their very intensity. They were, in the beginning, felt to be overwhelming; it was as if they proceeded from a bottomless well of feeling. And so, through the years, one has learned to hide them, even from oneself, to fix them on trifles in order to minimize them—to deny that, indeed, they exist at all.
Only by letting them up into the awareness can one experience the fact that their intensity is not overwhelming and that the emotion one experiences has very definite limits; it does not proceed from a bottomless well.
I recall one woman who, in approaching this problem, would not let herself weep over a strong underlying feeling of rejection by men that she had partially uncovered in herself. "If I start crying I feel I'll never stop," she told me. She was not being histrionic either; that's the way she really felt. When she did let herself cry, however, the storm lasted for a mere thirty minutes or so—and then it was done with for good. She was terribly relieved to find that the emotion which, when unexpressed, seemed so boundless had very concrete limits. From that point on she was much more at home with all of her emotions, not nearly so frightened of them.
The second reason a woman fears to let her feelings about her husband (and men in general) come to the surface is that she believes that the things she feels are literally true. They exist in her unconscious or partly conscious mind as profound convictions. She holds them at bay because she does not wish to face just how completely a part of her mind believes that her highly irrational feelings are based on reality.
It will help, however, to know that, no matter how convinced a part of you is that your negative feelings represent reality, such is not the case. Your investigation is not going to prove that your hidden fears are valid; it is going
