Have you ever said that you don’t feel much? Maybe someone asks you how you’re feeling and the answer is always ‘fine’, or ‘I’m good, the usual aches and pains, everyone has the right, I have my bad back, but that’s okay, work is work, everyone has to get by right, I’ve been busy. That’s good isn’t it.’
Stop. Breathe.
These things are not emotions, they’re not feeling tones, they’re cultural narratives that keep us from feeling what we’re feeling. That said, it’s challenging to overcome these things, it needs energy and awareness to navigate the weight of the culture around this; people are invested in this way of thinking because it makes them feel comfortable and safe, it’s common. I’ve experienced that so often in my life, it wasn’t until recently where I really opened up and relaxed into feeling things.
Life is complex and we won’t always know how we feel, or why we feel the way we feel. If I frame my experience of life by seeking to understand my emotions in each situation then I’ll be able to build momentum and understanding slowly until I have a bank of felt experience and scenarios to reference. There are some reasons why I was too scared to open up an understanding of my emotion, Brené Brown describes some of the cultural narratives that keep us blocking our emotions in her book Rising Strong:
- Being emotional is a sign of vulnerability, and vulnerability is a sign of weakness.
- Don’t ask. Don’t tell. You can feel emotion all you want, but there’s nothing to be gained by sharing it with others.
- We don’t have access to emotional language or full emotional vocabulary, so we stay quiet or make fun of it.
- Discussing emotion is frivolous, self-indulgent, and a waste of time. It’s not for people like us.
- We’re so numb to feeling that there’s nothing to discuss.
- Uncertainty is too uncomfortable.
- Engaging and asking questions invites trouble. I’ll learn something I don’t want to or shouldn’t know.
These are all ways to distract and avoid feeling what we’re feeling in each moment and it is possible to live a life this way, however, it will lead to some pretty heavy silences or some stresses on the body. The Body Keeps The Score by Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk describes the ways that repressed emotion can put stress on the body, the emotion is literally held in our body because we won’t recognise it; we won’t let it be felt.
Inevitably if we don’t feel our emotions they will build in pressure and we’ll either become a tyrant and demand that life be enacted in certain ways so that it doesn’t rub up against the emotion, or we will become explosive and reactive. This ruptures trust and respect. I know this feeling well from previous relationships; after exploding in emotion — usually anger, the sadness of knowing that I had shattered the trust and respect that I had built with my partner settled in, the first time this happened was always the worst, and although I tend to partner with incredibly empathetic and caring individuals, they were still rightly hurt, angry and concerned for their welfare.
I made a commitment to recognising and feeling my emotions for this reason. This doesn’t mean it was simple, there are many ways that the Western cultural narrative blocks us from this. Let’s explore them.
Brown describes the 5 different ways that we block and repress our emotion:
Chandelier
Chandelier is a term that Brown uses to describe the volcano that erupts around repressed emotion, it describes the state where someone erupts in a reaction to pain, and they jump so high that they touch the chandelier. It refers to when there’s a pain so big within us that we wince if it’s even slightly rubbed up against. It’s like having a broken toe, it’s so painful that you can’t hide it if you hit it against something.
We can’t pack down hurt, nor can we off-load it to someone else while maintaining our own authenticity and integrity.
The idea with chandelier is that you pack down the emotion so tightly and avoid it altogether, then as wanton life is inevitably going to do, something will rub up against it and you’ll erupt up to the ceiling. This method also impairs personal trust and relational trust as after this happens a few times everyone is walking on eggshells and the dynamics get changed to mould to that situation. These are fear-based settings where everyone is on edge, we might internalise this fear and see it as normal, all the while our nervous system is on high alert. It’s an exhausting way to live.
Bouncing hurt
This aspect in the book is all about the ego avoiding truth and vulnerability with anger, blame, and avoidance. In other words, we never face what it is we have to face because the ego keeps us safe from our experience and it’s doing that to protect us because we’re scared.
I don’t necessarily agree with everything Brown says about the ego being slick, conniving, and a dangerous liar. I believe the ego can be partnered with and ultimately the function of the ego is to stop us from reaching a dangerous threshold, in partnering with the ego what we’re actually doing is parenting ourselves from the standpoint of a mature adult. When we notice anger, blame, and avoidance we ask the ego what is going on, and we discern the next best action to take. The ego is a natural and intelligent function and so we don’t want to shame it, or try to bury it, it just needs to be partnered with the mature understanding of an adult spirit, this is why I believe the Chinese proverb which says that the mind is a good slave, but a terrible master. The function of the mind is to regulate; emotional process with thoughts, chemical balances in the body, sensory information, nervous system messages, and to listen to the messages that are sent from the heart and translate them, amongst many others.
Numbing hurt
Numbing pain is such a huge thing in Western society; we use any distraction necessary to numb the pain of something hard: relationships, work, money, sports, planning, perfectionism, constant change, social media, food, sex, porn, shopping, fame, TV.
These things can help short term, but they don’t build a lasting connection with ourselves or what we’re feeling.
When we numb the dark emotions, we also numb the light emotions too. This isn’t a choice, it’s just part of the nature of the human experience. If we get into numbing compulsively and chronically it can turn into addictive tendencies that we can’t get ourselves out of.
Stockpiling hurt
For years I stockpiled all my hurt because I didn’t have an environment that was safe and secure to express it. I feel these environments are so commonly built because of the fear of facing emotion, and what that will do to the dynamic of the relationships we are in. There also might be some resistance to change, and death coming in here. It’s absolutely not celebrated to go through grief or to recognise that aspect of the relationship that needs to die, the counterintuitive thing, and sadly ironic in some cases, is that we cling to these relationships hoping that those aspects don’t die. If we fully honour the grieving process it might give us a chance to find the seeds of life that always lie in death and start a new way of relating. Too often these things go unsaid and the relationship stagnates or trust is ruptured without a knowledge of how to repair it.
My own personal experience of stockpiling hurtled me into a frantic and relentless job in the music industry, I enjoyed that job and I’m blessed by the extraordinary experiences it has given me, but I got to the point in 2014 where I was totally and utterly burnt out because I’d stockpiled and repressed my emotions for so long. I lived amongst this exhausting cocktail of numbness, depression, rage, bitterness, resentment, thrill-seeking, addictive coping tendencies, and sexual promiscuity.
My body told me that it was time to stop and face my emotions or I’d perish amongst these high energetic states of discomfort.
Brown mentions this in her book:
We’re not erupting with misplaced emotion or using blame to deflect our true feelings or numbing the pain. Stockpiling starts like chandeliering, with us firmly packing down the pain, but here, we just continue to amass hurt until the wisest parts of ourselves, our bodies, decide that enough is enough. The body’s message is always clear: Shut down the stockpiling or I’ll shut you down. The body wins every time.
I chose to take this opportunity to go travelling in Asia for a year, I’d already planned it out with my partner at the time, and I took off to really give myself space between the person that I’d grown up to be amongst my culture and the person my soul was translating to me. I didn’t know that at the time of course, and there’s an argument that an easier path would’ve been to enter psychotherapy earlier, however, I wasn’t in a space where I could see myself honestly; I wasn’t ready and I honour that.
Hurt and the fear of high centring
Brown discusses this as the fear of going backwards and the fear of going forwards simultaneously, keeping us in the position of stagnation and fear of our emotions.
“What if I unlock something I can’t handle?”
“What if I go insane?”
“What if I’m unfixable?”
One reason we deny our feelings is our fear of high centring emotionally. If I recognise my hurt or fear or anger, I’ll get stuck.
Brown mentions the place that we’ve all been in: “If I open this up and express it then I won’t be able to move backwards and pretend that it’s not true for me, but moving forward might open a floodgate of emotion that I can’t control.”
I felt this way around my trauma and the response from my psychotherapist was always “patience”. She also assured me that it’s unlikely that I’d go insane, in fact facing and honouring emotion is the healthy response. Things happen in their timing for a reason, some things we do need to surrender to. Surrender to the patience that they will take a long time to achieve, and a consistent and intentional effort. I believe this is hard for our Western narrative, we’re taught to go out there and to crush, make things happen, and to dominate; to progress at all costs. These narratives help us in some situations however when we’re dealing with complex emotion, the opposite is required; a surrendering to the process, a safe emotional connection with another person, an honouring of emotional weight and listening to what my soul needs to do in this scenario.
Offloading vs integrating
We can now see that there are two ways to deal with our emotional process, one way is to offload it onto the people in our environment and as we can see that involves repression of our own emotion, projection, and actually giving away our own power to external sources. This dynamic can be accepted in a relationship although it doesn’t foster a healthy trust and respect with oneself or with others.
So what are better ways to relate with emotion, to integrate our emotional experience? What are the solutions to this situation?
Permission slips
Giving myself permission to feel things. Physically writing out a post-it note that says: “I give myself permission to feel…”
We are very intuitive beings, you might be surprised what comes out here on the post-it, just trust yourself, and follow this curiosity. The things I wrote out this morning were, I give myself permission to:
- Feel excited, joyous, & grateful
- Feel hurt, angry, and in pain
- Feel depression over stagnation
- Feel progressive in my art
- Feel intrepid
- Feel connected & seeking to express
I don’t know what all these things mean specifically, the important thing is that I acknowledge and recognise that they are there, the understanding might come later, it might not, I might revisit these things tomorrow or next week. In being witnessed it allows me to be conscious of them, and in that way, I am creating space to respond in the way that I choose to respond.
Paying attention
Giving ourselves permission to feel is the first step, then comes paying attention to what we’re feeling and when. This can be a long process, we have our entire lives here to do that though right!
Noticing, and becoming grateful for different states of being is a really satisfying practice in my life.
Tactical breathing
Breathing is so magical in many ways, it’s our superpower. Notice the breath. Notice it coming in, notice it going out. One of the main things we’re taught to do that’s counterintuitive to breathing is sucking in our bellies because we all have to be so thin right? Well, expanding the belly on the in-breath is really vital to a healthy and functioning respiratory system. Over my journey of discovery of who I am in this world, I have learned to breathe in so much more air, to use my lungs, and therefore to breath in life, and allow my body to operate at a much higher energy state. Oxygenation is a key part of how our bodies function.
Practise box breathing:
Practise breathing in through the nose and out through the nose. This slows us down, and it changes our body chemistry and allows us to enter into a rest and digest state of our nervous system. Once we’re in rest and digest we’re no longer looking for an escape from danger and we can explore our situation in curiosity and wonder; we can make choices that are aligned to a long vision, and we can stack good decisions little and often and move towards a better life for us and those around us. There are some other powerful techniques in breathwork, one that I do often is the Wim Hof Method which helps me in the process of alkalisation in my body — the process of balance between the acidity and alkaline nature of our inner organs. There’s also the fire breath in yogic culture which I use when I have a high level of stress or tension in my body, I wouldn’t recommend starting out with this, it’s just a nudge at what is possible further down the road.
Closing thoughts
Now we’ve seen the way-markers, systemic blocks, and alternative techniques to cultivate an awareness of emotion we can realise that there is a simple and effective way to unblock ourselves from the stress and strain of repressed emotion. It’s not an easy path, and I’d definitely recommend doing this alongside a professional therapist if you feel like there’s a lot within you, I know I did and it turned out that I had trauma in my body, yet it’s so worthwhile because it leads to deeper loving connections, more trust, and less awkward heavy and resentful silences.
You’ll notice that the number of ways we are blocked — internalising them and therefore blocking ourselves, are more than the ways in which we can move towards integrating instead of off-loading our emotional experience. I believe deeply that this is because we have the natural capability to heal and integrate our live situations into deep and rich, meaningful experiences. I believe we have a reservoir of loving energy. It’s really possible to live from a loving perspective. Every time I get reactive I stop and breath and ask, what would love do?
Just the act of slowing down and breathing starts to change my body chemistry. It’s not only possible, it’s necessary in today’s global situation.