Emotional Sovereignty

I’ve just finished reading the post reclaiming our emotional sovereignty: repairing the cultural poverty that currently meets disorganised states, by Jason Field. 

It is not a light read; it’s a dense 20,472 words masterwork that, despite the foreign terrain for me, prompted more ah-ha moments than anything I’ve read in recent memory.

If I had to select a single paragraph that explains why, it’s this one:

In this renewed ability to hold ourselves, the logical next step comes to put down some of the bags that we have picked up along the way. This can be scary on the first presentation. Knowing how heavy they have been in the past, we must prevent ourselves from projecting one data point into the future indefinitely.

Oftentimes, we think we can pretend something hasn’t happened, I’ve tried that for decades, but the body knows, and our day is not ours (lost sovereignty) because of it. Until we face what was previously too much, we will have great difficulties calling ourselves sovereign over our experience, and our body is here to help us through it too.

So much of my own work in recent years has me return to the statement “I’m not the kind of person who…,” and surely that’s exactly what “projecting one data point into the future indefinitely” is all about.

I remember a visit to a psychologist a decade ago in front of whom I, genuinely, honestly, asked “I’m wondering if it’s possible that I’m feeling things that I’m not aware of.” 

Looking back at that now, I realize how naive I was, how almost everything about me was working hard to “pretend something hasn’t happened,” and how, in the years before and since, my body has been trying to tell me this.

Later, Field writes:

We can’t (and shouldn’t) pretend disempowering events never happened.

But we can commit to re-building ourselves and, in doing so, become the agent of our own rescue.

His post is a compelling treatise on how to start doing that.

It’s not an easy read. It took me three days. But it was a worthwhile effort.