Containment

If you weren’t held as a child, you won’t know how to hold yourself now. If your emotions and your physical energy were not contained, you will feel overwhelmed by them, even now. If you were not allowed, or it wasn’t safe, for you to express love and joy, anger and fear, as a child, you will not know how to contain and express these emotions appropriately now. Consequently, you will not be able to feel, contain and express the full extent of your power and potential. You will have grown up stunted and underachieving in so many ways – and fearful.

If you did not have the opportunity to experience the full extent of your emotions and energy, as a child, you would have imagined all sorts of things; that your power was destructive, to yourself and others; that your rage could kill; even that you might suffer punishment and retribution if you dared to be happy. That’s why you feel fear when you feel excited now. Probably nobody ever explained to you why things were the way they were, why your environment felt limiting or restrictive; and you probably blamed yourself for that too, and even do now. You probably thought there was something wrong with you. Nor were you taught how to contain your own energy and emotions without necessarily acting out on them; how to get what you wanted without emoting, by articulating; and, most importantly, how to delay gratification and make choices from probably limited possibilities. All of this would add to your sense of not being OK.

In this way you may have gown up being afraid to fully feel, to be fully alive, to live your life fully and spontaneously. You may have a nagging doubt that there is more but not know how to reach it. I’ll write some more specifically on how to contain various emotions and what choices you have now that you didn’t have as a child.