The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

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Perhaps never before has humankind been so alienated from so many of its normal feeling states, as it is in the twentieth century. Never before have so many human beings been so emotionally deadened and impoverished. The disease of emotional emaciation is epidemic. Its effects on health are often euphemistically labeled as stress, and like the emotions, stress is often treated like some unwanted waste that must be removed. Until all of the emotions are accepted indiscriminately (and acceptance does not imply license to dump emotions irresponsibly or abusively), there can be no wholeness, no real sense of well being, and no solid sense of self esteem. Thus, while it may be fairly easy to like oneself when feelings of love or happiness or serenity are present, deeper psychological health is seen only in the individual who can maintain a posture of self love and self respect in the times of emotional hurt that accompany life's inevitable contingencies of loss, loneliness, uncontrollable unfairness, and accidental mistake.

Those who finally come to terms with their grief no longer struggle with the desire to be finished with it forever. They have learned to cherish their ability to grieve, and value it as an irreplaceable tool of emotional hygiene" (111). This is a very helpful and wise book on helping people damaged in childhood recover their full range of feelings. Pete Walker rightly argues that we can’t just select some emotions we want to feel, such as happiness, and refuse to feel other more “negative” emotions such as anger.

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Dissociation protects us in childhood from absorbing the full toxicity of destructive parental messages" (118). Many survivors grow more attractive as they learn to accept their feelings and become more authentic. Authenticity allows them to release the facial tension and postural contortion that accompanies emotional repression and forced smiling" (137).

Pete's first book, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness Out of Blame, is now also an audio book. It has been acclaimed by many therapists and clients as a powerful, compassionate and pragmatic tool for guiding recovery. Alice Miller, author of The Drama of the Gifted Child, wrote: "Pete Walker wrote a book about his own recovery from emotional numbness. The author passionately explores as thoroughly as possible the role of emotions in human life. The result is not only a moving, honest recount but also an informative guide for people who want to become more aware of their buried feelings. Walker's well explained concept of 'reparenting' will help them go through this fascinating process in a safe, protected way." This book is an in-depth exploration on how we can safely open ourselves up to these difficult “negative” emotions, and therefore enrich our lives. Pete Walker examines rage, grief, blame and shame - emotions that many of us struggle with. There are no pat answers or easy solutions offered. I found his advice and insights profound and humane. Many survivors live their whole lives in denial about how much old spiritual beliefs have hurt them and continue to curtail their lives. Barely conscious feelings of guilt, shame, and fear constantly inhibit them from enjoying the normal, life-celebratory aspects of human existence" (199). The author regularly dips into his own horrific childhood to show how shut down and damaged he became and then recounts his lifelong adult journey of reclaiming his full range of emotions with honest accounts of his mistakes and relapses. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-01-12 11:10:18 Boxid IA40321503 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

Denial protects abused children from the overwhelming, undigestible reality that their parents are not their allies" (17). This book was recommended by a friend and I was initially skeptical - I’m not a person who’s shy with expressing non-positive feelings but didn’t find it helpful to unburden past traumas. When I was reading this book, I realized that I may never get rid of certain baggages by understanding them better, but I do get more clarity in myself and can pursue things that are desired by the real me and not the external voices I’ve internalized over the years. The imaginative reconstruction of our parents' childhoods sometimes stimulates us to grieve for their losses. We may experience a very profound healing by letting ourselves cry for them, and by allowing ourselves to feel angry about how their parents hurt them. This is sometimes difficult to do because many of us had grandparents who were kind to us in a way they never were with our parents.... Most of us hold a part of our parents' grief about their childhood abandonment. When we mournfully protest our mom and dad's unfair suffering, we are also championing the us in them that lost so much because of grandma and grandpa's poor parenting. When we grieve deeply for our parents, this feeling of sorrow for them sometimes expands into genuine feelings of forgiveness" (222-3). Many of us were so thoroughly rejected by our parents that we falsely view ourselves as ugly. Many of our parents exacerbated our awful self-image by grooming us poorly and by outfitting us in unflattering clothes and hairstyles" (137). I was particularly impressed on his exploration of forgiveness and how much of a struggle it is to truly forgive a bad parent without repressing or minimising the hurt they caused. His description of how we oscillate between anger and compassion was very real and honest.

This book is a handbook for increasing your emotional intelligence. Moreover, if you are a survivor of a dysfunctional family, it is a guide for repairing the damage done to your emotional nature in childhood. As such it is actually a sequel to my later book: Complex PTSD from Surviving To Thriving. The Tao of Fully Feeling focuses primarily on the emotional healing level of trauma recovery. It is a safe handbook for grieving losses of childhood. The repression of the so-called negative polarities of emotion causes much unnecessary pain, as well as the loss of many essential aspects of the feeling nature. In fact, much of the plethora of loneliness, alienation, and addictive distraction that plagues modern America is a result of being taught and forced to reject, pathologize or punish so many of our own and others; normal feeling states. Nowhere, not in the deepest recesses of the self, or in the presence of one's closest friends, is the average person allowed to have and explore any number of normal emotional states. Anger, depression, envy, sadness, fear, distrust, etc., are all as normal a part of life as bread and flowers and streets; yet they have become ubiquitously avoided and shameful human experiences. How tragic this is, for all of these emotions have enormously important and healthy functions in a wholly integrated psyche. One dimension where this is most true is in the arena of healthy self protection. For without access to our dysphoric feelings, we are deprived of the most fundamental part of our ability to notice when something is unfair, abusive, or neglectful in our environments. Those who cannot feel their sadness often do not know when they are being unfairly excluded, and those who cannot feel their normal angry or fearful responses to abuse, are often in danger of putting up with it without protest. useful concept to identify those needs; to others, like myself, there seems to be a historical child- Complex PTSD : From Surviving To Thriving is a comprehensive, user-friendly, self-help guide to recovering from the lingering effects of childhood trauma. It is an overview of the tasks of recovering, and an illumination of the silver linings that can come out of effective recovery work. It contains a great many practical tools and techniques for recovering from Cptsd. It is also copiously illustrated with examples of his own and others' journeys of recovering.But I didn’t enjoy everything in this book. There are lots of quotes from people I’ve never heard of and excerpts from poems that did nothing for me and I found distracting. I didn’t relate to his spiritual experiences which came across as being gospel truth. These aren’t criticisms, more my own personal response. A different reader will respond differently and may find these aspects of the book positive. We suffer many dire consequences when we are unwilling to feel. The price of emotional repression is a constant, wasteful expenditure of energy that leaves many of us depressed and taciturn. Perpetually enervated, more and more of us sink into the apathy and ennui of the “seen that - been there - done that” syndrome. When this occurs, we forfeit our destiny of growing into the vitally expressive and life-celebratory beings we were born to be. Our war on feelings forces our emotions to turn against us. Much of our unnecessary suffering is caused by the ghosts of our murdered emotions wafting into consciousness and haunting us as hurtful thinking. Denied emotions taint our thoughts with fearful worry, dour self-doubt, and angry self-criticism. We also risk “acting out” our emotions unconsciously when we are unwilling to feel them. Sarcasm, criticality, habitual lateness, and “forgotten” commitments are common unconscious expressions of anger. Ironically, these passive-aggressive behaviors leave us in even greater emotional pain because they cause others to distrust and dislike us. The epidemics of overeating, over-medicating, and overworking that plague America are also rooted in our mass retreat from feeling. When we are feeling-phobic, we are compelled to distract ourselves from our emotions with mood-altering substances, workaholism or constant busyness. Many of us, as Anne Wilson Schaef points out in When Society Becomes An Addict, are addicted to at least one self-destructive substance or process.” Most individuals, who choose or are coerced into only identifying with "positive" feelings, usually wind up in an emotionally lifeless middle ground - bland, deadened, and dissociated in an unemotional "no-man's-land." Moreover, when an individual tries to hold onto a preferred feeling for longer than its actual tenure, s/he often appears as unnatural and phony as ersatz grass or plastic flowers. If instead, s/he learns to surrender willingly to the normal human experience that: good feelings always ebb and flow, s/he will eventually be graced with a growing ability to renew the self in the vital waters of emotional flexibility. I love to have you near me, Pete. You are such a joy to me. I love it when you talk to me and tell me how it is for you. I want to hear everything you have to say. I want to be the one person you can always come to whenever you need help. You can come to me when you are hurting, when you just want company, or when you want to play. You are always welcome. You are a delight to my eyes, and I always enjoy having you around. You are a good boy, very special and absolutely worthy of love, respect, and all good things. I am so proud of you and so glad that you are alive. I will help you in any way that I can. I want to be the loving mom and dad you were so unfairly deprived of, and that you so much deserve. And I want you to know that I have an especially loving place in my heart for you when you are scared or sad or mad or ashamed. You can always come to me and tell me about such feelings, and I will be with you and try to soothe you until those feelings run their natural course. I want to become your best friend and I will always try to protect you from unfairness and humiliation. I will also seek friends for you who genuinely like you and who are truly on your side. We will only befriend people who are fair, who treat us with equality and respect, and who listen to us as much as we listen to them. I want to help you learn that it really is good to have needs and desires. It’s wonderful that you have feelings. It’s healthy to be mad and sad and scared and depressed at times. It’s natural to make mistakes. And it’s okay to feel good too, and even to have more fun than mom and dad did.”