Gut feeling
Children needs to be allowed to express all feelings, even ones that some adults deem inappropiate.
I know many fathers to girls that have told me when their daughters turn a certain age they would like them to start some kind of defence class, this is so they can protect themselves against potential dangers.
This is fine but I believe that the best defence anyone can have is actually something that comes from within; gut feeling.
Honing your skills in listening to gut feelings will most likely help you to remove yourself from a potential dangerous situation because you can feel that something is not right.
In todays day and age with all the new technology people seem to have forgotten to listen to them selves or perhaps they have never learnt to in the first place, of course trauma can also lead to a person not wanting to feel anything, therefore they shut their feelings down.
Another reason most people don’t know how to listen to their gut feeling could also be stemming from childhood conditioning.
Have you ever hurt yourself and started crying to be told by your caring adult that it didn’t hurt, nothing happened and to stop crying?
How do you think this makes the child feel? When you are in pain but the adult tells you that what you’re feeling is wrong? Do you think you will grow up to follow your gut or will it make you not trust it?
When children are pressured to not cry or show anger or fear, they might come to believe that feelings can be controlled. This can explain our attempts- or need- to be in control later in life as adults.
Attuning to and validating children’s feelings, even the anger and sadness, teaches them to listen to and trust their gut feelings.
The most intimate sense we have of ourselves is through proprioception (the body’s sense of its location in space).
Without the visceral sense (enteric nervous system) we are literally without the vital feelings that let us know we are alive; it’s our guts that allow us to perceive our deepest needs and longings.
Peter Levine
