Feeling what we feel
This is not the first night where I’m not sure what I want to say. It’s 11:30pm as I begin this post, and it’s been a long, intense day. There are quite a few themes and ideas racing around my brain, mostly around self-care, resilience, and finding healthy ways to respond to stress and navigate uncertainty.
This topic is massively on my mind because I’ve just spent two days facilitating a course for 14 people dealing with just this. It’s a huge, important, vulnerable area to explore. We humans are infinitely creative. We have a multitude of ways of responding to challenging situations. Many of those end up causing us more trouble than they solve. There’s a scene in the BRILLIANT new show on Apple TV, The Morning Show, starring Jennifer Aniston, Steve Carrell and Reese Witherspoon amongst others, that illustrates this perfectly. Witherspoon plays Bradley Jackson, a journalist, whose career is taking off. After a highly unexpected, emotional and stressful conversation with her estranged father, she gets off the phone, goes straight back into the bar she was outside, and does some shots given to her by the hunky Irish barman. The camera cuts to an alleyway, presumably round the back of the Irish bar in New York City, where Bradley and the barman (I can’t remember his name, sorry!) are having sex. In my counsellor training programme, we called this kind of response “anxiety binding behaviour”, and it can be anything we do to try to feel better (or feel number or nothing), rather than simply feeling what we feel. The sex (or chocolate, or shopping, or gambling, or alcohol, or, or, or) feels good in the moment when we’re doing it. It provides an escape route from whatever pain arises from the challenging situation – plus, where relevant, all the pain from the past that also comes to the surface – but it’s a very temporary, highly ineffective solution. We end up drunk/high/broke/etc, usually regretting what we’ve just done, and with no resolution to the thing that prompted us to the controlling behaviour in the first place. I used to think that only addicts responded in this way. Now I understand that pretty much all of us are doing it in many and varied ways.
Feeling what we feel sounds simple, but it’s often not. Feeling our emotions gets challenging at a certain point in our development. Young children do it effortlessly, but I think we get bound up in a lot of conditioning and learn to hide our feelings from other people and to resist the ones that feel difficult to feel. That isn’t just things like anger, sadness and loneliness, by the way; as Brené Brown points out, joy is the most vulnerable emotion to experience. That explains a lot, I think. I know that place of resisting feeling happy and joyful. I know the fear that arises of the moment when it will pass, and thinking that perhaps it is easier all round not to feel it in the first place.
I have come away from two days of teaching with a sort of heavy sense that although I can talk a good game about this stuff, I do really struggle to put it into practice sometimes. I wish I was better at just feeling my emotions, at “being with them” as my friend Hannah says. Tonight I feel quite annoyed at how reactive I can be, at all the ways that I try to control things instead of simply feeling the hard thing – the tension, the sadness, the uncertainty, the fear. There is a whole other conversation there, about the ways in which we actually generate more of those feelings through responding to stress and uncertainty in unhelpful ways. I often make life harder for myself than it needs to be. And there is also the fact that I’ve been holding space for this difficult, messy, human stuff for a couple of days and probably need a good night’s sleep.
The post I had in my mind about feeling our feelings wasn’t anything like the one that actually came out. I don’t like this post very much, but that’s not the point of this practice. The point is to write every day until the end of January, and in a minute, when I press publish, I’ll only have two days left and I’ll be able to say I’ve done it. I can hardly believe that, and for that reason, even though I don’t really like this one, I am glad I have written today.
Thank you, as always, for reading. It means a huge amount to me.
(Photo by Cosmic Timetraveler on Unsplash. Thank you.)