“Am I just stupid or stubborn or what?   What makes it so hard for me to feel the feelings or accept the challenge to feel my feelings?  Why is it not just a natural thing to do?”

No, you are not stupid… you are defended.  There is a psychological mechanism that you have learned from the trauma of your childhood that protects you by shutting down the emotions.  There is nothing here that will actually harm you, but this part of you doesn’t know that.  You just have to gently and persistently open yourself to the emotions.

The hard part is that the emotions you are opening yourself up to are ones that come to you from the reality of not getting what you need.  They are all different varieties of hurt.  It is hard to be open to the hurt.  So remember that all emotions are transitory. Joy doesn’t last.  Sadness doesn’t last.  Feelings come and go.

We are just working to make ourselves transparent to the feelings.  We are working to become able to just allow them to pass through us.  We notice them. we honor what they are telling us, we observe their source, and we let them go.

“What does feeling my feelings have to do with ‘fixing’ what is going on in my life?”

Our goal is to make choices that make things better.  Things get better when we create what we need.  We can’t create what we need if we don’t know what we need. What we need is to satisfy our longing. We can’t know what we long for if we don’t know what we feel.  So the place to start is to feel our feelings.