Halting the Flight From Fully Feeling
- olivierbranford
- May 12, 2024
- 10 min read
Updated: Jan 28
Susanne Short wrote that “When a child is not allowed to experience feelings of sadness, anger, loss, and frustration, his or her real feelings become neurotic and distorted; in adulthood, that child will unconsciously arrange life to repeat these same repressions of feeling. Child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim laments that children are not being allowed legitimate suffering. He states that even the books children read in school show life as nothing but a succession of pleasures. Nobody is really angry, nobody truly suffers, there are no real emotions.”
Carl Jung wrote that “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”
The disease of emotional emaciation is epidemic and hundreds of millions of industrialised people are emotionally impoverished, empty, and deadened. Our vast array of seemingly sophisticated distractions leave us more emotionally hurt and lost than human beings have ever been before. As we become increasingly driven and relentlessly compulsive, real experiences of peace elude us. Constant busyness stresses and wears us out on the treadmill of never accomplishing enough. We unconsciously dread stopping or having unstructured time lest the feelings we are fleeing catch up with us and pounce into awareness.
Feel your feelings, then let them go
Some of the most beautiful things of life – physical intimacy, food, exercise, conversation, learning, and work – lose their quality because our frenzied pace makes it impossible to savour them. Rarely do we slow down long enough to digest the full pleasure of these activities.
How sad it is that we sacrifice our peace because we are not still enough to feel, experience, and work through the undigested emotions that drive us, that rumble in our bellies as anxiety, that ‘toxify’ our thoughts as constant worry, that make us run as if we were stuck in a constant prison break from our Selves!
We can stop the mindless running, busyness, and ‘hustle for our worthiness’. Experiences of peace and contentment underlie our undigested feelings. We can learn to safely feel and express all our emotions, and discover the deep comfort of full, undistracted inhabitancy of our bodies. We can be transformed from “Human doings,” a term coined by John Bradshaw, back into human BEings.
Anthropologists Eli and Beth Halpern remind us that peacefulness is a natural condition for human beings. They report: In Micronesian, there’s a word, ‘kukaro’, which has no corresponding word in English. When people say they are going to kukaro, they mean they are going to relax, sit around, hang out. They are BEing, not doing.
Many of us cannot remember the last time we weren’t obsessing about being productive. Many of us have forgotten how we used to be bedazzled by such everyday wonders as marvelling at a spider web, finding an animal shape in the clouds, gazing at the stars, exploring the delicate intricacy of the petals and stamens of a flower.
It is time to rediscover the emotional vitality of the child within us. Our inner child can find enduring satisfaction in simple pleasures because s/he does not pursue them purely to escape inner emotional turmoil. Perhaps the vision of the emotionally vital poet Walt Whitman will motivate you to reconnect with the ardour of your abandoned inner child:
“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlours of Heaven,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels...
And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the Earth,
And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times…”
Dr Wayne Dyer wrote "To be more childlike, you don't have to give up being an adult. The fully integrated person is capable of being both an adult and a child simultaneously. Recapture the childlike feelings of wide-eyed excitement, spontaneous appreciation, cutting loose, and being full of awe and wonder at this magnificent Universe."
Helen Keller wrote that "The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.”
Many of us balk at the idea of welcoming our feelings because we rarely witness healthy emotional expression. The small percentage of people in our culture who do express feelings are often emotional in obnoxious ways, and many individuals ‘under the influence’ are pathetic or hurtful in their unbridled emotionalism.
There is also a small but highly visible segment of our population which suffers from borderline personality disorder. Borderlines typically express their emotions punitively and explosively. They rage and sob convulsively at the drop of a hat, often in a manner that makes us feel controlled and manipulated. Their extreme emotional behaviours further convince us that we are wise to hide our feelings.
There is a third type of individual who gives feelings a bad name by stubbornly holding onto them until they become embittered attitudes. Those who are perpetually entrenched in irritability or self-pity often alienate us from feeling or expressing any anger or sadness whatsoever. We do not have to let other people’s irresponsible emotional expression alienate us from our feelings.
We can learn to be emotional in benign ways. We can have our emotions without holding onto them. We can soften and relax into our feelings without exiling or enshrining them. We can let our feelings pass through us when they have fully served their function. After all, most feelings, when felt, only last a few minutes.
There are times when it behooves us to sublimate or suppress our feelings. Sublimation is the conscious choice to transform and redirect emotional energy into other modes of productive self-expression, such as exercise, dance, and other forms of creativity such as writing and art. I get so much solace from my writing. William Wordsworth wrote that "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."
Suppression is the conscious choice to refrain from emotional expression in inappropriate circumstances; rarely do we benefit from yelling at the boss or crying in front of insensitive people. At such times we can postpone ‘emoting’ until we are in a safer milieu.
Automatic repression is not the only bad choice that we make regarding our feelings. A damaging choice that most of us continuously make is clasping a positive feeling that we are no longer truly experiencing. When we do this, we replace the authenticity of that feeling with an empty, lifeless idea.
When we force ourselves to display unfelt happiness or love, we appear as artificial and beguiling as plastic flowers or cheap perfume. Forced laughter and strained smiles inspire the same level of trust as do dishonest politicians and social media fakery.
Without the full spectrum of emotions, we are not whole human beings. We are instead like the artist whose palette only has room for light and cheery colours. Our self-expression is boring and superficial like discount store paintings, unconvincingly ethereal in their insipid feathery pastels.
The “negative” emotions add dark colours to an artist’s palette. They open up an infinite range of colour, hue, and tone. Without black on the palette there are no rich colours, no depths, no contrasts, no intricacies. Without the dark colours it is impossible to capture the infinitely diverse themes and landscapes of life.
Without our darker emotions, there is little depth and dimensionality in our connection with others. We cannot access the many avenues and subtleties of communication that make friendships rich and enduringly interesting. If we can only be friends when we are happy and “up,” then our friendships are painfully superficial.
Profound loneliness is the terrible price we pay when we only relate to others from a guise or stance of feeling good. Those who are only there for others during the good times are fair-weather friends who are strangers to loyalty and trust: There is no depth or unconditional love in the connection. “I will love you only in the insipid times” is no love at all.
Most people like themselves when they are feeling love or happiness or serenity, but the person who befriends himself in times of emotional pain possesses a more solid and authentic self-esteem.
When we learn to experience our feelings directly, we eventually discover that surrendering to them is by far the most efficient – and, in the long run, least painful – way of responding to them. We realise firsthand that life does not have to be pain-free to be fully enjoyed. We discover that new encounters with loss and hurt do not dominate our awareness or crush our enthusiasm for being alive.
As we learn to befriend our emotions, we suffer less and less from self-damaging flights from feelings. We gracefully accept the reality that our emotional nature, like the weather, often changes unpredictably with a variety of pleasant and unpleasant conditions. We realise that a positive feeling cannot be induced to persist any more than the sun can be forced to continuously shine.
When we surrender to, express, and soften to our feelings, we reconnect with the invaluable instincts and intuition they naturally carry. At times we discover the wonder of all the so-called negative emotions. I see others with restored emotionality having many wonderful experiences of sadness mellowing into solace, of anger unfolding into laughter, of fear flipping into excitement, of jealousy opening up into appreciation, and of blame giving way to forgiveness. These transmutations are not possible if the feelings are denied.
Even if you are interested in optimal performance, feelings are your fuel Lewis Hamilton said "The way I drive, the way I handle a car, is an expression of my inner feelings."
There are only two things we do every moment of every day - breathe and feel. We bury feelings alive - feelings are like a football being held under water: It always resurfaces despite your efforts to keep it submerged. We have to be vulnerable. That’s the only way not to avoid our feelings. As children we had emotions that were too overwhelming to bear as a result of growing up in a dysfunctional family. The problem is centred in the mind, not the heart. We need to unhook our minds from thoughts, open our hearts, and feel our feelings. You could consider that the bundle of emotions are not a curse. But an inheritance; a gift: Bless them. Even if they came from chaos. Dissociation from feelings is the antithesis of life and being alive. Spirituality is about learning to see in the dark and amidst that chaos that is this dysfunctional, Dystopian world.
There are no good or bad emotions. If we can hold them all in a healthy way then we can generate light. Nothing is demonised and nothing is idealised. We should not be attached to either 'good' or 'bad' feelings. All emotions are part of the spectrum of light. We need to believe in and see the rainbow as the miracle that is life.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote "I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings." Wise words indeed.
These are the emotions that I have covered for you in my series on emotions (click on the link to be taken to them):
Speak in such a way that others love to listen to you: Listen in such a way that others love to speak to you.
George Bernard Shaw wrote that “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” Are you ready to change your mind?
Namaste.
Olly
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