Water has no shape of its own. It will always take on the shape of its container. If you put water into a cup, the water will have precisely the same shape as the cup. Water in a bathtub, takes on the shape of the bathtub. If water is flowing in a river, its shape will be that of the river bed and banks. In a wine bottle with a green tint, water will acquire the shape and the tint of the bottle.
Feelings are the direct experience of your self. Just like water, feelings don't have a shape of their own. They are your life energies, flowing through your being in every second of your life. If you push them away because they are tough or because you have learned to suppress them, then you will feel less alive than you would if you allowed them to be experienced and expressed. Of course, the kicker here is that some feelings seem to be sent from hell. They aren't, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Being like water, which takes on the shape and colour of its container, feelings/emotions provide a whole bunch of different experiences. These experiences have their own names: joy, love, hate, anger, frustration and despair, to name but a few of them. These emotions are your life energies taking on different shapes - the same stuff, molded and coloured into different experiences. What shapes and colours our emotional energies into depression, anger, happiness, joy, sadness, desperation, panic and terror and so on? Thoughts and thought patterns do this.
For example, "In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." The crew of the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria were scared silly that they would sail off the edge of the world. Their thought patterns convinced them that the earth was flat and had edges. They believed that they were in terrible danger. Even though they were in no real risk of sailing off the edge of the earth, their minds generated thought-forms which shaped and coloured their life energies into fear and panic. Major bummer. Now, memorize this:
This is the cornerstone concept of this manual. Understanding how thought patterns work, and how to work with them is obviously very important in the task of recovering from sexual victimization.
You are not at the mercy of what has happened to you. You are not at the mercy of what goes on around you. You are at the mercy of your habituated thinking.
Your feelings or emotions are your life energies dressed up in the clothing of thought patterns. The unfortunate fact is that sexual trauma has a way of warping some of your thought patterns. It is these thought patterns which shape your emotional energies into disturbing feelings like depression, shame, anxiety and terror.
The good news is that with knowledgeable practice you can undo much of this troublesome thinking. Before beginning that task, let's continue filling out your theoretical base.
In the case of Chris Columbus and his crew, their faulty belief that the earth was flat became a fear-producing mechanism. Their thought patterns shaped their emotions in every moment, just as yours and mine do.
When sexual victimization occurs, traumatic thinking may occur also. It is the persistence of patterns of traumatic thinking that actively causes shame, depression and sadness to continue for months and years - not the event itself. Habituated, traumatic thinking patterns are the tragic result of trauma. Okay. Therefore, if you have been sexually victimized in the recent or distant past, and you are emotionally suffering right now, your suffering is not caused by the event, but by the thinking patterns that are active right in this moment. Traumatic emotions will be re-experienced each time the traumatic patterns of thinking are activated. Try to understand this. It's the key. These thinking patterns are what we are after. So stay tuned.
