How do you give yourself permission to truly feel suppressed emotions?

Firstly Clever Bird would like to thank Baggy's lovely bloggees for your support! Creative Clara's blog of yesterday, "Ashamed" has been read by more people than any of her previous blogs and the messages of support that Baggy has received have been heart warming. Part of Baggy's problem of facing her issues, is that Clever Bird will intellectualise everything. In her counselling sessions she flips into a kind of third-party analysis of the influences that have affected her life. She beats the counsellor to identifying the issues and their harmful causal effects. By doing this, she can actually prevent Baggy from truly facing those issues - she prevents her from "feeling" them, and therefore she isn't actually accepting them as being anything to do with her. It almost becomes an academic exercise on Clever Bird's behalf. Then the instant that Baggy starts to "hurt", Hormonal Hannah shuts her down and stops her from "feeling". Baggy's favourite word in these sessions is "sorry", chucked in every time she cries. If she carries on blubbing, Psychic Ploppo steps in and literally switches her off; Baggy's brain stops functioning totally and she can think of nothing at all! Apparently, as safety-mechanisms go, this is an impressive one, but Baggy has no control over it and it is getting a little over used in her sessions. It probably was what she did from childhood and explains why she cannot remember anything of her childhood at all from nine or ten years old, back. And very little from when she was older. But that makes it kind of hard to accept and relive those emotions!

But one thing that has become obvious to Clever bird is that she has never been "allowed" to show those emotions. Even when her Mama left when she was eight, she was told "don't be upset", "don't cry". She was accused by her Step-Mother of shedding "crocodile tears" at her Grandma's funeral! Her real Mum, while dying from pancreatic cancer told Baggy not to cry and when she couldn't not, got cross with her. So suppressing her emotions has been the norm for Baggy for her whole life. Don't misunderstand bloggees, Baggy is ridiculously emotional, she'll cry if she sees someone else crying, even on telly and even if she has no idea why they're crying. She cried like a waterfall when her Mama died and when she found her Dad. But for some reason she cannot let herself feel the eight-year-old Baggy's pain. It is just too scary. But today while talking to Calum she realised that there's also anger in there. Clever Bird is wondering if actually it's the anger that Baggy's scared about. She doesn't want to have to face the fact that maybe she has a right to be angry at her parents, who she loved dearly.

As for the shame that she feels admitting she needs help - again Clever Bird realises it's because she still needs her parents' approval, and they wouldn't approve. Bit of a Catch 22 really one way and another. But the fact that Clever Bird has even recognised any of this has to be a positive...........