When I first started this blog about 5 years ago or something, I didn’t know that I had Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I didn’t know that the inability to connect both the Rational and Emotional parts of our own brains is often a sign of Trauma. I didn’t know that this topic was talked about amongst Psychiatrists. I didn’t know that this concept of connecting these parts of our brains was a thing. And yet, I called my blog “Feelings to Think and Thoughts to Feel”.
I remember finding out later that I wasn’t the first to coin that phrase and I was surprised. I thought it was all mine. I’m trying to remember how I came up with that. I seem to have a knack for expressing my inner turmoils in written words pretty well. And I guess I came up with just the right phrase somehow.
I also had never actually read any books by Rilke, but I saw a quote by Rilke (probably on Goodreads) that I put at the top of my blog and have kept there ever since. For those reading on a mobile device that might not show the quote, it says,
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. ~Rilke With the Ultra Long Name
Yesterday, as I was attempting (that’s really all I can do is attempt) to focus on an audiobook while I mowed the lawn, the monotone man of the audiobook quoted that exact quote. It was quoted from a quote in the book called The Body Keeps the Score: Brain Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD. I missed half or more of what I was trying to listen to, and didn’t understand much of the science, but I didn’t miss that familiar quote.
I also didn’t miss the following (from Kolk, not Rilke):
For now, I want to emphasize that emotion is not opposed to reason. Our emotions assign value to experiences and thus are the foundation of reason. Our self-experience is the product of the balance between our rational and our emotional brains. When these two systems are in balance, we feel like ourselves. However, when our survival is at stake, these systems can function relatively independently.
So thinking our feelings and feeling our thoughts is actually essential to feeling like ourselves.
As I listen to this book on trauma and recovery, I am learning so much and hearing so much that resonates with me. I like things like this book that help me understand myself better. And I feel so proud and impressed at myself that before I had sought therapy, and despite the things that were overtly stated to me in my upbringing, I was headed in the right direction in this way. Without even knowing what listening to feelings really meant, I thought beyond what I had been told, that they could not be irrelevant. And I am grateful for any hints that might have pointed me to here from those rare and special souls who I came into contact with. Perhaps if I hadn’t been headed in the right direction and blindly seeking the right things, I would not have ended up in therapy with my current therapist. And I wouldn’t have developed to the place that I am at now.
I feel I have so far to go in my self-discovery and learning how to navigate relationships. Right now, though, I am glad to have years ago begun a journey on my own that I wanted to undertake. A journey that I sensed had depth, but had no idea what it really entailed. And I’m glad to now not be alone in that journey.
This is a journey that will never end for me. I am living it. And I am learning better how to live it every day. Even when it doesn’t feel like it sometimes, I have grown closer to me.
