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2. “Process-Skipping” around Difficult Feelings |
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the Psychological Health of "Spiritual" and "Growth" Practices 5. Conclusion |
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| You know when you’re angry, lonely, or excited. You know when you feel chills up and down your spine, tears, rapid heart beats, or delighted laughter. These are in your awareness and, if you choose, you can think about or analyze them. |
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| But there is another kind of knowing that all the while moves forward in your body beneath the surface of your mind’s thinking and your emotional experience. |
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 Snow near Columbia Charles Surendorf |
This knowing is more vague and opaque. Here, your mind’s eye cannot easily penetrate to figure out, conceptualize, analyze, or organize. Your body expresses a meaning that you can “feel,” without yet being able to formulate anything in your mind or articulate it with words. Eugene Gendlin calls such felt meaning a “felt sense.” It’s all about how you’re connected in a bodily way in life. Developing the habit of noticing and nurturing your important feelings is all about learning to go “into and through” your surface feelings in a way that allows you to find the felt sense which lies beneath them. It’s learning to access a meaning in your body that is not thought in your mind. |
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 HY IS THIS IMPORTANT? Because most of us are always looking “outside” for answers to problems, rarely understanding that our bodies already have answers if we will only take a little time to look and listen “inside.” Dr. Gendlin notes that your mind seeks the “solution” to a problem while your body looks for a “resolution” in how it carries the problem. |
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| We welcome "good" feelings and push away so-called “bad” feelings without ever pausing to realize that difficult feelings offer equally as important doorways to answers as do our good feelings. Too often we stop with the feeling and fail to connect with the felt sense that lies beneath it. The possibility for change and growth lies not in your emotional reactions, but in your body’s more connected sense for some personal felt meaning within a relationship or situation. Your difficult feelings have as much to tell you about yourself as do your more comfortable feelings. |
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 OTS OF PEOPLE are uncomfortable with difficult feelings. They don’t like them! Some even dislike them so much that as soon they feel the barest first hint of a troublesome or uncomfortable emotion, it’s like hearing the starter’s gun at the beginning of a race. Without even thinking they’re immediately off and running, trying to numb, to avoid, to escape from what they feel rising up inside themselves. |
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| That’s what process-skipping is all about. It’s the way we bounce off, skip away from, and try to control uncomfortable feelings that are actually our very best doorway into our felt senses. This troublesome experience is precisely where the potential for inner growth and change lie waiting to surprise us. |
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around Difficult Feelings |
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 ROCESS-SKIPPING IS A repetitious, psychological habit that’s always set on automatic pilot. You numb or distract yourself from a feeling you don’t like, thereby turning away from the very doorway into connecting with a felt sense and the possibility of some change in how your body must carry a difficult issue. |
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| Most people don’t do this deliberately. We all fall into process-skipping, generally by imitating others--our parents, for example. How did your parents “deal with” difficult feelings? You’ll learn a lot about yourself simply by answering that one simple question. |
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“Can I identify some of my own process-skipping reactions?” |
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or run away from my difficult feelings?” |
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to sense any inner response that might come to answer these questions. |
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| Most people think difficult feelings are caused by some external situation that bothers them--a threatening person, an embarassing situation, an insoluble dilemma. But that’s only part of the picture. |
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| The other part is that an important piece of the difficult feeling is all about you! It’s about how YOU are inside with carrying this outside, external threat or circumstance. Often, you can’t change external events. They are beyond your control. But you can learn to be in touch with the part of you that is forced to carry the effects of that external circumstance and the feelings generated by it. |
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 HERE IS A STORY, a very personal meaning that waits to be uncovered and move forward inside your difficult feeling. For most people, however, a painful, repetitive emotion is so hard to bear that they turn the messenger into the enemy. They skip right past the feeling into some activity that draws their attention away from the difficult emotion in their body. |
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| We each come right up to the door of entering through our unprocessed feeling into our felt sense, and then we suddenly whisk ourselves away into some distracting or numbing activity that soothes and seems to make the problem go away--at least for the moment. But your body has a tenacious memory! Whatever remains unfinished, still unprocessed inside, will continue to let you know you need to listen to it. |
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| It’s an education to hear grade school children describe how they “deal with” their difficult feelings. The litany of process-skipping strategies is alarming and nearly endles. One wonders from whom they learned it all! “I go shopping.” “I listen to music.” “I run.” “I hang out with my friends at the mall.” “I talk on the phone.” “I play sports.” “I watch TV.” “I just get busy and DO SOMETHING!” |
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| There is an inward path to grow beyond such process-skipping, but your must rely upon your body to teach you how to find it! You simply cannot THINK your way into solving your difficult feelings. |
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| Clicking on the blue link below will open a second browser window on this page containing a printer friendly process-skipping story that provides a clear example illustrating what you’ve just read above. This additional page will help you to learn more about process-skipping, and also includes a more detailed introduction to, “The Emerging World of ‘Felt Sensing’.” |
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| Clicking the upper left corner box on the “Story” window will close that page and return you to this location on the Process-Skipping page. |
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STORY |
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the Psychological Health of "Spiritual" and "Growth" Practices |
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| Clicking on the blue link below will open a second browser window containing a helpful page of questions and examples that illustrate process-skipping approaches which easily become incorporated into many "spiritual" and "growth" practices. |
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 NLY WHEN YOU REACH a point in your “process-skipping” where you become tired of burdening your body with the never-ending attempt to "deal with” your difficult feelings, will you be ready to try an entirely different approach.It’s learning how to be with your feelings in a more open, caring, and body-accepting way, just as you dissolved inside from being tight to relaxing while walking in the rain. |
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| This then leads to walking an inward path of learning about a marvelous inner resource for being with your difficult feelings. It is discovering your own personal "Affection Teacher. |
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OUR BODY'S capacity for knowing and being in-touch with feelings may be compared to an iceberg floating in the sea. Only a very small portion of the iceberg is actually visible above the waterline. The larger mass lies hidden beneath the surface.