Feelings Buried Alive Never Die. That's the name of a book i saw the other day. No idea if the book itself is any good, but it gets my vote for one of the best titles ever written. (Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway was my previous favorite.)
What happens to a feeling you have tried to bury, if it doesn't languish? It just sits there, bubbling below the surface. It takes all your effort to keep it under there. You hope to suffocate it, but the best you can do is keep holding it down. Even then it will keep rearing its ugly head, stronger and overwhelming than ever, until you finally decide to (have to, really) deal with it in some way. In the meantime, if you shut yourself out to one emotion, you prevent yourself from feeling, period. I forget what book it's from, but the author said something to the effect of, "Feelings aren't like piano keys, you can't hold one of them down and expect all of the rest to stay up."
The concept of yin and yang comes to mind... interdependence rather than duality. In reality there are no "good" or "bad" feelings per se (although i might add that how you deal with feelings can be either healthy or unhealthy). Various emotions are functions of one another. Without unhappiness, happiness would be utterly meaningless; you wouldn't have anything with which to compare it. It's impossible to really, truly laugh if you have never really, truly cried. Immense joy cannot be fully known until you have felt tremendous and deep despair.
If you can't feel anything, you may not be physically dead, but neither can you say that you are truly alive.
Easier said than done, of course. Lord knows when thigns get really rough i tend to vascillate between overwhelming emotion or utter numbness. Partly learned -- the message received from family, skating, and the world at large seemed to be that showing negative emotions was a bad thing. One particularly vivid memory, eight years ago at a local competition, we were in the locker room and Mom was yelling at me about something. A tear ran down my cheek, and she hit me and hissed in my ear, "Stop crying, do you want people to think I'm a bad mother?" (The irony of that never escapes me.) She was a wonderful mother in every other respect, but other than smiling, displays of emotion were verboten. I'm sure everyone can relate to that. Coach was like that, too. And i still have a hard time crying, even in private. The tears get as far as the back of my eyes but won't go any further. So i'm stuck with dry sobs or just an immense pain of not being able to let it out.
Moreover, i just have difficulty/unwillingness to deal with things sometimes. One reason that portions of the past still haunt me is i've just never really dealt with most of it; the feelings that come up are far too intense. Certain feelings, well, you know you're not supposed to "act out." So the lesser evil seemed to be just to stuff them, not even deal with them, or let them out in more subtle, more often self-destructive ways. (Case in point, eating disorders, self-injury, which give the illusion of control even though you're still letting your feelings rule over you...) The apparent alternative to suppressing "bad" feelings -- anger, depression, pain, anxiety, fear -- was to be overwhelmed by them. After all, what other option could there be...?
In PHP we actually had an entire class on "containment." I didn't understand that at first because "containing" an emotion sure sounded the same as "boxing it in" to me. But containment is supposed to be a happy medium between letting feelings overwhelm or control you, and suppressing them or numbing yourself out. The best analogy I can come up with is building a fence in the yard for your dog, instead of either shutting her in a stuffy cage or just letting her run wild throughout the neighborhood. Again, though, easier said than done. That's why we had a whole class on it, every week. I wish now that i'd actually paid attention instead of focussing on, "When is this day going to be over so i can go home [or "back to my room" during my inpatient phase] and not have to deal with this shit inside my head anymore?" Not bothering to consciously acknowlede that it was the shit in my head that landed me in the hospital in the first place.
Was that all really only three and a half years ago? I am healthier now, by many standards. Emotionally, even. I've begun to acknowledge and appropriately express anger, for example, instead of turning it back on myself and getting immensely depressed. (One thing i am grateful for about the last skating season, Coach definitely gave me an opportunity to learn to deal with anger!!!) But other old mental patterns still die hard. I'm still not sure if i just feel things more --- i'm told i can be way oversensitive -- or just inadequately able to deal with them. Probably a bit of both.
Damn feelings. Who knew they could be so complicated? :P
"Talking makes us human, that's what I was told. So why do I find it so difficult to let my feelings unfold?" Genesis
