The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness Out of Blame

255 Pages·2015·1.44 MB·English

by  Pete Walker

THE TAO OF

FULLY FEELING

HARVESTING FORGIVENESS

OUT OF BLAME

PETE WALKER

THE TAO OF FULLY FEELING

AN AZURE COYOTE BOOK / 1995

Second Edition/2015

For information about Azure Coyote publications, please visit:

www.pete-walker.com

Cover Art: Pip Wilson

ISBN 971515079767

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 94-96296

Copyright © 1995 by Pete Walker

All rights reserved

To my best friend, Sat Ferren
who was like a mother to me.

To Jim Dowe

“Walt Whitman in a Buick”

my most significant father figure.

To my sisters Pat, Diane, and Sharon

whose love helped keep

my heart alive in childhood.

I see there is no prison except that which I construct to protect myself from feeling

my pain.

– Sheldon Kopp

To be able to invite pain to join in my experience

and not have to control my life to avoid

pain is such a freedom!

– Christina Baldwin

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

TERMS

INTRODUCTION

1.
THE IMPORTANCE OF RECOVERING THE WHOLE EMOTIONAL NATURE

Halting The Flight From Feelings
Harvesting Forgiveness Out Of Blame
Grief Precedes Relief
How Can I Forgive You If You Are Not To Blame?
Forgive, But Do Not Forget
The Rewards Of Emotional Recovery

2.
FORGIVENESS AS DENIAL

Denial Masks Self-Abuse
Premature Forgiveness And Guilt
Premature Forgiveness And The Loss Of Human Rights
False Forgiveness And Perfectionism
Denial About Perfectionism
Perfectionism Kills Self-Esteem, As Phoniness Kills Love
There Is No Perfect Mr./Ms. Right
Idiot Savants Of The Emotional Kind

3.
THE TAO OF FULLY FEELING

Fundamental Dynamics Of The Emotional Nature
Wholism
Polarity
Understanding Polarity Helps Us Deal With Normal Loneliness
Ambivalence
Ambivalence And Splitting
Ambivalence And Spirituality
Flow

4.
THE GIFTS OF GRIEVING

Grieving And Reclaiming The Losses Of Childhood
The Emotions Recovered In Grieving Fuel Intentionality
Suggested Intentions For Recovery
Grieving Awakens Self-Compassion
Grieving Recharges The Instinct Of Self-Protection
Grieving Soothes Emotional Flashbacks
The Dysfunctional Family As A War Zone
Grieving Decreases Somatization
Grief Opens The Door To And Peace Relief
Grieving Restores The Heart To Love
Circumnavigating My Loneliness
A Guided Meditation
Grieving Diminishes Denial And Minimization
Grieving Alleviates Fear And Shame

5.
THE ESSENTIAL PROCESSES OF GRIEVING

Crying
Upgrading Self-Pity Into Self-Compassion
Crying Heals Catastrophizing And Drasticizing
Crying And Positive Nostalgia
Angering
Techniques Of Angering
Angering Builds Confidence
Temporary Splitting Into Anger Aids Recovery
Verbal Ventilation
Fully Emoting
Feeling
A Technique To Enhance Feeling
Feeling As Spiritual Practice
How Reason Circumvents Grieving
Grieving Is Not Always A Fast Fix
The Dark Night Of The Soul
Unpredictable Storms Of Grief
When Grieving Does Not Bring Relief

6.
GRIEVING PROMOTES VITALITY BY DECREASING SELF-DESTRUCTIVENESS

Dissociation
Everything In Moderation Including Defended-ness
Hypervigilance
Looking Out To Avoid Looking In
Healthy Hypervigilance
The Hypervigilance/Dissociation “Two-Step”

Obsessiveness
Healthy Obsessiveness
The Therapeutic Cul-de-sac Of Overanalyzing Obsessions
Compulsiveness
Compulsions Wear Out Our Bodies
Obsessive-Compulsiveness
Busyholism
Busyholism And Codependence
Healthy Compulsiveness
The Healthy Use Of Defenses To Retreat From Grieving
When Recovery Becomes Obsessive-Compulsive

7.
BLAME AND FORGIVENESS

Blame Is Not A Dirty Word
Learned Helplessness And Toxic Blame
Blame As Healthy Self-Protection
No Recovery vs. Recovering “No!”
Too Shamed To Blame
Angering Out The Blame
Repetition Compulsion, Blame And Premature Forgiveness
The Healing Ambivalence Of Feeling Both Forgiveness And Blame
Blame As An Ongoing Process
Blame and Shame
The Inner Critical Parent
Declaring War On The Inner Critical Parent
Blaming Shame
The Interplay Of Blame And Forgiveness

8.
FULLY FEELING DEPENDS UPON FULLY REMEMBERING

Constructing A Detailed Picture Of Childhood Abuse And Neglect
Verbal Abuse
Emotional Abuse
The Deadly Duo Of Verbal And Emotional Abuse
Sarcasm And Teasing: Disguised Abuse
Characteristics Of Destructive Sarcasm
Sarcasm Wounds
Sarcasm: The Leaking Out Of Repressed Anger
Television And Sarcasm
Sarcasm Makes Man An Island
Sarcasm Kills Relationships
Healthy Limits With Sarcasm And Teasing
Constructive Feedback Naturally De-escalates Sarcasm
Neglect: Invisible Perpetration

Verbal Neglect
Verbal Nurturance
Healing Verbal Neglect
Psychotherapy Resuscitates Self-Expression
Emotional Neglect
Mirroring
Failure To Thrive
Healing Emotional Neglect
Spiritual Abuse
Spiritual Neglect
Healing Spiritual Neglect
Grieving As Spiritual Practice

9.
SELF-COMPASSIONATE REPARENTING

Reparenting Begins With Forgiving The Inner Child
Talking To And For The Inner Child
Self-Mothering
Self-Fathering

10. FORGIVENESS AND EXTENUATING CIRCUMSTANCES

Our Parents’ Uncried Tears Became Their Rage
Forgiving Our Parents
The Emotional And Spiritual Carnage Of The Industrial Revolution
The Imaginative Reconstruction Of Our Parents’Childhoods
God: The Ultimate Extenuating Circumstance
Understanding Extenuating Circumstances Assuages Shame

11. LIMITS OF FORGIVENESS

Extenuating Circumstances Are Sometimes Irrelevant
The Ongoing Dance Of Forgiveness And Blame
Degrees Of Forgiveness
Forgiveness From A Distance
Real Feelings Of Forgiveness May Recrystallize Denial
Forgiveness Can Mask Emotional Exploitation
A Personal Story About Forgiveness From A Distance
Limiting Contact With Still-Dysfunctional Parents
Forgiveness And Spirituality

12. SEEKING FORGIVENESS FOR OUR OWN

DYSFUNCTIONAL PARENTING
An Example Of A Balanced Apology
Forgiveness, Reparenting And The Inner Child

Seeking Forgiveness For Our Own Poor Reparenting
Forgiveness And Blame And The Inner Child

13. SELF-FORGIVENESS

Self-Forgiveness And The Forgiveness Of Others
Self-Forgiveness Of Past Mistakes And Diehard Habits
Self-Forgiveness And Entrenched Self-Hatred
Self-Forgiveness And Existential Pain
Self-Forgiveness, Others’ Forgiveness And Extenuating Circumstances
Mutual Forgiveness
Unscrambling The Mix Of Past And Present Pain

14. AUTHENTICALLY FORGIVING ONE’S PARENTS

Dynamic Forgiveness
Forgiveness As A Subset Of Love

APPENDIX A:

AN ASSESSMENT OUTLINE OF PARENTAL ABUSE AND NEGLECT

APPENDIX B:

THE HUMAN BILL OF RIGHTS OF SELF-EXPRESSION

APPENDIX C:

AFFIRMATIONS FOR REPARENTING THE INNER CHILD

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the many friends, clients, teachers, therapists, and authors whose healing

influence is directly and indirectly reflected in this book. I am especially lucky to have had a
succession of loving, heart-centered therapists: Jo Gaha, Derek Simmonds, Will Schutz, Bob
Rosenbush, and Lisa Schiffer – and loving, therapist-friends: Jude Gee, Deb Bonham, Maria
Cogburn, Leah Lazar, Randi Myrseth, and Nancy Ashworth. I thank you all for your healing love
and wonderful influence in helping me to reclaim the birthright of valuing my feelings and
myself. Thank you also for your positive influence in my evolution as a psychotherapist.

I would also like to acknowledge all the psychological and spiritual theorists whose ideas

are pivotal in this book. So much comes secondhand through modern proponents of the
psychological ideas of Freud and Jung, and the spiritual ideas of Buddha and Lao Tsu. The most
formative of these for me have been Ken Wilber, Alice Miller, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Sheldon
Kopp, Stephen Levine, Steven Arroyo, Alan Watts, Will Schutz, John Bradshaw, Irwin Yalom,
Bryan Whittine, Walt Whitman, and all who are included in the bibliography.

I have also used numerous excerpts from Stephen Mitchell’s wonderful anthology of

sacred poetry: The Enlightened Heart, and Robert Bly, James Hillman and Michael Meade’s
anthology: The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart.

Apologies to all whose ideas I have unconsciously borrowed and not mentioned, and

gratitude to God for the unique formulations that have come directly into my own consciousness.

I also deeply appreciate all the adult children of dysfunctional families – friends and

clients – who have shared their painful histories with me. Thank you for helping me validate my
observations about the parenting crisis in our culture.

I am also grateful for the editorial help of Robin Bishop who breathed new life into this

book at a very crucial juncture and enriched it in many valuable ways. Many thanks also to my
good friends Marilyn Clemo and Leah Lazar for their invaluable editing help.

TERMS

The term dysfunctional family refers to any family that damaged a child’s inborn self-

esteem through any constellation of verbal, spiritual, emotional, or physical abuse and neglect as
defined in Appendix A and Chapter 8.

The terms adult child, survivor, and recoveree will be used interchangeably to describe

any individual injured by abusive or neglectful parenting in childhood. The term adult child does
not imply that adult survivors of dysfunctional families act childishly. It refers to the fact that
they arrive in adulthood with many of their developmental needs unmet. Many adult children
have yet to acquire the full emotional, relational, and self-expressive capacities of mature adults.

The term inner child refers to the part of the self that is developmentally arrested because

important kinds of nurturing were missing in childhood. To some survivors this is merely a
useful concept to identify those needs; to others, like myself, there seems to be a historical child-
self residing in the unconscious still waiting for the safety and nurturance it needs to come forth
and develop a fully functioning adult-self.

The term recovery is used in two ways: firstly, as a global term to describe the overall

process of healing the traumas of childhood abuse and neglect. Many recoverees describe this
with the phrase: “I am in recovery.” Recovery is also used to identify specific developmental
goals as in: “I am working on the recovery of my feelings,” and “My therapy is helping me to
recover my assertiveness.” Recovery is best seen as an ongoing process – a process of recovering
rather than becoming recovered. This helps to avoid the pitfalls of all-or-none evaluating and
black-and-white thinking that are common legacies of the dysfunctional family.

The term codependent is used in a narrow sense to describe the adult child who habitually

over-sacrifices his needs and desires for someone else. Codependency is commonly the result of
a childhood in which the parents’ needs were routinely elevated over those of the child’s.

The term toxic shame describes a distorted mental and emotional state that afflicts many

adult children with long periods of feeling overwhelmed and incapacitated by self-loathing.
Toxic shame is the product of prolonged exposure in childhood to parental disapproval and
disgust. (Chapter 7 explores the irreplaceable role of blame in healing toxic shame.)

The term effective grieving highlights the fact that most survivors are not able to embrace

their grief fully and shamelessly enough to find the precious relief it offers. (Chapter 5 explores
the most common causes of “failed” grieving.)

While the nouns feeling and emotion are used interchangeably throughout this book, the

verbs feeling and emoting are distinguished from one another. Feeling is the process of passively
attuning to and accepting inner affective experiences without trying to change them. Emoting is
the process of actively expressing and releasing inner affective experiences, as in crying,
“angering” or laughing.

INTRODUCTION

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

– e.e. cummings

Industrial societies are becoming as soulless as the machine-icons they elevate above

humanity. Industrial societies treat feelings as if they are obsolete parts. The Tao of Fully Feeling
is a guide to reclaiming the emotional richness we are stripped of in childhood, as our land is
stripped of timber and coal.

The Tao of Fully Feeling is born out of my own personal struggle and the struggles of my

clients and friends to reclaim their feelings. It is an invitation to discover how feeling and
emoting naturally re-prioritize our values so that love and intimacy are once again elevated
above acquisition and consumption.

The Tao of Fully Feeling focuses a great deal on the dysfunctional family since that is

where society’s dictums against feeling are most stringently enforced. I agree with John
Bradshaw that our culture is afflicted by an epidemic of poor parenting.

My ideas about family dysfunctionality concur with a number of modern books whose

titles alone vividly capture the collapse of the institution of parenting in our culture: Prisoners of
Childhood, Betrayal of Innocence, The Secret Everyone Knows, Hearts That We Broke Long
Ago, Soul Murder: Persecution in the Family, After The Tears: Reclaiming the Personal Losses
of Childhood, Getting Divorced From Mom And Dad , Healing The Shame That Binds You, and
My Name Is Chellis, I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization .

Family dysfunctionality is so commonplace and normal in our society that it is difficult to

recognize. Ironically, those who did not suffer extended physical abuse in childhood are the most
likely to ignore the adverse effects of their childhoods. Nonetheless, most of the adult suffering I
witness as a psychotherapist is rooted in nonphysical forms of childhood abuse and neglect.

The most common characteristic of adult suffering is self-hatred, and the most common

focus of this hatred is our feelings. Most of us were attacked, shamed or abandoned for being
emotional at very early ages. Before we can remember, most of us were forced to renounce our
feelings and hate ourselves for having them. This book offers practical advice on breaking this
unconscious, self-destructive habit.

The perspective and advice that I offer here are informed by a wide variety of life

experiences and studies. My personal journey of emotional recovery is interwoven throughout.
Let me begin here with the disturbing observation that the U. S. Army, during the height of the
Viet Nam war, was a warmer, more nurturing home to me than my childhood home.

This surprising understanding came to me via a series of recurring dreams in which I had

reenlisted and felt more content and fulfilled than I ever felt in real life.

I was perplexed by these dreams for the entire decade they occurred. Had they been

nightmares, they would have made perfect sense, for I never wanted to be in the army. Any
notion that the army was of some benefit to me was unthinkable. I had pined endlessly for the
end of my tour of duty while I was incarcerated there.

I was so befuddled by these dreams that I occasionally prayed: “Please God, tell me that

this doesn’t mean I’m supposed to reenlist!”

I eventually began to understand these dreams by comparing my army experience with

life in my family. The drill sergeants and officers who trained me to be a combat platoon leader
were as verbally and emotionally abusive as my parents. The impending threat of physical
violence was also familiar, although by some grace my combat duty was along the Korean DMZ
– considerably less dangerous than Viet Nam.

The army was different than my family however, in that I was never actually physically

assaulted there, whereas at home physical abuse was an ongoing occurrence until I was a
teenager.

As I pondered this distinction, I discovered other important differences between the army

and my family. Once the initial, relatively brief degradation phase of training was completed, the
army was significantly more hospitable than my family. Unlike my family, clear, well-defined
rules offered me the possibility of “getting it right,” of fitting in, of gaining appreciation and
respect.

Life in the army was not a constant maze of double binds and no-win situations. And even

though there were many unpleasant and dangerous on-the-job situations, there were many times
that were safe and free from imminent attack. Even notoriously stressful “boot camp” had more
overall safety in it for me than my family! What a blessed relief it was to eat meals in the mess
hall where the person next to me didn’t suddenly scream at me or hit me, as so often occurred at
family mealtime. I relaxed enough to assimilate my food more effectively, and I put on thirty
healthy pounds in the first six months.

I also made many friends who valued me. I shone at tasks I was assigned, and was

rewarded for accomplishing them. My confidence and assertiveness grew in leaps and bounds,
and I began to believe that I might have an iota of worth after all. (This is not to say that I was
instantly cured of the belief, common to many adult children, that my success was a fluke. Much
of the time I thought I was merely fooling my superiors. Surely when they discovered the real me
– the defective one that my parents saw with little difficulty – I would quickly be demoted to the
most degraded position. I was still afflicted with the infamous “impostor syndrome” that taints
the successes of many adult children.)

When I understood these dreams they ceased. Their function was served as soon as they

initiated the gradual erosion of my “idyllic childhood” illusion.

I was also studying psychology, sociology, and anthropology at university around this

time. My studies accelerated the dissolution of my illusions about my “perfect” family. I
discovered glaring evidence that Western parenting practices have been devolving since the
Industrial Revolution. I eventually became convinced that most American families grossly belie
our treasured Brady Bunch ideal.

My belief that we are suffering a parenting crisis is also grounded in my six years of

experiences living with or near non-industrialized people: three years in Africa and Asia, and