GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT

When you are in touch with your own feelings you:

1. Become a more real and authentic person.
2. Become more honest with yourself about who you are, where you have come from, and where you are going.
3. Begin to be more willing to take risks and become more vulnerable and intimate in interpersonal relationships.
4. Cease being in denial about what is really happening in your life.
5. No longer pull in and hide so that you become invisible to yourself and others. Take the risk of no longer disassociating or becoming numb when things are going on in your life, which are negative or overwhelming.
6. Make yourself stay conscious to the reality of your life so that you are able to recall or remember it in the future rather than to have no memory of it.
7. Push yourself to have a broadened or enriched emotional vocabulary to describe the experiences of your life.
8. Cease viewing life from a black or white perspective and become more willing to take the gray into account. Open yourself up to grieve the losses in your life so that you no longer use denial, repression, suppression, or delusion to describe your life the way you wanted it to be but rather describe your life the way it really was.
9. Allow yourself to become a congruent, healthy human being who uses rational, reality-based thinking to assist your feelings to become rational and reality-based so that the actions and behaviors which follow are also rational and reality-based.
10. Are open to the spirit of your inner child in your soul who allows you to enjoy your life to the fullest without the constraints or restrictions of how you “should” think, feel or act.
11. Live life moment-to-moment, day-to-day, and become reasonably happy realizing that feelings are a natural, human process.
12. Begin to accept that feeling all feelings is OK and that there is no right or wrong feeling.
13. Become open to experience the full continuum of emotions from the most painfully negative to the most exhilaratingly positive.
14. Grow in the ability to listen, understand, and be empathetic to others’ verbal and nonverbal expressions of feelings and emotions. Causes for your being out of touch with your feelings.