Let’s Normalize HEALTHY Emotional Expression

Hello Friends!

This week and the next I want to explore something I commonly see in the self help/self love/spirituality world.

That is the idea that we should NEVER move from/express negative emotions.

That we must always be poised, coming from a neutral place, always 'rational' and calm BEFORE we choose an action step or express ourselves.

I want to explore why I think this is stagnating, why I think we fear emotional expression, and how I think we can move forward in a more pragmatic way.

Here is part one, I'll see you next week for part two.

Let's Normalize Allowing Emotional Expression

Let’s normalize allowing and learning from the EMOTIONAL expression of our content creators in the self help/self love/spirituality world. 

Let’s normalize allowing OURSELVES to have emotional reactions to life without trying to spiritualize our way out of them. 

Let’s normalize having anger, rage, sadness and other ‘intense’ emotions being a motivating factor in our lives in the direction of positive change - rather than seeing these ‘negative’ emotions as always harmful, destructive and in need of taming/processing/fixing BEFORE they should be ‘acted’ upon.

Now, I want to begin by saying of COURSE we don’t want to act from totally impulsive, fully unprocessed emotional stimulation - especially when we’re in a role where we teach/lead/serve in some public way. This is called immature emotional expression - and it’s the REASON most of us fear and resist any negative emotional expression whatsoever.

I want to deeply validate the fact that *most* of us grew up in environments where healthy emotional expression and processing wasn’t demonstrated to us.

Rather, we experienced extreme bursts of anger and rage coming from our caregivers/ authority figures that were at best frightening and at worst violent and dangerous for us. We experienced periodic or prolonged episodes of all consuming darkness and depression that made it so that our caretakers weren’t able to be there for and present with us. We learned that suppression was the only acceptable way to work through uncomfortable emotions. That we were only safe and loved when we were ok, or when our authority figures were ok. We witnessed fights. We witnessed deep withdrawal. We got hurt by the unprocessed and immature expression of negative emotions and we were SHAMED in our experience of emotions.

We saw the chaos of IMMATURE emotional expression and it led us to believe that only happiness was safe. Again we never learned what it looks like to HEALTHFULLY embody our anger, sadness, rage or other ‘lower emotions’, and we’ve never had an example of how we can actually use these emotional states as a catalyst for very effective, positive change. We only saw immature expression or suppression. In this, generally speaking, suppression felt better because at least in suppression we were seemingly safe.

At the same time, these ‘lower’ emotions are difficult to experience.

They often come with pain, confusion and a whole host of other unpleasant sensations - even when we don’t have any ‘stories’ built up around them. Sadness, anger, fear - these emotions are inherently uncomfortable. On top of that, most of us have a whole whack load of stories built up around these emotions, and thus along with them come shame, guilt, fear of losing love and being rejected and so on. These emotions are a response to painful experiences/false beliefs and oftentimes we aren’t able to fix or change the painful experiences/beliefs we’re in in order to make the emotion dissipate. We don’t understand the pain we’re experiencing and the subsequent emotions being generated in response. We don’t see that the anger, the sadness, the hopelessness aren’t things in and of themselves - but are REACTIONS to something. We don’t know how to feel the emotional sensations and mine them for information that can empower us. We don’t know how to feel an emotion in a surrendered way so that we can GET this information that often surpasses what our intellect currently understands - we’ve been taught that we have to DO something about every emotional state - whether that’s a processing, suppressing, getting rid of, denying, fixing, overcoming - and have no idea what it’s like to just EXPERIENCE an emotion. This DOING often thwarts the process of FEELING which then blocks us from UNDERSTANDING - and therefore blocks us from learning what needs to be done to move ourselves into a new situation and thus a new emotional state. These emotional states again are tied to memories of being violated, made to be unsafe, ignored, shamed, guilted, abandoned, told we’re unacceptable.

All we know is that these lower emotions HURT and we want them to STOP. 

These negative emotions, for the most part, have been traumatic experiences for us. We never got to see someone healthfully processing their negative emotions, coming out the other side EMPOWERED to make their lives BETTER. We saw explosions, emotions being turned in or we saw suppression. No one ever really GOT THROUGH their emotional state, saw it’s message, took the message, improved their lives, saw that the negative emotion was a helpful messenger and therefore could pragmatically work WITH their emotions. People just got stuck, doing the same things over and over, feeling the same way over and over, internalizing their pain, projecting their pain and so on.

There's A Reason We Fear Our Emotions:

Thus, there’s a reason so many of us fear our own emotions, the emotions of others. There’s a reason we believe emotions to be ‘bad’. There’s a reason we want to get rid of them, have them tied up in a little bow before we show them or are exposed to them in another. There’s a reason we don’t believe that anger or sadness could ever be healing or productive - and rather believe these emotions must be worked through and overcome in some way before they should be expressed.  

With this, when we’re not using food, drugs, distraction and coping to try to separate ourselves from our negative emotional states, many of us have turned to spirituality as a tool for helping us suppress, deny and otherwise demonize ‘negative’ emotions. For a long time spirituality in general has promoted the idea that to be truly holy, righteous, ‘good’, pure or whatever other adjective we are searching to ‘become’ through our spiritual practices - we must be poised. Always in control of our emotions. Never slipping into anger, sadness, hopelessness - and if we do we MUST fix that QUICK - lest we lose ourselves to the sin of human emotion. 

We’ve been sold the idea that if we just practice hard enough, become enlightened enough, become self aware enough, control ourselves enough, can witness or dissociate from ourselves enough - that we will TRANSCEND human emotional experience.

We’ve been told that we can exist in a permanent state of bliss if we just ‘spirituality’ correctly for long enough. We’ve been told over and over that to express anything but what the world today perceives as ‘love and light’ is to be harmful, immature, destructive and projecting. That if we ever move from a place of passionate anger, deep sadness, are clearly moved by something that’s happening in the world and are making a statement or plea from that depth - that we are to take ourselves away, work through those emotions FIRST - then come back when we’re all put together. When we’re not longer ‘triggered’ or triggering. When we can be fully neutral and non-offensive to all who may listen.

I personally believe this is a childlike way of trying to control emotions. I personally believe that again, it’s true that to express immature emotional states in an immature way usually leads to more chaos and damage. When we don’t have the requisite self awareness and self control, we CAN and often WILL BE overtaken by impulse, instinct and conditioning in our emotional states - and this is rarely helpful or productive.

AND.

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More next week.

<3