We all have strong emotional reactions to our parents. Some of us are in touch with these feelings, but others protect themselves from the intensity of their emotions by burying them.
You may have gotten strong messages in your childhood that it wasn't safe to feel. Perhaps you were punished for expressing feelings, or perhaps your feelings were so painful that you pushed them deep into your unconscious in order to survive. Perhaps you had to convince yourself that you just didn't care, or perhaps you needed to prove to your parents that they couldn't get to you.
As an adult it may be very difficult for you to turn your emotional faucets back on. The connection between powerful feelings and your past and current relationship with your parents may be especially difficult for you to see. The feelings I'm discussing throughout this book may seem foreign to you. Perhaps you describe yourself as cold or numb, or you believe that you don't have any feelings - that you don't have much to offer in the way of love or caring. If so, your childhood feelings were probably very intense, and you required a great deal of protective defenses to make it into adulthood.
TOXIC PARENTS: OVERCOMING THEIR HURTFUL LEGACY AND RECLAIMING YOUR LIFE, BY DR. SUSAN FORWARD
yeah, I love Blue Velvet. Do you like Twin Peaks? A great Lynch to check out as it was a TV show so is a different pace than the later movies you've been watching of his which I pass on. every episode for free here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.cbs.com/classics/twin_peaks/