Photo Credit: Sydney Sims
I am processing difficult emotions this week.
When I say my emotions are “difficult” what I mean is that I have a lot of resistance to that particular emotion. As a 2-year old would scream “I DON’T WANNA!!!!!!”, and then throws themselves down and cry over something rando, such is my own inner child in the face of difficult emotions. Difficult emotions make me want to kick and scream in resistance, suppress it or deny it or judge it. Anything but process it. Anything but see it simply and clearly for what it was without adding any additional baggage to it.
My most difficult emotion to process is anger.
My mindless inward reaction is to shame it. In my mental space, anger is not welcome. It is evil. It leads to bad things. It doesn’t make me a “good woman”. It makes me a difficult woman. It makes me a nuisance. It makes me dangerous. It makes me irrational. You aren’t welcome here, Anger, you make me a terrible person.
My mindless outward reaction is to be loudly silent, but with its ferocity shooting out a piercing, concentrated bullet-gaze in double. Not quiet, but deathly silent. If I have to respond to a question, it is short and largely punctuated because I don’t want to say something I will regret. I know what I’m thinking will come out as a verbal barrage of punches that won’t stop until the person pinned underneath my vocal-assault is helplessly flesh and blood. I’ve never lost my shit this way, never said anything purely to hurt another person without restraint. Not verbally, not physically. But I know I’m capable of it. So either I’m bomb-ticking silent, I exit stage left with a quickness, or both. Whatever option is available.
Other difficult emotions: sadness, hurt, love. I am also processing these emotions this week too alongside anger. These are the list of emotions I have a conflicted relationship with. We have sort of a make up-break up cycle going on. We are working on our trust and communication issues with each other.
A way to look at it is to say that some emotions I feel have another layer of emotion piled on top of them. They aren’t singular emotions, they are compounded 2-ply emotions. The 2nd layer of emotion is usually shame. Sometimes, they can even be 3-ply—like shame and guilt, that’s a fun one to navigate — and that can be difficult to see because it all just looks like one big pile of shit at first glance.
This makes them more complicated to navigate especially if I get too immersed in them, if I don’t sit as The Observer as I experience them. The stronger the emotion, the harder it is to take the seat as Observer. It’s something you just learn to accept and roll with as you practice it though. Just get back on the throne when you find you’ve slipped and fell on the floor. It’s as simple as that. Simple isn’t always easy though. I know that from experience.
The goal for me when I process any difficult emotion is to get from “emotional mind” to “wise mind” with as little resistance and self-flagellation as possible. Ideally, I’d like to move through this trajectory quickly and easily, smooth and practiced. But I’m still working out the kinks of old habits. So mostly it looks like pronounced squiggly lines, then a smoothing out, then maybe a few more squiggly lines, and then I reach it.
Emotional mind is my inner 2-year old, my most emotionally reactive state. When in emotional mind, my brain responds by going into “black-and-white” thinking, seeing everything in stark binary, as a means of energy-efficiency and survival. For me, this usually looks like writing a personal, uncensored journal entry where I throw an inordinate amount of expletives, maybe whole sentences completely in CAPS, and yelling about how such-and-such person is bad and I am justified in my complete and pure goodness. In my emotional mind, if I were to direct it at anyone, I would go straight for the throat. This is why I exit the scene when I feel emotional mind starting to take over the stage. In some cases, I push it down so hard, to protect the other person(s) involved or take care of their feelings first, that it doesn’t surface until 2-3 days after the inciting event. I call this “delayed processing”.
Because some emotions are 2-ply, sometimes it can be hard to let myself go uncensored in any space, even if its completely private. What I’ve learned is that I used to make every thought I birth into existence mean something about myself. But this is the very definition of constant self-judgment and a guaranteed recipe for mental illness. My old way to deal with this was to just try and keep those “mean thoughts” hidden in the subconscious. If it remains unsaid in my mind then it doesn’t exist, right? Wrong. It’s actually how I end up doing actions I don’t understand, by responding to subconsciously-stored feelings. It leads to a scavenger hunt in my brain to track down what emotion is running the show and digging up what thought is pushing the emotion into bloom. It takes up way more energy than just letting myself have a “tantrum room” where I get to lose my shit internally for awhile.
Isn’t the mind super interesting?
It used to scare me when I didn’t know where I was going. Now that I’ve learned to navigate it with more clarity, I find my own “inner research” super fascinating. Thank goodness for “mind guides”, those people who hold your hand and help answer your questions, those people who keep you centered while you try to make sense of it all, aka therapists.
Now that I recognize how intense my self-judgment can be, how normalized it has become from a lifetime of habit formation, I know better. Now I get to choose whether or not I want a thought to have weight. Or I think more neutrally about it in general. For instance, if I wrote something like, “Fuck this person.” Instead of responding to myself with, “Oh shit, that’s a really bad thought. I’m a terrible person.” I say something like, “Oh shit, I’m really angry. This is just something brains do when we’re angry. It doesn’t mean anything about me as a person.” Then I let my 2-year old go off on the page for awhile, swoop in when she starts to yawn from exhaustion. That’s when wise mind gets a chance to take over, cuddle the 2-year old back to her angelic self. I do this for pretty much any “negative” emotion I have to give myself an internal safe space to just be.
And that’s just the beginning.
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Hm. This seems more like a research paper on my mind and mindful emotions than anything. This is already a lot of information so I’ll stop here now for Reader-Processing.
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To be continued…
Shameless Jas 