Emotional Fitness: Taking your emotions for a workout
I have heard it said that “Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions who will not enter a house where her children are not welcome”.
Yet, we live in a time and in a culture in which we have decided that many of our feelings are unwelcome. Sadness. Anger. Anxiety. Confusion. Fear. Grief. Maybe especially grief. And so it is no coincidence that many of us have a lot of difficulty accessing real joy. Because when we feel we have to clamp down to not feel some emotions, we end up clamping down on all of them, even the ones we want.
Joy is a result of the vibrancy of being truly alive. Instead, the best we often get to is distraction from the pain and anxiety.
I was raised in a home where I was expected to be pleasant and grateful and needless all the time. Whenever I was emotionally struggling, I was treated as a problem and often bullied into at least performing happiness through clenched teeth. There was no comfort coming. What I learned was that the difficult feelings inside me were a problem to be ignored or fought against or at least frightened of. More than that, I learned that there was actually something wrong with me that they were even happening.
Well into adulthood I still sometimes struggle with this conditioning.
I want to offer a metaphor: Think of our emotions as different muscles that each sometimes need a workout in order to have a life of vitality, vibrancy and joy.
The Problem: What happens when we avoid our emotions
When we push away certain emotions, our ability to be with them without repression or avoidance begins to atrophy, like an underused muscle. And then when those emotions arise (as they are wont to do in every human from time to time) it can feel excruciating. Like suddenly lifting a huge weight when you haven’t been training, you often don’t have the strength to do it without injuring yourself. When difficult emotions come up, the fear that we cannot tolerate it often causes many of us to do anything we can do to get away from this feeling. We drink, smoke or scroll to numb out. We fill our time so we’re too busy to feel. Or we repress which represses our whole vitality.
It’s been my experience that avoiding or resisting our emotions makes them feel quite a bit worse when they do arise. It’s kind of like they have to get so loud to get our attention that they overwhelm us.
The metaphor: Emotional strength training
So how do we learn to exercise our feeling muscles so that we grow stronger instead of weaker?
Sometimes what I do in my practice is help people just remember how to feel the full spectrum of their emotions, little by little. Like reps.
I find that especially if we were shamed for our difficult feeling growing up, it really helps to have a compassionate witness staying present with us and encouraging us to stay with the feeling. Our nervous systems pick up on the fact that this is socially safe and won’t result in belittling, mockery or rejection, and something starts to change.
A Quick Emotional Workout
While it can be great to work with an experienced “trainer” of some kind, if you want to try a little emotional workout by yourself experiment with this one simple exercise:
The Emotions Dressing Room
Imagine that you are in an “emotions dressing room” trying on different emotional shirts. Call to mind the first one for a moment. Just feel what it feels like in your body. Is it warm or cool? Smooth or rough? Active or still? Does it make you tense and contract, or relax and expand? Which parts of your body do either one of those things?
When you have a sense of the feeling of that emotion, go ahead and take it off and try on another. I find this works best if you alternate somewhat between the more and less pleasant emotions. For instance, here’s one potential sequence:
Fear
Contentment
Sadness
Relief
Anxiety
Gratitude
Anger
Love
Excitement
Jealousy
Peace
Then congratulate yourself for completing a few reps of an emotional workout.
This is a simple, somewhat lighthearted way to just start to train ourselves to not be so afraid of the feeling parts of life.
If you’d like to work with me and do some of this training together, just reach out.