Nick DiMaggio’s Reviews > Getting Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life with Self-Help Techniques from EMDR Therapy > Status Update

Basically, life is not just about getting rid of suffering. It’s about expanding our potential while embracing feelings of joy and well-being.

Whatever you feel ashamed or guilty about, don’t let it separate you from the ones you love.

Righteous indignation, anger, pain, guilt — mostly coming down to feeling wounded, misunderstood, discounter, unappreciated. See me! Respect my wants, my needs. It all seems reasonable. But it’s a balancing act with different views, wounds and sometimes a bottomless pit of pain that shows up when you least expect it.

As we’ve seen, the sensations of an experience stored in our memory networks can produce feelings of pain. They can also be responsible for us not feeling anything — even those feelings we’d like to have.

The good news is that it’s not too late for any of us to “re-parent” ourselves with the proper assistance.

Unfortunately, feelings of lack of safety and security can be based on the fact that we didn’t feel sufficiently valued and protected as children. We were left feeling that we weren’t good enough and worried that other people would negatively judge us.

It’s through our parents’ loving care that we learn the ways of the world and that we are valuable beings able to achieve our goals in life. It is through being loved that we learn to love in return. Except it doesn’t always work out that way.

It’s also important to remember that sometimes it’s what didn’t happen that is causing problems.

You can’t eliminate unhappiness from your life completely. Things happen, things change. Emotions may momentarily come and go. The question is: How pervasive are the feelings and how long do they last? Meaning, is the sadness, anger, fear, anxiety, loneliness, shyness and so forth temporary and for a good and obvious reason, or is it the water I’m swimming in most of the time? Is it the weather or the climate?

The question is: Are we being guided appropriately by our memories, or are they pushing us to do things we shouldn’t do — and preventing us from doing things we should?