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The Disloyalty of Feeling Good
How good are you allowed to feel before it becomes a problem?
How good are you allowed to feel, as a baseline, before it seems like an act of disloyalty? Or betrayal? Or abandonment?
I’ve been thinking about this question for quite a while, because of something I’ve seen frequently with clients and that I experienced myself. It usually happens a person has made a certain amount of progress removing their most persistent psychological blocks.
It’s a kind of dawning of the reality of what life could be like. As in: Woah, I could actually feel really fucking good.
Not all the time, of course. Mileage varies, catastrophes loom, but still: it turns out there’s an available feeling-setting that’s a lot higher on the ‘good’ scale we ever thought it could be.
This sounds like great news, right?
But it’s as if there’s some sort of Threshold of Feeling Good, and many of us have made an unspoken vow not to cross it.
Not everyone’s threshold is in the same place, but what is consistent is the sense that it is not OK to get to the other side. There are a lot of reasons this may be the case. But the ones I want to focus on today have to do with the fear that it will alter our relationship to others in a…
