Emptiness (how to stop feeling empty) – Teal Swan
(Teal Swan) Emptiness is like an inner void. Often times it is so painful that the word emptiness doesn’t really cover it. It feels more like a starvation or an inner vacuum or black hole or chasm. The most important quality though to recognize is the lack. Emptiness is a state of lack. And lack tips us off to the fact that we are missing something. The key is finding out exactly what we are missing, exactly what we are lacking. What is it that you lost?
Emptiness is like an internal starvation
When we are young, our consciousness (sometimes referred to as our soul) becomes fractured by traumatic experiences in our life. We suppress, deny, disown and dissociate from aspects of ourselves in order to be accepted and survive within the social group we are born into. These aspects of us are frozen in time and so they do not come with us into the present. I discussed this concept in the video on YouTube titled “Projection”.
Now here’s the best part and the part that applies most to emptiness. If in our past, we experienced trauma as a result of one of our needs not being met, the aspect of ourselves that could not get that need met, is still stuck in time unresolved. We experience that need being unmet in present time as well. So often, the thing we are lacking or missing, is that need that was not met at the time in our past that the trauma occurred. For example, say we were wounded as a child because we felt no sense of belonging with our family, that lack of belonging becomes a traumatic imprint. We feel the lack of belonging and that is really what the emptiness in our adult life is about.
Struggle with emotional connection
When we feel emptiness, because it is like an internal starvation, it is so uncomfortable that we do anything we can to try to escape the feeling. Many self-help experts will say that people try to fill in the void. This is actually not true at all. The problem is that no one tries to fill in the void. No one tries to fill the void with what the void is lacking. They instead try to distract themselves from the void with things like drugs and food and shopping and sex. I will tip you off to the fact that most people who struggle with chronic emptiness had parents who were incapable of intimacy, especially emotional connection.
As a result, their inner world did not feel seen, heard, felt, understood or validated, so not only did this wound them, it made them subconsciously conclude that there must be nothing there. Emotional neglect is the cause of the inner void. If you struggle with a feeling of emptiness, try to feel for what you are empty of, what you are missing. Is it belonging? Is it meaning? Is it love? Is it connection? Is it purpose? Are you lonely (lacking someone’s unconditional presence)? And then work on manifesting that in your life. Begin by looking for how that thing is already in your reality. For example, if you lack a sense of belonging, force yourself to think of ways that you do already belong. If it is a lack of self-love, practice self-love.
Rejected and denied aspects of ourselves
Also, meet your needs. This one is imperative. Now a lot of people have got it into their heads that needs are not ok. But everyone has needs, whether they want to admit it or not. What makes a need painful is when we think we can’t get what we need. And often the reason we think we can’t get our need met is because we think we have to meet the need ourselves by ourselves, as if it is possible to be an island unto ourselves. The river doesn’t drink itself my friends. Many times the empowering thing is not just to meet a need ourselves, it is to take action to get up and go find someone to meet the need; or to open up so someone can meet the need. For example, if you’re need is for company, don’t spend your time trying to figure out how to be your own company, just go find company.
Also, any time we feel that inner emptiness, we want to do the process I created for healing the emotional body. This process actually brings disowned, rejected and denied aspects of ourselves back to the present so the trauma is resolved and the emptiness goes away entirely. I presented this process in my video titled “How to Heal The Emotional Body”. We must sink into the emptiness and learn from it and discover all we can about it and fill the emptiness with our own unconditional presence.
We often think that emptiness is a difficult problem to solve. Actually, it is one of the easiest problems to solve because it is literally a matter of meeting our unmet needs.
Source: Teal Swan
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