EMOTIONAL FREEDOM
Each day we face injustices that cause us distress. But psychologist Cynthia Hickman says we each hold the key to end our suffering and set ourselves free of our negative emotions – all we have to do is look within.
We each hold the key to end our suffering and set ourselves free of our negativity – all we have to do is look within ourselves.
Sitting in my office, Kate couldn’t contain her anger. “I’m so furious I’m going to explode!” she cried. “It’s all just so unfair. He’s so unreasonable. It drives me crazy.” Kate had come to see me for counselling support during her divorce. She was incredibly stressed, and had lost a huge amount of weight. She wasn’t sleeping well and her mind was going round and round the same track and simply wouldn’t let up.
There are many people who’d be familiar with this scenario. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, over 49,000 Aussie couples got divorced in 2017 – that’s a lot of people going through the pain of separating from their partners. As a psychologist, I know the process isn’t easy, but Kate was having an especially hard time. This was partly because of the way she was approaching the matter. Kate had to free herself from the emotional torture she was subjecting herself to.
Life scenarios like divorce can be challenging, but often we actually add to the difficulty ourselves. We like to think the other person is the source of our misery, but this is not necessarily the case. Yes, someone may be meanspirited, vengeful or callous towards us, and this is certainly never pleasant. But some of the challenge comes from how we approach the whole situation.
Let’s look at Kate’s complaint. She felt that her situation was unfair, and perhaps it was. But dwelling on the injustice was making her bitter and resentful. So many things in life are unfair – bullying, disparate rates of pay, how minorities are treated … the list is endless. None of this is okay, but if we make ourselves ill because of the injustice then we’ve just added to the misery. How does it help anything?
Wisdom teachings throughout the ages have pointed to the fact that there is the reality, which might be fair or unfair, depending on the situation, and then there is how we react to this reality. If the world is full of unfairness – which it is at one level – then we’re going to live in misery if we react to the unfairness all the time.
“So, what? Are you telling me to just give up then?” Kate asked furiously. “Am I supposed to let him get away with this? Its just not fair.”
I had to explain. “The situation may not be fair. But you’re banging your head against the wall of this unfairness and expecting to feel better. You’re really just going to give yourself a headache.” In fact, she already had.
To be clear, Kate’s situation may not have been fair. But there wasn’t a lot she could do about it. Her partner was going to be bloody-minded, and Kate couldn’t stop this. Her reactivity was likely just provoking him further. This was the reality – how her partner was behaving. This was something she couldn’t change. So wouldn’t it be better to work with what she could change? And what she could change was her response to the situation. She could work on her own inner state.
“Why should I have to be the one to do all the work?” Kate complained.
“Yes, again, I agree, it’s not fair,” I replied. “But you’re suffering through this process and you could be making it much better for yourself. If you do the ‘work’, you end up feeling better. There is less pain for you. Why go through extra torture if you don’t have to?”
Kate was learning a valuable life lesson. She was going to learn about how best to face ‘reality’. We might want reality to be different. It might not be fair that someone gets away with stealing our car. It might not be fair that we get sick or injured. It might not be fair if someone gets a job ahead of us or gets a lucky break and we do not. However, this is simply the reality of life.
This doesn’t mean that we give up on the world. We still speak up when necessary, we still ask for the things we want, and we still make a stand for what’s right. But what needs to be different is our state when we do the speaking. If we are reactive, stressed and frustrated, then we are hurting ourselves. It creates a tense internal state that damages both our physical and mental health. And this in no way helps the situation. It only doubles the suffering. There is ‘reality’ and then there’s what we do to ourselves because of this ‘reality’.
Slowly but surely, Kate came to understand that if she was able to take control of her emotional self, then she would get through the divorce process with so much less hardship. She could look at her angry, frustrated self and see that it was not helping her, and that it needed to settle down and let a wiser aspect of herself take charge.
Part of maturity is learning to face reality and accept what cannot be changed, and to instead work with our own interior reality – which can be changed. On the world stage it is those who are able to do this internal self-management that we all come to admire. We instinctively respond with respect to people who can transcend the harsh reality surrounding them, manage their own inner being, and then act from this still, inner position.
Take Nelson Mandela, for example. He was faced with the reality of being imprisoned for protesting apartheid. He could have let himself get eaten up with bitterness and rage, but he didn’t. He came out of prison ennobled, and ready to work for change.
Not everyone is in Mandela’s league, of course, but we can all take his lessons on coping with the situations we’re presented with. What happens, happens. This is reality, and there’s no point banging our heads against that wall. Instead, we must connect to our inner strength and step up to take action. Not from a stance of hate or revenge, but from a constructive approach to change.
Kate gradually got the hang of this more mature approach to reality, too. She understood that while it wasn’t fair how her husband was behaving, she had a choice about how she was going to deal with this. What was the point in not sleeping and going through an endless internal monologue? She had to take her resentful self in hand and teach it to grow up.
What this meant was that when she felt herself getting wound up, and when she heard her resentful voice start talking, she had to stop and take a moment to regain composure. She needed to shake out the tension from her body – starting with letting her fingers and hands vibrate, then letting this spread to her arms and then the whole body if needed. This helps to release the accumulated tension from the frustration. Then she’d take some deep, gentle breaths. Finally, she had to talk to this resentful ‘self’ within to remind it that there was a better way.
Though Kate was going through a very difficult time, she was learning something very important about life. Something good could come from this challenging situation. She was learning to be emotionally free. And she was learning that the keys to this freedom were in her own hands.
One of the most important lessons we can learn in life is that the external scenario we’re facing does not have to define who we are. One of the most powerful examples of this is the story of Victor Frankl, who was held in a Nazi concentration camp in World War II. He noticed the great differences in the ways people responded to this brutal reality. Some gave up in the face of the hardship. Some colluded with the Nazis. Some maintained their dignity despite the horror of the situation.
Frankl noticed that the person’s internal attitude towards the hardship determined their quality of life – and, in fact, whether they survived or not. Frankl himself found that by focusing on the love he felt for his wife that he was able to get through the inhumanity of the situation.
Frankl’s situation was absolutely not fair. But it was the reality he faced – and he found a way to survive it. It is definitely not comparable to Kate’s situation, but the principle is the same. We can let the external circumstances define us, or we can define ourselves and find another way through the ordeal. This is what Kate began to do.
Kate’s internal wellbeing was more important than holding on to her ideas about right and wrong. Her mental agitation was not helping her in her daily life, and it was not helping her manage her children through the process. They were picking up on her distress and acting out. If she could model a more balanced approach, then this would help her kids, too.
Kate was on her way to emotional freedom. This is because, in the end, we all cause our own misery. It is not the external situation, but our reaction to the situation, that causes the pain. What is the point of righteousness or fairness if it harms our wellbeing?
When it comes to relationships, it’s important to learn to put notions about right and wrong and fair and unfair in their place. Couples come to me all the time complaining about each other, so eager to point out how their partner is wrong and they are right. They’re prepared to argue and fight to make their point known.
What they don’t realise at first is that in their desire to be right, they are sacrificing the quality of connection in their relationship. They’re eroding the love between themselves and their partner. This can tear couples apart.
I must take people back to what is important – and what could be more important than love? Maybe it wasn’t ‘right’ for your partner to forget to do that chore, or to ignore your need for affection. But making them wrong for this and getting angry just destroys the connection between you both.
This doesn’t mean you have to put up with bad behaviour, and it doesn’t mean you don’t speak up. But it does mean that you have to manage your emotional state first. It is the out- ofcontrol emotional state that causes the damage – not your partner’s actions, and not you asking for what you need.
Right and wrong is a mental construct. It doesn’t come from the heart. Love does. Connection does. So we need to make love and connection the foundation. If something damages this, then we need to stop and reorient. There will be time for discussion later. First we have to bring compassion and understanding to the situation.
If we can put our sense of injustice aside, we can listen to our partner and feel what is going on for them. Often it isn’t about the immediate situation. It is often related to something deeper, and the situation is just the trigger.
With Kate, for example, the deeper issue related to her father, who’d diminished her and made her feel wrong. So she was primed to react strongly to anything that echoed this situation. There are any number of triggers we can all carry with us, based on unresolved earlier life experiences.
If we don’t explore our needs with our partner, then we might never get to the deeper issue. And if we miss the deeper issue, then we’ll just continue to go around the same cycle of issues.
“The eternal situation we’re facing doesn’t have to define who we are.” CYNTHIA HICKMAN
We can short circuit this cycle by becoming ‘bigger’ than our emotional reactions, letting them subside and staying connected with our partner. Once our partner has been heard and we have calmed down, then we have the opportunity to bring in a different perspective. Not from the position of right or wrong, but from the position of love – choosing to understand each other’s perspective and needs, then working through the issue together.
Right and wrong, fair and unfair – there are deeper distinctions than this. Kate was learning this wisdom, as are many of the couples I see. Love trumps those mental constructs. It makes us wiser, and sets us free to be our best selves and face ‘reality’ with dignity and ease.