The Letter You'll Never Send

I’m writing this from my screened porch on Easter weekend, so thankful for the warm air, breezy blue sky, and that I can sit outside without wearing so many layers. I have had a break from the blog, not because I didn’t have anything to say. Instead, because I have so much I’d like to share that sometimes I feel overwhelmed. 

This month in our Partnered Healing Community Group meeting on Thursday April 9th, Lindsay and I will be discussing and workshopping the topics of Shedding and Simplifying for the spring season. There are a few spots left, please RSVP here if you would like to attend. 

To this end, I want to share a concept I find myself recommending often in our coaching sessions. Maybe you’ve heard of “The Letter You’ll Never Send?” First a brief background.

Being a human means to experience emotions. This is an inescapable reality of Life on the Planet. Emotions can be the source of incredible pain, but they also hold the secret to a life of high vitality. It is through the feeling of emotion that you get to experience joy, love, and presence. Without emotions, you would not have access to those experiences. Unfortunately, you cannot shut down negative emotions and expect to feel the full range of the positive ones. Either they are all shut down, or you are feeling all of them. 

Do you know what most clients say to me when they come in for the first session? I ask the question “What are you hoping for?” Many of them say, “I just want to be able to feel joy again. I want to feel peaceful, present, and happy.” Yes, of course you do. Of course we all do. It is our birthright to have access to presence and joy. However, it cannot be accessed if the “bad” emotions are locked away. For much more on this and how it is directly related to nervous system regulation, please discuss coaching with your Partnered Healing provider and consider attending our monthly Community Group meetings. 

The key to unlocking the full emotional range, and as one client said perhaps the key to unlocking Life, without allowing it to overwhelm you, is giving expression to everything you feel in a very safe and intentional way. We teach this method in our practice and you can investigate further here if you would like. 

The Letter You’ll Never Send is a specialized and safe way of expressing important emotions that you may have on lockdown. Emotions do not go away when we hold them in. It is one of the great misunderstandings of our culture to think you can “just move on” from difficult things without expressing and processing. In fact, stored emotions are a main source of nervous system dysregulation, physical pain, and emotional struggles. Maybe not what you were hoping to hear but true none-the-less.

The Letter You’ll Never Send is one that you write to express specific emotions - rage, hatred, love, disappointment, shame, regret, gentleness, care, wisdom etc. - specifically to another person or to previous version of yourself. You can write to a loved one who has died or is gone from your life. You can write a letter to someone who is in your life, but you feel unable or unsafe to tell them the entirety of how you feel. You can write to your children, your parents, your boss, your spouse, your siblings, friends, and any one who has hurt you or with whom you have unfinished business. 

You may also write to your younger selves. You can express compassion, forgiveness, wisdom, and give blessings to any past version of yourself that did not receive what you needed at the time. You can provide that for yourself retrospectively, this is one way to "re-parent" yourself. 

In the Letter You’ll Never Send, you say everything. Every single thing, no matter how sad, how awful, how shameful, how despairing. No matter how “sappy” or cringe, or deeply loving and compassionate it might be. You may use very bad words. You may call people names. You may, indeed you must, say every word and feeling that you have kept bottled up inside because it was not safe to express it, you didn’t know how to express it, or perhaps you felt you did not have the right to feel and express it. 

Emotions are not a thing that you have the right or do not have the right to feel. They simply are as they are, present in every human experience. Could I go so far as to say, what if we embrace emotions as companions that help us know when we need to draw a boundary, or speak our minds,  and embrace them as THE SOURCE of joy, presence and love. 

Examples of Letters You’ll Never Send:

1. To a deceased or absent parent/caregiver who may have been a source of trauma and abuse

2. To any abuser

3. To a deceased or absent loved one with whom you need some closure or forgiveness 

4. To your adult children 

5. To any person with whom you have or have had a conflict

6. To your spouse or intimate partner

7. To siblings

8. To old bosses who were horrible

9. Other types of people, places, things that may represent or invoke strong emotions - pets, homes, governments, businesses, God, political figures, the Planet, etc.

10. YOUR SYMPTOMS, your own body

11. YOUR PAST SELVES, your inner child/ren

When you are done - YOU ARE GOING TO THROW IT AWAY. You may also burn or shred it, but what makes it safe is that you are not going to re-read and ruminate. No one else is going to see it. This is just for you. It does not need to be legible, it does not need to make sense. It is not for anyone else's eyes. Giving a full voice to an emotion is how you get that energy out of your body. When the energy is out of your body, then your nervous system no longer sees it as a threat. The triggers you feel when you think about a certain person or situation begin to cool down, they do not run your life anymore. When bottled up emotions and experiences are no longer running your life, this is when peace, presence, and joy become available to you. 

Some tips:

*Relationships, events, traumas, and situations, and the emotions that go with them, are complex. It is not just rage or guilt or grief. Grief is mixed throughout most things in Life. Guilt accompanies most of us daily. These letters would include all of these things -  the emotion, the guilt, the judgement of another and of self. It’s pretty messy to be human. 

*If the person is still alive and in your life, and if you want to have a strong relationship with them, first express the entirety of your feelings in a letter you will destroy. Then you can use it to help you craft a letter or a conversation that will more lovingly communicate your needs to them. 

*If it is a letter of love to your children or another or yourself, you can choose not to destroy it. 

*Some situations may call for more than 1 letter.

Examples I have seen in my work as a nurse and in my personal life when a Letter You’ll Never Send could be helpful:

*to a doctor or medical care team that treated you poorly, let you down, or caused trauma

*to the “essence” of an autoimmune disease, chronic illness, or chronic pain

*to one’s own body

*to a baby that has been miscarried or lost

*to God

*to our children

*and all the ones listed previously

Most humans are carrying around a great deal of emotional baggage. The spring is a natural time to not just clean out and declutter your home, but also to begin ladling out your emotional reservoir. It may feel scary or overwhelming to contemplate this activity, but completing it does actually bring some closure and calm. It allows these difficult experiences to take up their natural place in the story of your life, rather than running it. It opens the door for you into presence and joy. I’ll see you there. 

Written by Jessica Cochran, BSN RN

Integrative Life Coach

Certified in Sarno X Sachs Solution for Healing Chronic Pain and Anxiety