"How can I release the negative feelings that come up, especially when I drink?"
Hi Ayal,
I am very fascinated by your website and the answers you have provided for others. I would like to seek some guidance from you. Thank you.
A year and a half ago I met my boyfriend of whom we have become very close together and we are now moving into a house that we are buying together. As this is a very big move for me, I want some guidance to how I can make this new adventure more rewarding and with more love. You see I am troubled by an eating disorder that I have had since I was 18, and continue to have some problems with bulimia on a weekly basis. Before I met my boyfriend I was very much absorbed into the eating disorder, and was always attracted to guys who did not love me, respect me or basically would even want to be close to me. Somehow I was able to attract my boyfriend now, who is so warm and special and everything which I had not imagined my own boyfriend would be like. With him I feel very safe to be me. I have however come across a lot of issues in the time with him. Sometimes I become very judgmental of him, critical and even try to control him. In all this comes a very intense amount of anger that I am facing and it is very difficult because I don't know what to do with it. I am at a point where I feel a slight panic sensation when I get feelings of dread when I am with him. I feel like I am scared to look at him because I am afraid to judge him. At times however I feel very much in love, and accept him and feel at peace with myself and everything feels really good. The polarity between the two feelings are very strong. This happens sometimes when we are being intimate. When I was little my cousin looked and plaid with my genitals and I had felt really weird. I am not sure if it was that that scarred me, but I find it very difficult to be aroused in my adulthood and when I am with my BF I sometimes get the same weird feeling. Again I have really good moments too and enjoy sexual pleasures with him and that feels very good for me.
In the time my boyfriend and I have been together I feel he is someone who is a very important figure in my life. He has shown me how to truly love someone and that is something that I really want to learn, especially to myself. I feel sometimes that I haven't allowed myself to love him completely, and that I feel somewhat guilty by this because out of anyone who I would want to love, it would be him and I want to be the best of who I am for him. How do I go about releasing the negative feelings that come up for me, and what can I do about my eating disorder? I also want to add that I become very emotional and negative when I drink alcohol, which also brings me more susceptible to my bingeing. Is this something that I have hidden in my subconscious and that it 'comes out' when I relax with a bit of alcohol? I don't want to sound like I am crazy but the last time after I was a bit drunk, during my bingeing it was as if there were other voices or I felt other beings inside of me?! I could even name one of them, it was really scary.
One more thing I need to ask, about the Everclear and epsom salt mixing technique. We don't have Everclear here; is it okay to use white spirits instead for moving into the new house? Thank you for your help...
Hi... all of the issues you speak about relate to not feeling safe. You are dealing with, as you are aware, the belief that it's not safe to be you, of being yourself. A good affirmation for this is: "I accept myself at every age. Each moment in life is perfect. I have faith." When you say this, feel it in your body, and keep your hand on your heart. You are learning, in this life, to have a compassionate heart, and to do this, you must first learn to love yourself. This means that you need to explore what the origin is of your not feeling safe, when did that begin (?) - and see how, when, and where you decided not to love yourself. Then use the techniques offered to work with this , feel it completely, and heal it. A commitment to self love is a primary factor for healthy relationships with others. It is a force that influences biological activity and heals us and others.
There is a lot of trauma still held in your physical body. One thing you can do to help heal this is to imagine a rainbow. See the rays coming from the sky and entering your heal. Flow the rainbow like liquid color through your boy. Let it carry out whatever is not your true essence. What is left is what is truly yours. I'd invite you to do this 3 times a day for 2 months.
Also, here are some powerful prayers you can do to support your healing:
To Heal Addictions:
Also, I invite you to get hold of Caroline Myss's book, Why People Don't Heal. There is good info in there for you.
What you are doing with your boyfriend, in being controlling or critical of him, is called transference. You are transferring your own fears an issues onto him. In other words, when you are being critical of him, it's really your own criticalness toward yourself that you are feeling. When you are trying to control him, it's because you aren't feeling safe. So, what you need to do is become aware of what is going on within YOUR OWN BODY and tune into it. Then just stop, take a deep breath, and follow some of the techniques I will give you here. One of the things that is showing up for you in anger. Anger is a defense mechanism to cover up deep fear. So, what you need to do is become aware of your anger, and then also explore below your anger to find the fears that are hidden there. Ask: "What am I really afraid of?" One issue that is showing up for you is that you felt, as a child, that someone else was loved or favored more then you. (Fears would be: I am unlovable, unworthy, loneliness, isolation, etc.) This is a good issue to explore and then use the techniques offered to transform it.
Facing Deep Fear:
- Find your fear/ learn its name. You need to acknowledge what your fear is actually about, even though doing so will probably be painful.
- Go inside of its presence and relinquish/accept it all. Go into the center of the fear and give up everything. In other words, as an example, if you are facing the fear that you might be filled with illness the rest of your life, you have to be willing to accept or face the ultimate fear, the ultimate place you don't want to go to, the place you want to avoid going to, that you are going to die. It seems odd that you have to be willing to die in order to live, but it works, IF YOU TRULY ALLOW YOURSELF TO FEEL ALL OF YOUR FEAR - be with it completely an go as deep as you nee to go - AND THEN TOTALLY GO TO THIS PLACE OF LETTING GO. Most fears, fortunately, won't need such a drastic sacrifice, i.e., I'm going to be fat the rest of my life, and that's OK.
- Heighten your senses/ live to the fullest - In the throes of the anguish and pain of your realization of never having or never being what you want, relish the sensations that at least, you are FULLY ALIVE AND FULLY FEELING in the pain.
- Join with the unlike/ slide into place. As the pain begins to subside, you'll see/ feel yourself as being out of phase with what your opposite is. (FOR EXAMPLE: I'm fat/ I want to be thin.) Both halves are part of you and need to be merged. Imagine that there are two pieces of 35mm film, each with one of the two opposite images of you. See them sliding into place on top of each other, so that now they are lined up perfectly.
- Complete the union/ embrace and hold. Envision the two images moving into each other and becoming one. Feel deeply how that feels, in every cell of your being.
Boundary Position
Eye segment block: issues of existence
In the first days of our life outside the womb, we urgently seek contact with those who care for us, usually our mothers. We need to receive unspoken messages which tell us 'Yes, you're here, you exist, I recognize and care for you'; to see and be seen, touch and be touched, hear and be heard. The focus for this affirmation that we exist seems to be the whole skin surface of our bodies, and more specifically, the upper head and particularly the eyes.
We are not really describing anything mysterious here; you can see parents and babies instinctively drinking deep in each others' eyes right from the start, especially during feeding, and there have been several studies of how badly affected a baby is if the parent keeps turning their attention away. The same happens if she is not held and stroked enough - enough to feel real.
We depend utterly on this fundamental validation, and if we don't get it at the start of life through our eyes and skin, there will be a long-term incompleteness and fragility built into our body-mind development A part of our energy will stay back in those first days of life, still seeking that primary contact which says 'you exist'. This insecurity can be seen in the eyes of the adult, and sensed in their interaction with the world. At least part of the character will be built upon a basic uncertainty about their own wholeness and reality, and every crisis of life will be experienced as a threat to being.
If the person stays in the same family situation this lack of warm human contact in earliest infancy is likely to be continued in childhood, and may be reinforced by frightening or confusing experiences that need to be shut out of awareness. This kind of history puts a particular stress on boundaries. Do I have any? Where are they? These are very real questions for someone with a strong eye segment block. With a 'yearning block', someone will feel a lack of wholeness. They may experience themselves as 'in bits', fragmented, 'all over the place', liable under pressure to flee or fall apart- There will be a drive to find some form of the missing primary contact: 'I must see, 1 must understand', a compulsion to make sense of things, to find an answer. There will be a 'seeking', intense expression in the eyes, which can be frightening to other people whose own deep feelings are sparked off by this demand for contact.
Does this sound familiar? It is partly this need to understand which draws someone to read - or to write - about the structures of the body-mind. You may also recognize in yourself the 'denying eye block', which seeks to repress this frightening need for contact, understanding and validation. Its message is 'I can't or won't see or understand'. The fear of what's out there, or what's inside, is so great that the person closes down their perception in some way, clouds or fogs or confuses, 'goes away in the eyes' as Reich puts it.
A small example is the otherwise sensible person who 'just can't see' some area of reality. Because of our training, for women it is often mathematics or mechanics; for men, it is emotions. We can't understand it because it stirs up too much: we cannot bear to keep our attention on it and re-experience the anger, say, of being put down in childhood, or the anguish in our own heart. For many people, psychic and spiritual realities fall into this category: 'I won't look because there's nothing there.'
On a wider scale, the denying eye block puts people severely out of touch with the world and with other humans. They feel 'cut off', 'unreal', but may well be giving out conscious or unconscious messages of 'stay away'; a coldness and an invisible wall which is their response to intolerable fear.
Fear is very much the key emotion with the boundary character position: fear of being overwhelmed. of exploding or imploding, of one's fragile foothold on existence crumbling. A source of denying eye blocking is very often the need, as a child, to escape adult scrutiny, to not be seen into. There is a lack of fundamental confidence which means a natural boundary between inside and outside fails to develop, so that a harsh and exaggerated cut-off is created in its place.
A good sign that we are occupying the boundary position is if we become confused about what is outside and what is inside. Perhaps we find ourselves seeing other people as feeling angry or afraid when that is what we are feeling, or perhaps we let other people's ideas take us over and dominate our own sense of things. Or maybe we mix up one kind of reality with another, mistaking our own energy for some sort of psychic or science-fiction 'attack' from outside.
All these experiences are seen in orthodox psychiatry as reflecting 'schizoid' character Structures. This is not the same thing as 'schizophrenia' but, one might say, a very mild version of the problems for which that label is used. These are the sorts of experiences described so well in R.D. Laing's earlier books, like The Divided Self. In a sense, though, Laing perpetuates the split he describes by writing only about the mind, and not the body. This is one boundary that tends to exist very strongly in such characters.
Eye segment blocking makes it hard to live in the body - one form it can take, as we have already noted, is the 'ivory tower' intellectual. It also makes it hard to achieve wholeness; the bodies of people with strong boundary characters often have an unfinished or unintegrated look to them - different parts may give contradictory messages. Sometimes there is a childlike, undeveloped physique, perhaps the large head and spindly neck of the baby who in essence is still present still seeking wholeness and validation. Someone really stuck in the boundary position will give off a deep sense of 'wrongness' with their body-mind; other people will instinctively tend to avoid them, which of course reinforces their isolation and fear.
Another form which this 'flight from the body' often takes is an extreme sensitivity to, and interest in, the 'psychic', 'spiritual' realm. However, because the boundary position is severely undergrounded, the very real sensitivity is quite undiscriminating. Genuine contact gets mixed up with complete fantasy, often projecting the person's own feelings and sensations 'out there' on to other people or 'spirits'. The awareness of energy, however confused, is real and strong; in particular, the boundary character will often be strongly conscious of the energy field surrounding the body - the 'aura'.
It is important to see how the needs and concerns of the boundary position as with every other character - are basically quite rational and universal. Every baby passes through a phase of contacting the world and other people through eyes, ears, nose and skin, and a phase of setting boundaries, making a sense of self which is secure against outside invasion or 'leaking'. Every adult can develop out of this 'eye energy' a creative enjoyment of looking, thinking, discovery, eye contact, flirting, visions, inspiration and meditation.
What we are calling an eye block, a boundary position, is a state where someone has not yet fully managed to create a basis for this adult creativity. They are still partially stuck in an early childhood crisis, and are reducing adult experience to these terms. By their very over-sensitivity, though, they are many of our artists, our mediums, our prophets, our seers.
Exercises to give a direct experience of the character positions necessarily involve working with another person, since the positions are fundamentally about relationship. If you have a friend with whom you feel happy to try it, then the following exercise should put you in touch with your boundary material.
Exercise
Person A, stand with your back close up against a wall, pressing yourself against it and coming up on tiptoe, so your whole posture is 'up and away'. Open your eyes very wide, breathe high in your chest, without ever fully emptying your lungs. Person B, stand a few feet away, and holding eye contact slowly advance on A. Person A, experiment with saying things like 'No', 'keep away', and so on; let yourself go into the feelings that come up. After a few minutes stop, make contact with each other's real self, perhaps by hugging and talking for a minute, and try the exercise in reverse.
There is a need to balance your feminine and masculine energies. I invite you to read the article on this listed at the end of the home page on this site. You are too much in the feminine and not enough in your masculine energy. This can lead you into being more of a victim. When you are relating to life from a victim standpoint, it is difficult to have faith that anything works out, or that you are safe. Check out the Laws of the Universe on the site as well, regarding healing victim energy.
I think that's enough for now.
Blessings, Ayal
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