I Don't Shove Down My Feelings Anymore, Now What?
A Musing About How I Process My Big Emotions
When I woke up this morning I didn’t have anything particularly interesting to say. I had a lot on my mind with no words for the page. Sometimes creativity, writing, is about sitting down anyway. So I sat at my kitchen counter all the way to the right in the third bar stool, the one against the wall, and placed my hands on my laptop, my fingers in all their starting places - index fingers on the F and J, the rest of my fingers lined up next to them in either direction, my right thumb resting on the space bar and my left hovering in the air with nothing to do but watch.
I gazed at the flowers in the mason jar to my left, like I always do when taking a beat. I took a small swig of my grapefruit juice. A flutter of anxiety rose up through my chest as I watched the minutes tick by, knowing I had more to do today than sit here and stare at the screen on my laptop, wondering if my left thumb would ever have a place here.
I’d gone to bed with a lot on my mind and when I woke up suddenly from my unexpected alarm, I thought, What the hell was that? which came immediately after my first thought which was: Why is my alarm so loud?
Do you know what I mean when I talk about that weird feeling between sleeping and waking, when you’ve had an awful dream? The moments of placing where you are - I’m in my bed, my dogs are here, I’m safe - and that you are not, in fact, in the dream and that the dream was not real? Sometimes it feels like an alternate reality. Or a parallel universe. Both the dream and the in between. Because how can something feel so real in our minds just to be shook back to a reality where none of it happened?
Something like this happens when I watch a movie I’m so enthralled with that I forget it’s a made up story. Or when I’m reading a book and forget how many pages I’ve read and then realize it’s 11:07 p.m. and that I meant to go to bed hours ago.
Sometimes our return to reality can be more jolting than others. Sometimes we’d rather forget reality exists at all and escape to a place where we can frolic in the forest forever. Or is that just me?
I don’t know exactly what the hell I’m feeling this morning, but I know it’s not very comfortable.
Maybe what I’m feeling is just the come down after a nice little getaway with my dogs in the van, frolicking in nature, submerging my body in water, being naked for several days out there in the open? But that doesn’t fit, doesn’t feel right. Maybe the dream, it threw me? I mean yes, it did, it was fucking weird and scary. But still no. Is it the compilation of several stressors taking their toll? Probably to some degree, not totally it. And the latter is likely the source of the weird and scary dream to begin with.
I don’t think we’re meant to feel comfortable all the time. It’s good to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. For the feeling of discomfort to feel at the same time familiar. Why can’t both be true?Â
This is a skill I learned over the course of the many, many years of therapy, and a nugget of wisdom I gleaned in the process. Being able to handle uncomfortable things and feelings and people and situations and places is part of being human, and when you’ve mastered it it means you’re maturing. And when I say master, that doesn’t mean you’ve arrived. It just means you’re so good at something that you’re considered an expert; even experts keep training in their fields. So I keep getting better at holding space for the uncomfortable. I keep using my tools to cope. I keep finding that balance between knowing when I need to process this alone and when I need to reach out for support. When I need to journal or go take a walk. When I need to scream into a pillow or jump into cold water, because sometimes I need to trade one discomfort for another to get my blood flowing again. Feeling uncomfortable can also be what motivates us to change, or to change our circumstances. Or it can be a moment to simply connect with self and feel all the things.
I’ve stood by this next belief for years, maybe even decades now: If everyone in the world were more in tune with their own needs and desires, were able to communicate that to others and had more love for themselves, everyone would be more compassionate, which would lead to much less, or possibly even - bear with me here - no hate or violence. Because it wouldn’t be necessary, not even part of the human equation. The distance self awareness could go is endless.
When we act out of a place of understanding our own emotions, we have less desire to punch someone in the face because we’re angry about something that happened 3 hours ago or 3 years ago or 3 decades ago. If everyone acted out of a place of understanding our emotions, that means the person who we want to punch in the face may not have done the thing that made us want to punch them in the face in the first place. We’d all be kinder.
I’m not saying there’s some ominous standard of perfection that we as humans are just not living up to and if we did life would be perfect and we’d have world peace. I’m not that naive.
What I’m saying is that as humans we often have more potential than we give into, than we let ourselves explore. Because it’s easier to be angry and say something mean or do something harmful, than it is to sit with our uncomfortable feelings, practice self control and move through it calmly. The reality is that anger/sadness/fear/grief/insert negative emotion here is uncomfortable, too. But it’s easier to choose what feels familiar, even when that familiarity is actually more uncomfortable than the other uncomfortable thing. It takes work, energy, time and other exhausting resources to move familiarity from one thing to another.
Isn’t it funny how our brains work? In its most basic form, the brain’s job is to conserve energy and keep the body alive. It creates patterns, rhythms, workflows, associations along the way so it knows how to respond next time. But sometimes these become detrimental along the way, because we don’t need to interact with our surroundings the way we used to need to.
Take, for instance, my childhood trauma. The sum of it that landed me an adult diagnosis of Complex PTSD. My brain and body clung so tightly to my deep and basic need to survive, that all other healthy forms of developing as a child went out the window. And I’d brought most of that into adulthood with me, until I started to unpack it and rewire my brain in therapy, also learning that I’d been emotionally stunted around age 5. As a 27 year old woman, long distanced from the disturbing environment I’d been in my youth, did I need to continue keeping everyone at arm’s length, even my then husband, protecting my heart so savagely like I’m ready for battle at any given moment, because what I’d learned so young and so deeply is that no human is safe? No, but my brain believed it.
You see, when we’re disconnected from ourselves, our bodies, our feelings, our desires and needs, we don’t act like ourselves, or at least the selves that we might want to actually be.
I’ve found that when I let myself feel my feelings, however uncomfortable, and let them pass through me, I actually feel better on the other side of it, because they actually leave me. What I used to do - bottle up all of my feelings and shove them down to those dark cluttered corners of myself - just kept them stuck there, until like a blood borne disease all those crusty, toxic feelings started infiltrating all the other parts of my body until my body itself gave way.
So while I’ve been sitting here at my kitchen counter in my blue upholstered bar stool and writing all this, I’ve uncovered that the discouragement I was feeling yesterday sunk a little deeper into my gut overnight, manifested itself in a dream as some tangled thread attached to fear, uncertainty and unworthiness, and flung me into today feeling unsettled and slightly disoriented.
And you know what? In a little bit, now that I’ve processed and sat with all these feelings and expressed them, I’ll feel better. The circumstances feeding into my feeling of discouragement may not have changed drastically, but my attitude in interacting with that feeling, myself and how I’m going to interact with the world around me today sure will. And I’m sure as hell going to be a kinder person because of it.
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MEET ME IN THE COMMENTS!
How do you normally handle uncomfortable feelings? Do you think I’m full of shit? What do you have to say about any or all of this? Seriously, I want to know!