From Christine Caldwell’s “Getting our bodies back”:
“Feelings are intended to move us, and until they move us toward a higher level of organization, they will persist. So that which you keep feeling is that which you haven’t let yourself feel completely.” (p. 119)
“As long as someone else is responsible for our experience (either partly or wholly), then they have the power in the relationship. They have the power to make us feel good or bad. They own a piece of us. And we have to control them in order to get our needs met.” (p. 122)
“When we abandon active rest, when we focus narrowly on one activity for long periods of time, or when we feel consistently powerless in the face of repeated events, we compel ourselves to dissociate. We enter a state of need deprivation, at the same time creating a response that does nothing to fill our needs, but merely dampens our perception that we are in need.” (p. 26)
“Our bodies must tense, shut down, and provide distracting alternatives in order to accomplish control in our thoughts and behavior. Control is very costly; it takes a lot of energy to maintain. It uses many of our personal resources to monitor and select the experiences and feelings that are acceptable or unacceptable. The cost is our aliveness. Whenever we control our experience, we sacrifice a measure of vitality. Most of my clients come into therapy wanting to get rid of certain feelings and only experience certain other, better ones. While it makes sense to want to feel good, doing it through control ultimately fails. It takes a while for many clients to realize this: that the strain and fatigue of control is actually causing their suffering, not the feelings they were trying to select and discard.” (pp. 31-32)