Traveling Through Time to Connect My Feelings to the Past Where They Belong

Right in the nick of time

After years of studying the matter, both on and off the couch, I have a pretty clear thesis on why I struggle emotionally.

Developmental injuries left me feeling periodically worthless and unlovable, which I have been ineffectually trying to remedy by frantically scrambling to somehow make myself more lovable and worthwhile.

I’ve since learned that worth and love need not be hard to earn. Making a contribution and not being an ass are pretty much all it takes. Or should take. But that wasn’t my experience and the repercussions are still echoing through my nervous system.

I have now come to the part of my healing journey that involves accepting and even inviting these painful feelings into my conscious experience. (Woohoo.)

As I do this and spend more time tolerating, exploring, and feeling my feelings, I am struck to find that they feel exactly the same as they always have.

This makes a lot of sense since my real problem has never actually been my current shortcomings but how my childhood left me feeling about myself and the world. I’ve suffered this same singular problem my whole life so why wouldn’t the underlying sensations be the same?

With extensive expensive help, I’ve come to know, at least in my head, that my chronic bouts of worthlessness, defeat, and my nearly constant, low-grade terror has to do with my past and not my present. Now, through somatic therapy, this realization is becoming body-centered and felt.

It turns out that my feelings at this moment are a direct portal to my emotional past where I can experience exactly what it felt like to be me at the time my…