“I have no reason to feel sad.” “Don’t be afraid.” “You should be ashamed.”
I’ve been thinking that, even though we might not focus on how we relate to our emotions, it turns out that we have relationships with them. We’ve all been exposed to various ideas about emotions and their meanings. We might think of some as positive, others negative, and some in between. We have favorite emotions and troubling emotions. *
And our relationships to our feelings change over time, depending on lots of things. And, like relationships with people, our relationships with our emotions are often complicated—sometimes they’re fraught with intense meanings and reactions, many of which are long-standing and involve our assumptions, hopes, and many secondary feelings. To put it another way, we have an emotion, and then we have an emotional reaction to it. Feelings upon feelings upon feelings.
But why do some emotions seem so unappealing or worrisome? For some of us, it’s simple; we just want to feel good as much as possible. It’s not surprising to view happiness as better than sadness. It just feels better. But for lots of us, we’ve learned to attach meaning to particular emotions. We’ve learned to avoid some and embrace others.
So how does this happen? One source is our family; directly or indirectly, as children, we learn from grownups how to relate to our emotions. For example, if we’ve been told that a family member was immobilized by sadness for years or even committed suicide, we might assume that sadness, itself, was the problem. Our parents might encourage us to see sadness that way in hopes of avoiding horrible outcomes. So, when we notice that we’re feeling sad, we try to steer away from it by trying to be happy and upbeat.
But, since sadness is a natural part of life, it exists anyway, and trying to banish it can bring unintended consequences. Those can include a sort of rebound effect, with sadness resisting our efforts to control it. Dark feelings can materialize with intensity, and we then see ourselves as failing to control them, and we not only feel sad, but ashamed and frightened too. So might naturally try even harder to squelch sadness—distracting ourselves, or punishing ourselves for lapses into “self pity.” We might even feel better for now, but that pattern of struggle may continue for years, and it’s often exhausting.
Other feelings can carry different meanings. Most of us probably know someone, or we are that person, for whom the emotion of fear signifies weakness and brings shame, so we naturally try to convince ourselves that we aren’t afraid. We behave in ways that reassure ourselves, and sometimes that means taking big risks. But, since fear is a natural emotion, we may have to keep it up, working hard on our self-image of fearlessness. That can lead to continuing to take risks, some of which can put us in significant physical danger.
For some, anger is associated with danger. Maybe we had a family member whose anger exploded into physical or emotional violence. So we naturally worry about our own angry feelings: Will they erupt and hurt someone? Do they mean we are like the parent we never wanted to be? So we try to avoid any expressions of anger or displeasure with others. If we do notice that we’re angry, or those feelings seep into our interactions with others, we might deny them (“I’m not angry!) or secretly worry about them.
But there’s hope. Maybe even more than is true for interpersonal relationships, our relationships with our emotions are amenable to change – we can take steps to make the full range of our emotions, if not exactly our friends, at least less stressful, more meaningful, and even worthy of our curiosity. That shift can also bring us closer to the people we care about because they become better able to see us as we are, rather than as an image.
So, how can this kind of movement happen? Changing the way we relate to our emotions isn’t simple, and it can take time. When people describe that sort of change, they say things like, “I’ve gradually realized that my feelings are natural.” “I decided that I was feeling sad for good reason, and it didn’t mean I was going crazy.” “I started to see my fear as legitimate, not as a sign that I was a weak person.” “I realized my angry rants helped me think I was in control.”
A good beginning is to start noticing our relationships to different emotions and the meanings that we give them. Then, as we continue to become more aware of what’s going on inside us around various emotions, we can slow down the process of attaching meanings to them, becoming more curious about how those meanings came to be, and gradually becoming more flexible in the meanings we make.
We may not ever become completely comfortable with the entire range of our human emotions. We may still occasionally erupt in anger if we feel afraid of being controlled. We might feel worried about being sad too much. But we can shift to a less reactive, more stable relationship with them. In the process of doing that, we are building our sense of wellbeing on more solid ground. And, in so doing, we open ourselves to deeper, less conflictual relationships to our whole selves, and also to fuller relationships to others, who can then see us more clearly as the complex, emotional people we are: sometimes sad, fearful, delighted, angry, curious, loving, and so on--the full range of our humanness.
* This piece reflects discussions and musings over many years, but a conversation with Andrew Kim and Keerthi Reddy was a recent inspiration, and I am grateful for their colleagueship.
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