Liberating “unfelt” feelings from childhood allows the inner human being to resurrect in the soul. The ‘I’ in every individual biography calls for this maturation—and, at the same time, so does the ‘I’ of humanity. Grow up—let’s all grow up.
It’s my earliest memory, and it is profound: I’m four years old lying in a hospital bed at the Freiburg Eye Clinic awaiting surgery for strabismus. My mother places a large box of Katzenzungen chocolates [thin cat-tongue shaped German chocolates] on the blanket in front of me. What a gift! Usually, my five siblings and I get only one of those black bars each, but now this whole universe of sweets belongs to just me. Then I—this four-year-old child—tell myself, quietly and with composure, “This has to last me a lifetime; six children is probably too much for our mother, so I have to be left in this strange house where everyone is wearing a white coat.” Not a single tear falls; my child soul is strangely calm. I know how much my mother loves my siblings and me, and I’m proud of myself for not shedding a tear. “Surely,” I tell myself, “it’s hard for her, too, to leave me here.” Unlike a few years later when my sister had her tonsils removed and my mother had herself admitted to the bed next to hers for the same operation, I’m here alone.
Strangely numb—almost as if I were a detached spectator—I surrender to the events that should actually be bitterly painful to my child soul. The pain remains unfelt. “Put on a brave face”—rarely in life does this phrase apply as much as in such moments of early childhood: an abyss opens, and we face it with seemingly stoic composure.
Emotional Backpack
It took half a century for me to understand what happened back then, what natural wisdom took the helm in that hospital. Something happened that was too terrible for the child’s soul to feel from his own limited perspective, and so the developing soul decided to sink all the pain of abandonment, of the apparent farewell, into the unconscious—to park it within his body. The feeling remained unfelt. A survival program stows the pain in the basement of consciousness so it will resurface later, when the soul is mature and strong enough to process it. Vivian Dittmar refers to the load we unconsciously carry within ourselves as the “emotional backpack”—a beautiful image, because a backpack has three characteristics that are relevant here:
- It weighs on your shoulders, which means it takes strength to carry it.
- You carry it on your back, which means you can’t easily access its contents. It takes a moment to pause and turn around to open it.
- It contains provisions and clothing, which means its contents are valuable to you; what seems like a burden is actually a treasure.
I’m using ‘”you” here because I’m sure every human being is carrying around these unfelt childhood emotions as a burden. “Every human being is in a process of understanding healing,” I read in a social media post. Your backpack could be small, like those trendy, handbag-sized back accessories, or it might tower over your head like a mountaineering backpack—it’s all homework from our childhood, waiting to be unpacked. Dittmar provides a mathematical equation for the size of the backpack: Backpack size = (Severity of the event × Sensitivity)/Support. The more sensitive you are, the more severely an event affects you. The more support and stability you receive from your social environment or your moral beliefs (religious or otherwise), the lighter your biographical burden. It’s not only intense experiences that create this baggage, but also unmet needs from early childhood. During a lecture on the topic of the inner child in Herdecke, I asked the audience how many of those present have no memory of their parents’ bodily affection or tenderness. More than half the audience raised their hands. Behind every raised hand there was an unfulfilled longing for bodily security in early childhood and, in lieu of this, there were clever coping strategies and affirmations to deal with this deficiency: “Life is hard; nothing is given to me for free,” “I’m not good enough to be loved,” or “I have to earn affection.” Such narratives help the child’s consciousness come to terms with the lack, but they become destructive in adulthood because they color our view of reality. So, stuck in the backpack are feelings of being “too much” from stressful events and having “too little” from unmet needs. It is part of life’s wisdom that we develop coping strategies for “too much” and “too little” and postpone dealing with the associated feelings because—in childhood—we are not yet equipped to handle them properly. But it is also part of life’s wisdom that our soul then seeks to reintegrate these segregated feelings. As Plato, and more so Plotinus, said, the soul strives for unity; it wants to become whole, and that means it strives to bring any hidden parts into the light of its own consciousness. The psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung calls this integration of the repressed, shadowy parts of the personality “individuation.”
Replace “Emotions” with “Feelings”
What happens next is probably familiar. A coworker points out a mistake you made. You’re hurt and can’t seem to get your energy back for the rest of the day. Someone close to you doesn’t respond to your message, and, for you, it looks like the end of your friendship. Someone beats you to a parking spot and instead taking it in stride, you get angry and stay upset for hours. Small events trigger unacknowledged feelings from childhood. They erupt from the depths of the soul. It can be helpful to try and distinguish between feeling and emotion. A feeling tells us how our own soul relates to the here and now: for instance, a first ray of sunshine in April brings warmth to the forehead and a feeling of happiness flows through the soul. Emotion is different: here, an event awakens a feeling from childhood slumbering within the body and it bursts forth as an emotion. A feeling enlightens me about the relationship between myself and the world. Emotion clouds this relationship. We can recognize emotion by the following indications:
- exaggerated, explosive reaction
- persists for a long time
- sense of lack, unable to be satiated
- typical behavioral patterns
- emotional detachment
- criticism of oneself or others
We have very little control over ourselves in such moments, just as we have little control over the conflicts we provoke through our overreactions. The ‘inner child’ is another name for these emotions; it aptly describes how these emotions flare up at the same level of soul maturity we were at when they first arose in childhood. If left unfelt, emotions remain preserved at their moment of origin. If an experience at age five triggered a fear in me that I could not fully feel, then when that emotion erupts today through some experience, it has the character of a five-year-old. As distressing as it is to lose ourselves in an outburst, these are nonetheless opportunities to encounter our inner child and to embark on a process of transformation, because our early unprocessed childhood experiences can be resolved when they surface.
This soul work is worth undertaking because there are a number of behavioral patterns that are more difficult to resolve directly. For example, someone might be frustrated by constant procrastination and think they lack willpower, when in fact this stems from an early childhood experience of not receiving recognition for a drawing or some small achievement. This resulted in a lack of self-confidence and lack of self-efficacy. Or someone in a work group always wants to take on every task because in childhood they developed the strategy: To get attention, I have to do and achieve something. We often call this ‘people-pleasing.’ Others have a constant craving for attention. In childhood, they may have developed a coping strategy based on an experience of neglect: To get attention, I have to be loud. When we transform these habits and deep-set beliefs from childhood, we open a door to a new experience of self and self-efficacy.
Five steps can be observed in this transformation:
- Recognition: There is much to be gained simply by noticing in the moment that inappropriate feelings are starting to well up and realizing that wounded pride, anger over rejection, or pain from criticism aren’t coming from the moment itself, but rather from the old baggage that is knocking at the door of consciousness. The current event is the trigger, not the cause. Becoming aware that our reaction toward another person is unfair—they may only be the present trigger for some deep emotion—is the first step toward transformation. It’s worth celebrating this discovery about ourselves rather than responding to it with shame. For generations of students, the red pen marks on tests and exams burned into their minds the conviction that “mistakes are bad.” Remorse is a reflex, along with the need to mentally erase the wrong feeling undo our previous action. But if we were to do this, we would be taking away precisely what we have just gained: the insight to distinguish between emotion and feeling. What could be more beautiful than discovering an inappropriate emotion within yourself and, in doing so, gifting yourself with the certainty that there is a higher authority within you capable of making this distinction? This opens the door to the second step.
- Pause and reflect: How great is it when we manage to not let our emotions result in writing an angry email, retreating into our shell, or exercising some other reflexive strategy, but instead to simply pause for a moment? Fight, flight, and freeze are the soul’s “well-trodden etheric paths,” varying according to temperament and habit but all practiced since childhood and arising whenever unacknowledged feelings are emotionally triggered. A pause—holding back for a moment—is one of the most valuable and reliable actions. This is because it interrupts the habitual action-reaction mechanism. We free ourselves from “if-then” causality. How much conflict and suffering would be spared if we could succeed in not instantly following an impulse, but instead remain still—like the sculpture of the Greek charioteer, holding the reins and calming the storming horses of the soul. Robin Schmidt and Heinz Zimmermann illustrated their book on meditation with the Greek charioteer for good reason.1 In the stillness of waiting, movement turns inward. Like a lake whose bottom can only be seen clearly once the surface is calm, the depths of the soul are revealed when we pause. The second condition for transformation is then fulfilled: bringing the prodigal son home.
- Feeling the feeling: When we pause, we create a space in the soul where our childhood experience can be felt anew—perhaps even for the first time. But now it is not the child who feels, rather, it is our adult nature that engages with the feeling of abandonment or inadequacy. To feel as an adult means not drowning in the emotion—that is, not surrendering to it—and at the same time, not suppressing, analyzing, or repressing it. It can help if we speak about our emotions with some distance. Instead of “I feel . . . ,” we can say, “something in me feels . . .” or “a part of me feels . . . .” This fulfills the third condition of transformation: first recognition, then pausing, and now feeling. A voice inside us may object, “I already suffered in childhood. Now I’m supposed to feel that emotion all over again—consciously?” Yes! “If you don’t feel it, you won’t catch it,” Goethe has Faust say to his companion Wagner. Just as substances can only react with one another when there is enough heat present, so too does the warmth of feeling serve to heal childhood wounds.
- Feel with wisdom: Mature emotional awareness means feeling the feeling itself—freeing the emotion trapped within the child and allowing the pain to be felt once more. The next step is to turn toward this feeling with the wisdom in our soul and delve deeper into it. Warmth becomes light. This is the step of moving from the role of victim to that of active agent. It can sometimes be difficult because in childhood I may have seen myself as a victim and the others as perpetrators, and now I myself am supposed to take action and not just feel self-pity. In the third step, the feeling was directed toward the past; now we experience the feeling in the present and look to the future.
- Willing: How do I want to become with these transformed aspects of my childhood? Where do I want to go with this emotional backpack that I’ve now opened? In the fifth step, we focus on new perspectives and discover the creativity that has been released through our inner work. Previously, it was still bound up and occupied with holding the unfelt feelings within the body, but now it’s free and exists as a new, quiet strength in the soul. “I came into the world to be born,” wrote Pablo Neruda. Transforming the emotional backpack is a birth in life—the birth of the adult human being.
After Maturation
It seems to me that this challenge, which every individual faces to a greater or lesser extent, is also something we encounter as collective humanity. The evolutionary biologist Wolfgang Schad drew an interesting comparison in his lectures on ecology and youth education. When we are teenagers, we don’t sleep enough, we don’t eat well, and we may even experiment with drugs. The soul liberates itself by pushing down our natural, organic life. In terms of anthroposophical anthropology: the youthful astral body bears down upon the etheric body. Schad added that our vitality at this age is so great that we usually survive unscathed for the most part. According to Schad, collective humanity in the twentieth century behaved the exact same way: ecologically, we liberated ourselves at nature’s expense—humanity’s teenage years! Becoming an adult involves taking responsibility for our organism by adjusting our lifestyle. Developing ecological consciousness means that humanity must, as a whole, become an adult. On September 23, 2019, the then 16-year-old Greta Thunberg delivered a speech at the UN Climate Summit in New York: “This is all wrong,” she said. “I shouldn’t be up here.” She gave voice to this wake-up call for humanity: grow up and take responsibility. A young person is calling on us to grow up. What an image: the youthfulness within us all, the one in process of becoming, is calling on us to grow up and set our inner child free.
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Illustrations Yves Berger, “Alphabet Drawings”
