In healing 'bad' and previously unwanted feelings, it is important to remember that we are here to learn. Learning is a trial and error enterprise. Sometimes we make mistakes, we do things we don't wish to repeat; so we learn.

If, however, in the learning process we judge ourselves - we can feel bad, sometimes really bad. A learning experience turns into an internal 'crime and punishment affair,' a courtroom scene with guilt and blame and judgments, and the feeling of guilt is the punishment.

Learning is essential to growing and evolving, and mistakes are excellent feedback in the learning process, if they are used as such.

However, the conditioning of our culture has taught us that making mistakes is bad, and there is something wrong with us if we didn't do it 'right.' This is simply not true.

What is true is that mistakes are the norm in trial and error learning, and in fact they are necessary for learning, growing and evolving. Learning is already hard enough without punishing ourselves for making mistakes that are a necessary part of the process.

The punishment and obvious result of negative judgments is to feel bad about ourselves. "Guilty, your honor!" pleads the would-be learner who has erred. And the automatic punishment is a vague sense of unease about self or outright guilt. Either way, our sense of self-worth is eroded, and it becomes more difficult to feel good enough about ourselves as learners to stay motivated.

Depression is often the consequence of judgment-induced, guilt-bound feelings that get stuck in the mire and cannot move. The standard way of coping with stuck feelings has been to deny them by either avoiding them or pushing them down in some way. This unconscious, conditioned repression of feeling can create a malaise that feels like numbness and apathy.

In healing from depression we often find this numbness to be the re-experience of the shock associated with an old trauma that is still present in an imprint. Lowered self-worth, the most insidious consequence of guilt, makes us feel less resourceful, and then changing the situation becomes seemingly impossible.

Feeling under the shock and finding the judgment-bound feeling opens the space for judgment release to work it's magic. Judgment release frees stuck feelings and allows them to move, and their movement dispels the remaining numbness and shock.

Leaving the Courtroom