right to Discern

When someone tells you, you think too much or feel too deep, they often don’t want you to think at all, or to be bothered by how you feel.

An installment from Eyes Wide Open: Avoiding Re-Traumatization, tools to recognize and prevent getting burnt or re-traumatized in therapy and self-help. Installments are standalone pieces and can be read in any order. Depending on my healing cadence, published weekly or biweekly as I am able.

All installments can be found here.

Photo by Dirk van Wolferen on Unsplash

Hello Friends,

I really enjoy the questions my 7-year-old granddaughter asks. Whatever she doesn’t understand, she asks for clarification. If it sparks her curiosity further, or if it makes her think of something else, she asks another question. But what’s even neater is how she contemplates my responses and applies them to different situations or scenarios, and doesn’t hesitate to tell me how she feels.

I tell her I love how she thinks. I tell her I love how she can express her feelings.

Has anyone ever told you that? Or have you heard the opposite?

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You Think Too Much & Feel Too Deep

That was one of my ex’s favorite accusations, You think too much. Especially when I got too close to his cheating truth. He called it ruminating, as if it were a personal shortcoming.

He was, also, contemptuous of feelings. Stop feeling so hurt. You’re making me feel guilty.

Or when I was really happy over a particularly, and infrequent, amazing day with him, “Whoa, that’s a lot of responsibility to put on me.”

What?

Equating thinking with ruminating is a mischaracterization. Ruminating is a normal result of abuse, and it involves circular thinking, but turning off your brain isn’t the solution.  

People who have hidden agendas, don’t like it when you look too closely, but you not only have a right to ask questions, you have the right to observe and assess the comings and goings of your reality.

Emotions tell you the truth about where you are in the moment. Whether those feelings are justified or not doesn’t mean they aren’t valid or that you shouldn’t feel and own them.

Whether based on misperception or fact, your emotions invite you to look closer, not away.

Some people say you choose what you feel. Okay. And there are times when you get cut and you bleed. You don’t choose to bleed, and you can’t simply choose to not bleed. You have to clean out the wound, and let it heal. Maybe get stitches.

Sometimes your feelings are the blood. Sometimes they are the water which cleans the wound. They are always yours to feel and to respect.

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Synergy of Discernment

The importance of being able to think and feel isn’t just that they each have value, but in the synergy they create when combined.

According to Merriam-Webster, discernment is the quality of being able to grasp and comprehend what is obscure, or to perceive. This makes discernment a powerful skill navigating the labyrinth of abuse.

(Note: I am using discernment as defined by Merriam-Webster. If you google the word, you will discover article after article that make “discernment” synonymous with “spiritual discernment” or “the ability to discern God’s will”. That is not how I’m using it in this post.)

Thinking, gathering information, from within yourself or without, and assessing it, is sometimes referred to as using your head. Listening to what you feel, intuit and sense is using your heart.

Discernment is the synergy of using both. It’s the precursor to being able to make informed choices, which are an integral part of the healing process.

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Faith, Enlightenment, Reasoning and “Helping”

What does it look like when someone undermines your ability to discern?

There are 4 general areas in therapy or self-help where discouraging or diminishing your ability to discern can occur.

1. The Area of Faith

First, let me say that spirituality is an integral part of my life.

Unfortunately, the idea of faith can be used to manipulate you to dependency.

Thinking and feeling can be seen as antithetical to faith. Reasoning, portrayed as unreliable and faulty, is not to be trusted. You’re warned that listening to your heart can lead you astray. And intuition? A tool of the devil.

In some religious/spiritual circles, logical fallacy, which is errors in reasoning, passes as spiritual discernment. If you don’t understand, that’s okay, because spiritual discernment, unlike mental and emotional discernment, is attained through faith... as defined and directed by religious authority.

This use of faith, to stifle your ability to think for yourself and cut you off from your intuition, can cause you to ignore or overlook warning signs of abuse, because you are discouraged from using the very faculties that would help you to spot them.

This is the cult trap of some self-help, spiritual, or faith-based groups and individuals, whose definition of faith may be at odds with your empowerment.

It’s a false dichotomy that you have to give up discernment for faith.

Faith is trust. Reasoning isn’t “proof first” but making those steps you take in faith trustworthy.

Faith says you don’t have to have all the answers. It doesn’t say you can’t have any.

Faith says you don’t have to have it all mapped out. It doesn’t say you can’t survey the terrain or search your heart.

2. The Area of Enlightenment

While faith may have a strong component of taking action, as in “acting on faith”, enlightenment is more about a state of being.

The appeal or seduction of enlightenment on the healing journey is that it offers transcendence instead of healing. One is clean. The other is messy.

With transcendence, you simply evolve or quantum leap into the place where wounds and suffering don’t exist. But what passes as enlightenment, or the path to enlightenment, is often a form of repressing emotions and denying pain.

This is also known as “spiritual bypassing” or “toxic positivity”. Whatever you call it, it’s repression and denial.

As long as you have a physical body, you can’t escape the care and responsibility for it, nor the experiences you encounter through it. Even “nonphysical” abuse causes massive amounts of stress hormones to course through the body you inhabit. Everything you experience is registered in your body. Acting as if you don’t have one or that the trauma stored in it suddenly has no impact on you is folly.

If you’re a spiritual being having a physical experience, then have it, and learn what it has to teach you. Don’t incarnate onto this planet just to ignore your teacher.

Like faith, the idea of enlightenment can lead you to detach from your emotions. Your thoughts, relegated to your ego, are not to be trusted. But feeling your emotions and using your mental faculties is your power, not a weakness or obstacle.

If you’re not enlightened yet (and who is?... no company on this planet excepted), whose thoughts might you turn to in the meantime?

Well, of course, your “enlightened” or “near-enlightened” (a hell of a lot more than you) teacher, counselor, mentor, guru, whatever.

It’s not that I don’t believe in a higher consciousness or Divine Presence— I do, or the indelible moments of connection—I just respect that, right now, I’m a physical being, and I have to use what I have, and what I have is a brain and a heart, and the ability to think and feel.

If you want to detach yourself from something, detach yourself from the cruel messages you’ve been telling yourself for as long as your wound has been bleeding.

Don’t reject your humanity or your humanness. It’s not a mistake or a footstool to something better. It’s a beauty, in and of itself, an opportunity to not only learn but to experience the wonder of what it means to be alive, here and now.

3. The Area of Reasoning, Itself

Still others venerate reason. They just attack your ability to engage in it.

And emotions? That’s an embarrassing little sibling better left at home.

Thinking is king. Your mental faculties are what’s important, but sorry, you’re not smart enough to do it. You’re not bright enough, educated enough, or clever enough to understand the skills and intricacies of logic and reason.

So maybe you should just leave the heavy lifting of thinking to others.

You know what? You think just fine. If your reasoning skills need improvement (and whose doesn’t?) that means you develop them, and you do that by using them. You don’t give the job to someone else.

There’s so much you can do. You can contemplate and ponder ideas. You can wonder and imagine. You can explore resources and educate yourself. You are fully qualified, always, to learn and grow.

And yes, you can hang out with your sibling emotions, because they can tell you stories that will make you laugh and make you cry. They can add bright colors and pastels to your living, bring the light to the dark, and the dark to the light, and down a pizza, and guzzle root beer faster than anybody on top of that, and you won’t care, even if you’re in public.

This isn’t about IQ. It’s about who you are as a person. You are the perfect environment for germinating your thoughts into ideas, solutions and insights, even dreams.

Don’t be so impressed with how others articulate their ideas that you forget to respect yours.

4. The Area of Being “Helpful”

People can unintentionally undermine you by being “helpful”. They are only too happy to provide the “right” answers. But getting the “right answers” on our journey isn’t as important as developing our skills to come to what’s right for us.

Regardless the intent, no matter how loving or well-meaning, doing the heavy lifting of thinking and sparing someone from feeling their emotions diminishes them. It’s one thing to hand someone a map or point out landmarks along a path they may pass when they walk it. It’s another to carry them on our backs.

If we carry others, we tell them we don’t think they’re capable of standing on their own feet.

There is power in thinking things through. There’s liberation in allowing yourself to truly feel—pleasant or uncomfortable, joyful or painful. It’s a practice which means you have to do it, and with every opportunity that comes your way.

Be careful about letting someone “help” you into helplessness.

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Slippery Slopes & a Beautiful View

Every world view, philosophy, or school of thought, religious and secular, can be twisted to divest you of empowerment. Sometimes we’re so busy looking at different modes of healing that we forget to look for what’s most important.

Regardless the window dressing, principles, values, and their application are what’s most important. If you notice the heart of what you value is absent, or only in word and not in application, then take note. You’re on a slippery slope.

The world needs your ideas, your vision, the way you think, and feel, and love.

Just look at our world, and you know we could never be accused of thinking too much or feeling too deeply. We can certainly be accused of not doing either enough.

Discerning what’s right for you, and what’s real in our interactions, is empowering.

Use your head. Use your heart. They are both beautiful and powerful. As you are.

From my heart… and my thoughts, to yours

Demian Elaine’ Yumei ~ Silent No More

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