CAN’T STOP THE FEELINGS?
Our agony aunt, Philippa Perry, on why we need to embrace emotions
You might not think of emotions as things you have relationships with. After all, they’re not people or pets! Nevertheless, we do have an attitude towards our feelings. We may think of some as bad, some as good, or we might not even notice them. How we relate to feelings is down to several factors: how sensitive we are, how we were brought up, our subsequent history and the culture we live in. When we’re born, we haven’t got much of a notion of emotions – we could get all the feelings down to just two: okay and not okay. How we experience emotion is about interpreting our bodily sensation and meaning-making process. In other words, emotions are learnt rather than innate. The bodily experiences one person might interpret as nervousness, another might feel as excitement. So, if emotions are constructed by us, what can we do to make them work for us, instead of, as it sometimes may feel, against us? The many letters I get from Red readers reflect the three main ways we have a relationship with our feelings: repressing, overreacting and containing.
REPRESSING
‘My father died three years ago,’ wrote one Red reader, Lynne. ‘I didn’t feel anything as there was no relationship to grieve. I barely saw him after he left home when I was five. Then I had a light-hearted flirtation at work with a lovely guy and I happened to find out he had a partner and was gay. For some reason, this has thrown me sideways. I am absolutely miserable about it. I didn’t even know I cared about him. This was nearly two years ago. I moved offices to avoid him, but still I cannot shake off these feelings for him and it makes me distraught.’
Lynne did not have a good relationship with her father, but that would not have stopped her longing for one, or stopped the pain of having to relinquish that hope after his death. She was trying to push the feelings for her father away and they found another unavailable man.
If you are a represser, your natural inclination is to push away feelings and tell yourself (and perhaps others) to not ‘make a fuss’ or that ‘it doesn’t matter’. Rather than being curious about an emotion, you’ll want to extinguish it. This might be a good short-term strategy, but what I have found out as a psychotherapist (and as a person!) is that when people do this long-term, it gets too much and it leaks out. Lynne may have moved offices to try to avoid the feeling, but, of course, this did not work. One thing that might work is understanding her sadness around her father and daring to feel it so that, with time, it loosens its grip on her.
OVERREACTING
Rather than use their feelings, overreactors are used by them. Take Katherine – her life was full of drama and chaos. She was at the mercy of her feelings and could never stick to a plan. She continually let people down. Her relationship towards her feelings meant it was hard for her to sustain any friendship or relationship or hold down a job. Typical of people who overreact to their emotions, she did not realise that she could get her feelings to work for her, rather than be at the mercy of emotion. It was only when an addiction made her hit rock bottom that she felt motivated to work on herself and learnt how to contain her feelings and take control of her life.
CONTAINING
Containers acknowledge and validate their feelings. They can take emotions seriously without overreacting and remain contained and generally optimistic. They say things like, ‘I am grieving right now, but I know this will lessen as time goes by.’ Personally, until I read a lot about psychology and undertook therapy, I used to swing between repressing and overreacting. I’d bottle everything up, ignore my feelings and plough on with what I thought was logical, then they’d explode or implode on me and after that the cycle would start again. I remember getting upset when telling my therapist that I had been examining an aspect of my past that we had been working on in therapy when the doorbell went. I answered it, dealt with the delivery, and then, when they had gone, went back to crying again. I was so unused to being able to contain an emotion like this that I told the therapist that if I was capable of answering the door, I must have been faking the sadness. She convinced me otherwise by asking, ‘As you were on your own, who were you being fake for?’