“I try telling myself it’s over and I just need to move on, but that doesn’t seem to work.”
Stacy writes:
I got a traffic ticket over the weekend, and it still bothers me. I keep replaying the scene in my mind, how the officer spoke to me, what I said, how I felt. Then other scenes from the past come up, other times I felt humiliated by authority figures, all the way back to childhood. I try telling myself it’s over and I just need to move on, but that doesn’t seem to work.
Dear Stacy:
Of course it’s annoying to get a traffic ticket! And of course you have feelings about it. But when those feelings are out of proportion to the event, you know that something else is going on. And that’s where Focusing can come in!
You tried telling yourself it’s over and you need to move on… but if it were really over, you wouldn’t need to tell yourself so. It’s not over…because there is something there that is calling for your attention.
So let’s see how you would bring Focusing to this issue.
You would start by bringing awareness to your body and sensing how this situation feels in there right now. When you find feelings, use this language to acknowledge them: “I am sensing something in me that feels humiliated…AND I am sensing something in me that feels angry…”
When you use this language, it helps you to experience those feelings as places in you that you can turn toward and give company to, with interested compassion. They have a good reason why they are being triggered. You might find that an older incident that bothered you was never really acknowledged. When you give those places an open, listening kind of attention, these long-time issues can relax and shift.
And then it won’t be that you have to let them go, but that…freely and easily…they will let you go.
