Cleaning out the garbage
“The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.” —Alice Miller
In my coaching practice, I use a model/metaphor for explaining the psyche that I adopted from my own coach—that within all of us there is an inner little kid, an adult, and a higher self. The easy, in a nutshell way to explain these three pieces is that the inner little kid governs emotions; the adult is functional, logical, rational; the higher self is that knowing beyond knowing feeling that descends when we are acutely in the present moment.
This model for understanding the personality is the most helpful one that I’ve seen. It’s how I can make sense of things such as feeling like you logically have forgiven someone, and then getting around the person and feeling hurt and angry, all over again. Why does that happen, in my estimation? It happens because the adult side of you understands that everyone does the best they can. It’s the inner kid who is still pissed. To a child, it does not matter that anyone has done the best they could. All of these parts of you are hanging around inside, bumping up against one another.
In my experience, how do we heal this? Start feeling.
At first this idea of feeling all the feelings seems dramatic. Cry? Get angry? Emote? What’s the point?
I remember telling my coach, “It all happened; there’s nothing I can do about it now.” It didn’t make any sense to me to start feeling a bunch of inconvenient feelings.
Later I’d realize that true, there’s nothing you can do about the past, but if the past is influencing your right-here-right-now, then there’s something to look at. I didn’t want to be a victim to my past, eternally run by it, and I’d tried any number of different talk therapy interventions that hadn’t gone anywhere. So, I started feeling my feelings.
Turns out, that was the thing that I needed.
The Garbage in the Basement Metaphor
Today, I encourage clients to feel feelings (of course, I encourage this responsibly. Someone in the midst of acute trauma responses where they still might go into freeze, fight, or flight, should not simply start feeling feelings without the support of a mental health professional. In general, I suggest the support of mental health professionals).
When explaining the reason for why it’s helpful to feel feelings to my coaching clients, I use the metaphor of a basement. If someone has been throwing their garbage in the basement instead of taking it out to the curb each week, the garbage might not be seen from the outside, but you know it’s in there. It smells. As more garbage piles up, it’s more crowded and harder to just breathe. That’s the impact of going a long time without feeling those feelings.
But then the day comes when you decide that it’s time to feel the feelings—to take some of the garbage out. (Feelings aren’t bad or “garbage” but work with me for a moment). The basement is super full, and you can’t live like this anymore. The body is presenting its bill. It’s time to look at this stuff.
It would be overwhelming to take it all out at once, so perhaps you decide to take one or two bags of trash out to the curb, but that’s it. But then you get down there and realize that even if you take out only a bag or two at a time, you still end up coming into some contact with the rest of what’s down there. That is overwhelming. Resistance comes up again—you don’t want to do that clean up job anymore. So perhaps you try to go a bit longer without having to deal with it.
And somehow, life finds a way. The body is presenting its bill. It’s time to look at this stuff.
A decade ago, I began sifting through my own garbage, as it were. At first, I tried just taking out a bag or two at a time. Eventually, I realized that unless I really got in there and got after it with processing out what I felt, the process was just dragging out. With the support of the appropriate people, I began intentionally crying, screaming into towels, and setting aside space for processing out my feelings just like someone would if they were setting aside time for meditation. I set a timer, and I went for it: crying, screaming into towels, hitting pillows, attempting to feel every feeling I’d ever not felt from my past.
It was terrifying. I realized that I was a way more pissed off person than I had ever realized. Also, a way sadder person than I had ever realized. At times it got overwhelming and I questioned why I was cleaning out this shitty mess, because it was seeming way stinkier and sadder than I’d bargained for.
But then some glimpses of relief came. I saw that without as much unneeded trash hanging around, there was something lighter, more powerful in how I walked the world. It was something I liked. I liked how, instead of starting a fight with my partner when I felt tension, I took care of myself and didn’t take it out on him. I liked how, instead of letting things spiral when I was sad, I started looking around and wondering aloud about my options.
If you’ve ever cleaned out a room of your own, you know what it feels like, to get that relief of having cleared some space. You just feel better. That’s what it’s like to do this work.
How I started cleaning up my past pain isn’t necessarily how anyone else is supposed to. The point of this post is to share that if you know that you need to clean out the garbage—if you know that the body is eventually going to present its bill—it’s best to simply own that and find the right people to help you through it. It’s better to face it than to pretend it isn’t down there, smelling, stinking up your life.