Your feelings have a PURPOSE. Don’t ignore them.

Your feelings are VALID.
Your feelings are AUTHENTIC AND REAL.
Your feelings are IMPORTANT and have VALUE.
Your feelings have PURPOSE.

Some of you are being told that your feelings aren't correct. (Invalidation.)

That you aren't seeing things properly or your perceptions are wrong and so your feelings are invalid. (Gaslighting.)

Or that your imagination is just creating this situation. (Also gaslighting.)

Or that your body chemical fluctuations are causing you to see through a lens of negativity. (That's just archaic, aren't we past that yet in 2022?

But THEY are WRONG. Your feelings aren't.

You have a RIGHT to your feelings. Your feelings are part of your HEALTH CARE. Hear me out.

Your feelings and emotions have PURPOSE. The purpose of eMOTIONS is to bring about MOTION. Action. Change.

Emotions is how our species survived:
– Fear moved us to find safety.
– Revulsion moved us to expel toxins and poisons from our body.
– Anger moved us to protect and eliminate the threat.
– Sadness moved us to find help.

This is a primal survival instinct embedded in our consciousness.

So someone is telling you to ignore your survival mechanisms, pressuring you to discount the inner process, whose purpose is not just to keep you safe, but to help you reach new heights of your potential.

Fight that. Don't accept that. Your emotions and feelings are your keys to finding safety, peace, clarity and a free path to move on to joy.

The addiction is the enemy, not it's host.

The addiction wants you to stay right where you are, and not act. Not speak. Keep providing cover.
It wants you to provide a safe, secure base to operate from, and that's the host, when the host feels safe and secure, with a safety net of a relationship.

It knows, that if you don't provide a safe secure base for the host, the host will have to find that safety from within and become self-reliant. The addiction knows when that happens, the host will see the addiction for what it is, a threat to safety, and the host will likely kick the addiction to the curb. At the very least, the host will have to make a choice: find safety from within my own free will and ability to learn new coping mechanisms, or keep the addiction as the safety and coping mechanism.

But, never given the opportunity to make that choice, the host for the addiction accepts the status quo, because change is fear. Addiction doesn't allow the host to take proper action on fear. Addiction dulls the fear so the host doesn't act on it appropriately.

Start to plan your MOVEMENT. It doesn't have to mean the extreme of packing up your things and moving out.

What can that look like?
-A new support team of people who speak differently than the addiction speaks.
-Your own bank account or line of credit.
– Starting a new small business from your home or learning a new marketable skill.
– New books.
– Saying things differently like, “I don't accept that” or “I won't listen to this conversation”, or “I see your discomfort and that has to be difficult, but my boundary stands.”

Little actions, little MOTIONS based on eMOTIONS are a way back to your authenticity, walking out your reality and your values. You're in charge. Not the addiction or it's host. You have authority and you have a voice.

The goal isn't just to feel better emotions. The goal is to get better at feeling them.

What actions or motion have you taken on your emotions to let them have their say?

Discuss: Private, moderated Facebook Group for Recovering Spouses