Feeling Different than the People Around You

Are you wiling to feel different than the people around you?  Many of us have trained ourselves or our bodies to match the emotional reality and even the physical reality of the people around us.  In terms of matching the emotional reality, this often begins in childhood.  For many of us it wasn't okay to feel completely different than our parents did.  If we were really happy and exuberant when our parents were sad or frustrated it didn't go well.  Or if we were sad or angry when our parents were doing well and just wanted to relax that didn't go well either.  So, what did we learn to do?  We learned to tailor our emotional responses to the people around us.  For some of us it was a need to present as always good or happy.  For others it was a need to present as always okay or fine.  For others it was to present as not being good or not doing well.  At some point it becomes exhausting to maintain the pretense, the presentation or the image of how we feel or who we are.  We desire to know who we truly are, or to be authentic, or congruent or in alignment.  So then the question becomes, how do we unravel what we put in place, or deconstruct what we previously constructed, or clear what we once created?  The predominant thing required is awareness that it is there, and the choice to change it.  That choice often is energized or fueled by the desire for authenticity or to know thyself, be thyself and express thyself in Truth, Love and Wisdom.  We don't want to live as the personality we constructed to survive the conditions of our upbringings, we want to show up as the beings we truly are, expressing our gifts, talents and abilities for us and others to benefit and live in physical and emotional realities that honor, nurture and support us.

To go a little deeper addressing the question of unraveling what we put in place, it can be helpful to acknowledge that there was a consequence for feeling how we felt, and to acknowledge what that consequence was.  It can also be helpful to acknowledge that the environment is different (you're most likely not still in your family home), and so there is space or room to choose to be and do something different without re-wounding or re-enacting the original conditions under which the adaptation strategy was put in place.  Once you have acknowledged that you can step into the question of: Who am I now and how am I now?  You can give yourself permission to feel how you feel and be who you are.  Sometimes we will have internalized the consequences that parents or other people in our lives delivered to us in the form of an inner voice, or a wall, or a barrier or a set of sensations.  That can be cleared by acknowledging that that took place and re-directing the energy, or choosing to be you and claim sovereignty from that or many other ways, depending on the tools or modalities you have available to you. 

As you choose to know who you are and feel how you feel, you can ask to have people in your life who will respond differently to you than people in your past which essentially means that how they are choosing to be supports how you're choosing to be now.  So for instance, if they are feeling sad and you are feeling joyful, there isn't any consequence for that, instead it's allowed or okay to include both of those emotional realities in the same physical reality.  They don't have to stop feeling sad and you don't have to stop feeling joyful.  And as your feeling joyful, you're able to acknowledge that they're feeling sad, as they can acknowledge your joy.  Also, at any moment, either of you can choose to feel different than you have been feeling and that is included to!

How many emotional realities are you willing to include in your physical reality?  For any emotional reality that you exclude, the tendency will be to reject, deny, separate from, control or manipulate or desire to change the people who are currently living in that reality.  And just imagine how much of your energy, creativity, healing ability, or focus could be consumed by that?  So, as you are more willing to be who you are and feel how you feel, you will increase your capacity to allow others to be who they are and feel how they feel.  In this process of being in allowance you have choice and they have choice, which means you can choose to change where you show up and how you show up, you just no longer have to separate from, exclude or reject other people's emotional realities as you do that.  In other words, you can acknowledge and include something in your awareness without choosing and creating it as your reality.  I wrote a blog on the subject of Presence & Preference which you may enjoy if you'd like to read about this from a different angle.  Another blog I wrote a few years ago called Choosing How You Feel may also benefit.  In presenting all of this information, my intention is to assist all of us to have new choices available that really support us to thrive in our lives here and be nourished, loved and supported in all ways, always.  Now is the time.