I’ll Second That Emotion

When we feel an uncomfortable emotion, there are two ways we tend to deal with it. 

Sometimes, we do our best to deny it. We shove it down the basement stairs and triple-lock the door, then try to ignore all the banging and moaning and screaming.

“What noise? I didn’t hear any noise. It must be the wind.”

That doesn’t usually turn out well. Not unless “turning out well” means delaying an inevitable explosion until it’s twice as destructive and comes when you least expect it. 

Other times we crawl into our emotion as if it’s a second skin. We become our emotion and it becomes us.

“I’m not sad--I’m a sad person. A sad, sorry, slovenly sack of sadness.”

Wallowing in emotion can feel like processing emotion, but it’s different. Just like eating yogurt is different from drowning yourself in a bathtub full of yogurt. 

There is a third alternative, though. Sometimes, we can sit down with our emotions and figure out what they’re trying to say to us. It’s tricky, because they aren’t very clear, and they contradict themselves. At first, they’ll tell you they’re angry. But if you keep listening, they might tell you they’re really just afraid. And then, if you’re patient and you stick around long enough, they might even admit that they’re ashamed. 

I think of emotions as these weird, inarticulate messages from our unmet needs. Some of those needs are very old, and don’t get out much. They’re trapped in the deepest, darkest holes in our psyches, and they spend a lot of time muttering to themselves about how no one really cares about them. But once in a while, in pain or frustration or desperation, they manage to send a message to the surface in the form of an emotion. It arrives on our doorstep, usually at the worst possible time, and we never quite know what to do with it. But there’s information in there that we can use. We just have to pay attention.