Hi zea
My heart goes out to you so much as you try your hardest to navigate through such intensely challenging time in your life.
As a 55yo gal, it literally took me decades to reach the conclusion 'There's nothing wrong with my feelings. Every single one of them is trying to tell me something. What's wrong is I don't know what they're trying to tell me (at times)'. If you kind of look at it as us having an emotional 'compass' to rely on, what we're feeling will be telling us what kind of territory we're in. For example, if we're feeling overwhelming frustration, this tells us we're in overwhelmingly frustrating territory that we need to navigate through. If we're feeling deeply depressed, we're in deeply depressing territory that we need to navigate through. If we're feeling a tiny bit stressed, this could be telling us we're in the process of heading towards highly stressful territory and we might need to adopt strategies, skills or tools to be able to navigate. A deep dive into what that territory's really all about is what offers us an understanding as to why we're in it and what's led us there. So, our emotional compass is so important and you know it's working the way it's meant to because we can feel the emotions that come with it (including the deeply challenging and upsetting ones).
People definitely mean well when they try leading us to become more conscious, like with what your friend is doing. What they don't necessarily realise though is sometimes the way they try is not the best way for us. It could end up being 1)a stressful way or a depressing way, as opposed to 2)an inspiring, uplifting or liberating way. If you're a real feeler or sensitive, you can feel or sense the difference between the 2 ways. With the stressful or depressing way, it's important for us to confidently acknowledge 'This is not the way for me. I can feel the impact it's having on me'. But it's not enough to simply say this, we have to find the inspiring, uplifting and liberating way. I know, not easy. Again, this is where that compass comes in, that thing that leads us to sense ourself heading in the right direction.
I've discovered that if I can feel someone (the right guide) leading me in the right direction, chances are I'm heading in the right direction. For example, what I may be experiencing in my life is a depressing lack of soulful connection to life. If someone I know is leading me to some soulful kind of research and/or practices, logically I'll start to feel some connection to life. The closer I get to what I really need, the stronger the feelings become. If someone else was to lead me to find more of a psychological approach, I may feel myself heading in the wrong direction (away from the soulful stuff that I need to feel). Of course, in some cases what I may be needing is the 2 approaches which can also feel right.
To some degree, it's about feeling our way through life. If no one's taught us exactly how to do that or, even worse, they got us shutting our feelings down then we're going to struggle greatly. Perhaps a liberating thought could be 'I want to learn how to feel like an absolute master of feelings', a different way of saying 'I want to feel better'.
