Hi, Renate.
Good to hear from you. Your TMS issue with your foot sounds frustrating.
I take a different philosophy than TMS's idea that you just tell the pain it's all in your mind. The pain isn't wanting to be ignored. It really is pain and it really is there. The question is always, "Why is my mind causing pain in my body? What's the purpose? What imbalance is it trying to alert me to so that I can deal with it?" The answer is always some emotion that's dysfunctioning (fear, anger, or grief). Technically, the base emotion is always fear. The secondary emotion is usually anger (anger wants to control the situation) and the final emotion is grief (sadness due to loss of something or not getting something, etc). The anger is to try to control the fear of not getting something and feeling the loss/grief of it. And the other fear we feel is the fear of what we'll do if we let our anger be expressed in us. It's scary to think what we'd do if we went on a rampage, you know? We could hurt someone or our self or get put in jail. So fear of anger is a big one. But with TPP, we're learning what to do when we feel our anger, and that helps us understand that we can be angry without doing something harmful to our self or others. That's when we finally start to let our self feel our emotions properly, because we see we aren't going to get in trouble feeling our fear--we have faith in ourselves to do the healthy thing, which is to contain the fear rather than outwardly expressing it in a dysfunctional way. Beyond that, the fear is just that fear of loss I mentioned earlier. And that's pretty much how our fear, anger, and grief work. And those are the emotions we're setting our intent to integrate throughout TPP. I set that as my intention the rest of my life, actually, so whether or not I'm doing a 10-week PP or not, my intention stays the same and I'm always primed for integrations to occur.
Week 7
My first integration was in Week 7, actually. I didn't have any before that point.
Anger
When I was a baby, I learned very quickly that anger wasn't allowed in my family. I saw my 3-yr-old sister get mad at my dad, throw a fit, and then he would get mad at her and spank her. So getting angry equaled getting spanked (a mild form of physical abuse [spanking] starting with a mild form of emotional abuse [no acceptance of anger]). So I repressed my anger from my earliest days. That's why my mother says I was an angel child who never cried and was always calm and happy. In other words, I didn't think I was allowed to be loud or ask for things in order to keep myself nurtured. My mom simply kept me on a schedule for feeding and that was it. My mom was under major stress, so I also probably understood that if I were loud or asked for things, I would stress her out. In other words, I learned that if I asked for my needs to be met, it would cause my mom and dad not to love me as much. That's not true, of course, but that's basically what a baby thinks. And that means that I thought my needs weren't important enough to be supplied by others and I shouldn't ask for them to be supplied by others. It also means that I thought I wasn't very important, and definitely not as important as my mother and father's needs. Anger equaled no love from my parents, basically. Just ask your mother if you were a loud, difficult baby who cried a lot or if you were a quiet, angel baby if you want to know if you experienced this as a child.
So, fast forward to my first Week 7. Someone cut me off while I was driving. I saw myself get a tiny bit angry for a split second, then I said to myself, "Oh, that guy must just be in a hurry or need to use the bathroom really bad or something." It's a technique I developed a while back (then later found out that it's a method psychology uses to prevent anger). But I stopped myself this time. I said, "Wait! I'm not gonna let my mind steal away my anger. I wanna feel it!" The second I had that thought, the anger came back and I felt it in my head. This anger I'd been so afraid of all of my life was right there, radiating out from the center of my head. So I sat with it without trying to rationalize it away. I just felt it and accepted it 100%. And after a minute or so, I realized that it felt good. It wasn't scary at all. I suddenly began laughing, because I realized that I'd been afraid of a good feeling all of these years. That's when the integration happened. I felt the odd feeling of anger in my head integrate. It moved from my head down into my chest and felt really good. I laughed and cried (happy tears) for about 15 minutes. That completely changed my outlook on everything. I became excited to deal with emotions after that, because it was such a cool experience. That's when I started feeling things in my body very strongly. When I'd go watch good movies, I'd feel my emotions all throughout my body while watching the movie, where as before, I barely felt anything in my body at all. Music is cool too, because I have integrations while I listen to it--not all songs, but good songs that really heighten my positive emotions. It's very cool. I'm not sure how much I've integrated while listening to music, but it's quite a bit.
I'm not saying that you'll for sure have integrations in Week 7--it's different for everyone. All I'm saying is that if you hang in there and you pay attention to yourself and trust that you can feel your emotions without worry that you'll do something awful or feel something unbearable, you'll eventually start to feel them and start having integrations. Just hang in there. You'll make it there eventually, and it's totally worth it once you get there.
A month or two before I did TPP, I noticed that I had an intellectual wall keeping me from experiencing emotions. When I would get into a situation that should cause emotions to rise up in me, I would think about it and rationalize it in some way so that I wouldn't have a reason to get angry or sad or scared or whatever. That was a huge coping mechanism that I thought was healthy, but finally realized was dysfunctional. So I sat down and had a talk with that part of me. I said, "Alright, you've done a great job of keeping me safe up to this point. But as an adult, it's not working anymore. It's causing health problems and emotional problems. So what began as a means for protecting us is now something that hurts us. Thank you so much for helping me all of these years, but it's time for you to rest and no longer block, because we need to feel our emotions in order to heal." That was a good first step for me, because it removed a coping mechanism, allowing me to get one step closer to feeling my emotions.
Before TPP, I developed a way to work with emotions. I'd use muscle testing to figure out the emotional problem and the belief that caused that problem. Then I'd talk to that part of myself in an unconditionally loving way and have it stop harming my body. I would correct it's harmful belief, too, which was keeping it dysfunctional. Once the belief was corrected, it would integrate. So I had one or two integrations before TPP. When I learned TPP, I learned how to fully integrate stuff more readily. It taught me how to feel my emotions again. It was really awesome. I highly recommend picturing your pain as a little kid (as you at age 6) and then let yourself express that anger in your mind as if you're that 6 year old. Just imagine beating up on someone whom the anger is directed toward. Figure out who that kid is angry with and beat them up in your mind as if you're that kid with those emotions. Feel the emotions and express them there. I do this because anger can't be reasoned with and just needs to be expressed in some healthy, safe way. Once it gets expressed sufficiently, then that part of me will move into sadness/grief/loss and start crying. That's the point at which I can love on it more effectively and correct it's dysfunctional belief that keeps it from integrating. So while it's angry, I empathize with it, letting it know that I accept it completely and I understand why it's angry and I don't blame it one bit for being angry. When I execute that anger in my mind through my imagination, I'm completely accepting of that part of me as it does that (as I do it through that part of me). It's like there are two of me--the more mature, adult part of me, and this angry, immature younger part of me. When the anger is spent, I just get to the root of what's causing the anger and grief, and I rationalize with that part of me to correct it's belief. Once it's corrected, that part of me sees that it wants to drop its old belief and integrate. So I clean that part of me up in a waterfall and take it to God and have it give it's heart to Him so He can clean off the bad programming and much. God hands it back to him, and he feels better. I do the same thing with myself, as if he and I are doing all of that together. Once we're done, we hug and integrate. By integrate, I mean he absorbs into me in my imagination, so we're becoming one person instead of two. It's like adding a hard part of my heart back to the soft part. It moves from dysfunctional emotion to functional emotion--from feeling angry or sad or scared to feeling happy, peaceful, and unconditional love. I don't always have to go through that process to integrate emotions, but I use it sometimes because I see emotions not integrating when they should've already integrated.
Look at it like this--this dysfunctional child inside wasn't allowed to be immature when she was a kid. Her parents didn't allow it in some way. So now, you're her parent--her new authority figure--and you have to show her the unconditional love she needed back then. And when you do, she'll mature into love. That's the key. Life is about maturity, not "right and wrong" or "good and bad." It's about maturing into our natural unconditional love despite our difficulties we experience. The difficulties are what make it possible for us to move through from immaturity to maturity. The more difficulties we have, the more progress we can make maturing. Difficulties are positive and for our growth, and we have to start seeing them that way instead of judging them as bad if we want to integrate them. They're all required, and they were planned ahead of time. Personally, I believe they were planned ahead of time by us and God. I think we asked God to set up our life so we could go through those things in order to learn and mature our hearts. I get that from all of the research I've done on near-death experiences where people die, go to heaven, then get resuscitated (come back to life because a doctor revived them through something like CPR). They all say very similar things about their experience with God. And their experiences show them that they made agreements with people in heaven before they came to earth--agreements to do things on earth for that person. For instance, people will meet their future children in heaven. Their children will say, "You have to go back, because you made a contract with me to have me as your child before you were born. If you don't go back, I'll never be born." That convinces the person to go back to her body, and then she gets revived by a medic and ends up back in her body. That tells me that we set all of this up before we came here, and we did so of our own free will. God's all about free will, because that's what unconditional love is all about. It doesn't force anything. It lets everything be and it manages in kindness. Hell is even kind--it's to break our resistance to God's help without forcing our free will. It causes us to use our free will to finally accept God instead of the painful things that caused us to resist Him in the first place. It allows us to embrace Love, and which is God's primary trait.
So I correct the beliefs of those different dysfunctional parts of me with beliefs like what I just explained. And it allows them to integrate/heal.
If I had to guess, I'd say you probably repressed your emotions with TPP and your psychotherapy accidentally. So your new goal in TPP would be to bring those emotions out of repression so you can experience them.
Hope this helps! I look forward to hearing more of your experiences with TPP. Have a great day.
