It’s Not You; It’s Your Trauma
EP 0070 – Sitting With Uncomfortable Feelings
It’s Not You – It’s Your Unfelt Grief
You’ve spent years running from the tight knot in your chest, the churning in your gut, convincing yourself that staying busy or numb will make it disappear. It won’t. The only way out is through—sitting with the uncomfortable feelings you’ve buried since childhood. No shortcut, no pill, no new relationship will erase what your body still remembers. Time to stop pretending and start feeling.
Grieving the Losses You Never Named
The core work is grieving every loss you endured but were never allowed to mourn: loss of innocence, loss of safety, loss of self-respect, loss of a childhood that should have been yours. Just like grieving a death, you have to let yourself feel the sorrow, the regret, the rage. You must sit in the pain until it moves through you instead of staying trapped inside, poisoning everything else. This isn’t optional self-pity; it’s the only path that actually releases what’s been locked in your nervous system for decades.
Why You Keep Running From the Body
You avoid these feelings because the moment you stop distracting yourself, the old tension returns—chest tight, stomach in knots, shoulders locked. Your mind immediately jumps to obsessive thinking to pull you out of sensation. That’s the survival strategy you learned: feel nothing, think everything. Society shames sadness, weakness, anything that isn’t glossy and productive. You were probably punished for crying or feeling bad as a kid—“I’ll give you something to cry about”—so now even allowing grief feels dangerous, shameful, wrong.
The Brutal Price of Avoidance
Every time you reach for the phone, the bottle, the next binge-watch, the next relationship, you’re paying the high cost of repression. The balloon you keep pushing down in one place bulges out somewhere else—addictions, anxiety, codependency, chronic exhaustion, rage that leaks onto the people you love. You age, your energy drops, and the distractions become less effective. Eventually you can’t outrun it. The feelings don’t go away; they just find uglier ways to surface.
The Freedom on the Other Side
When you stop resisting and start sitting in the discomfort—laying in the dark, breathing into the tension, staying even when it feels unbearable—something shifts. The energy stops being a solid block and begins to spread and soften. You teach your body you can survive the feelings instead of being destroyed by them. Panic loses its power. Space opens inside you. Joy actually becomes possible because you no longer live terrified of loss. You become stronger than the fear that once ran your life.
Three Important Takeaways
- Feelings don’t vanish by being ignored—they get stored in the body and demand attention through tension, anxiety, or addiction.
- Sitting with discomfort is a skill built through short, repeated practice, not a one-time breakthrough or intellectual insight.
- Processing old grief expands your capacity for joy and freedom by removing the constant fear of feeling bad again.
Conclusion
Stop waiting for permission to hurt. The world will never hand you a safe day to fall apart. What’s left is the cold, clear decision to claim the right to feel what was once forbidden. Every minute you stay present with the ache is a quiet act of defiance against the past that tried to erase you. When the wave finally recedes, you won’t find a perfect self waiting—you’ll find a body that finally trusts it can carry both sorrow and breath at the same time. That’s the beginning of something unbreakable.
