The phallacy of negative emotions
Your ability to feel emotions, to feel your body as it speaks to you, is a fucking gift
There are no negative emotions.
We can experience challenging emotions - such as sadness, grief, anger, shame and guilt - but the experience of feeling them is only negative if we choose to perceive it as such, and they only pose a significant challenge, if we either do not know to hold ourselves with grace alongside them, or, refuse to interact with them as they move through us - emotional bypassing.
Emotions are the language of our bodies - our sub-conscious, our intuition – and our bodies are incomprehensibly intelligent. Emotions are simply energy-in-motion; they are meant to come, tell us what we need to know, and then transmute, when they have served their purpose.
What challenging emotions communicate to us, is very important. For instance, guilt and shame can tell us when we have fallen out of alignment with our values, and have caused harm in some way – messed up. These emotions act as a form of relational awareness.*
Anger tells us where our boundaries have been crossed, or a sense of injustice has occurred. When we refuse to acknowledge or express anger, we fall into bitterness, passivity, and even reinforce a victim mentality. Unexpressed anger is actually toxic to our health – physically, mentally and spiritually – so anger needs to be expressed.
In its higher expression it is a call to action, an influx of energy to push back and defend* ourselves from that which seeks to hurt us; in its lower expression it can lead to an explosion of violence in situations unconnected to that which caused it in the first instance – we see this in acts of anti-immigration or domestic violence for instance. A reminder that anger does not equate to violence.
Contrary to how we speak on energy, it doesn’t just disappear – ever – it can only transmute and change form; it can rise in vibration, or lower in vibration; be rapid or slow; it has texture, colour, vibrancy. Working with emotion is an alchemic act. When we bypass, ignore and supress challenging emotions, they do not disappear because you tell them too, they sit and wait for us to pay attention to what they’re saying, because they have a mission. If you do not listen, they work their way through you till you do – stiff joints, tense muscles, gut issues, headaches etc – they will continue until you listen to them; it is in your interest to listen them.
Now, it’s common for us to falsely identify with emotions, and allow them to become a part of self. Please don’t identify with them, they’re not part of you, they’re merely passing through you. When we say ‘I am’ sad instead of ‘my body is holding’ sadness, or, ‘I can feel’ sadness, we are identifying with that emotion as being part of the ‘self’. This means that if we were to stop feeling that emotion - in this example, sadness - we would be loosing a part of ourselves, and that feels like a death, so we avoid it at all costs and hold onto sadness. This is why I’m not a fan of people saying ‘I’m a joyful, bubbly person’ – because what happens when joy fades (s it is meant to) and you feel sadness, or grief, or anger? Who are you then?
I used to tell my therapists that my sadness was ‘just my baseline’ - I was just a sad person. Sadness which is held onto becomes depression, we then label ourselves as a ‘depressed person’ and it melts into our identity. But when we know that we are just holding it, experiencing it, we know that eventually it will subside and we can choose to place it down, even if only for a break. We are not sadness, and you are not depressed, your body is holding a great deal of unprocessed sadness and grief and you are experiencing depression – it is not permanent if you choose for it not to be, you can heal.
And then there is grief, which is not only a possibility, but I would say an inevitable result of living life. All that we love we will eventually lose, and that fact does not need to limit how we participate in life or blunt our experience of being alive. When we feel grief more, we feel life more – it sharpens us to the sensations of love, of awe, of joy – so choosing to avoid grief is choosing to avoid life itself. I’m a firm believer that grief should be held as a dear friend, greeted with a hug, and offered a seat at the table with a cup of tea when it calls. When we tend to our grief with reverence, we open our capacity for loving more deeply – what is negative about that?
And I actually believe that all challenging emotions should be met with the same reverence – what if we did that, how much more beautiful and accepting would the world be?
Of course, we can only hold the emotions of others at the level we can hold our own. Emotional regulation is a skill which requires practice; our tolerance to hold ourselves around deep emotion effects how we are able to show up in spaces around other people. I would state that an aim of the healing path is for us to be able to acknowledge emotion as it surfaces, and hold without allowing it to derail us –it’s about how we listen and tend to them.
Many of us weren’t taught how to emotionally regulate – how to feel our emotions, listen to them, and still feel a sense of safety - and instead taught that our emotions would be punished or be in an unsafe position in some capacity if we expressed them; we were forced to supress our authentic expression as a requirment of safety, so it is no wonder that we do not hold capacity to express them as we become adults. This suppression in adult relationships can lead to interpersonal distress such as being unable to manage healthy conflict, fear, people pleasing, crossing our own boundaries, resentment and passive aggression etc.
When we numb challenging emotions, we numb our ability to feel good as well – I would assume that those who chase ecstasy through sex, drugs, violence, excitement deeply avoid their challenging emotions - this leaves us seeking more extreme ways to get the high that we, by birth rite, deserve to experience. We have a deeply innate ability to feel reverence, gratitude, joy, love, excitement and awe hardwired with us; we do not need drugs or psychedelic experiences to access this oneness with the universe, we all have the capacity to access this state of being within ourselves. My belief is that feeling challenging emotions is the gateway to this. As we equalise and rebalance ourselves to feel ourselves – all of ourselves – more deeply, we expand our capacity to feel everything that life in these bodies, on this planet, have to offer us.
When we begin to acknowledge and sit with our more challenging emotions, we begin to heal. We need to create a level of safety; gather the tools and skill for regulation; practice somatics; connect to our bodies in loving ways. We do not always need to mentally understand our emotions - talking therapy is not a one size fits all answer to mental distress – they may have nothing to do with the situation in front of you, and we do not need to remember what it was about - they can just be, and we can be with them, until they transform.
Phallic ideology would continue to have you believe that challenging emotions are ‘negative’, and should therefore be avoided at all costs - supressed and forgotten - because it serves patriarchal rule for that to be true. Emotions are the domain of the body, which is our feminine aspect, and therefore the suppression of emotion is part of the overarching suppression of the feminine. True of all bodies, no matter what labels you identify with, it is imperative that we should all embrace our emotionality.
The suppression of challenging emotions feed all major world crisis – including health and violence - it serves them for you to supress your grief, your disgust, your sadness at what is happening across the world, as they wish for you to be quiet, tame and non-responsive to their actions so they can continue to cause great harm; they wish for you to feel victimised and helpless, so that you do not do anything that challenges the status quo. It also serves them when untamed anger overflows – because we are easier to control and supress when we are at war with eachother, it misdirects our attention so well.
And here, as a final note, if you are a person who identifies with deep emotion, or perhaps being a ‘highly sensitive person’, know that there is no such thing as too emotional – do not allow other people to repress you – all emotions are fundamental, and your ability to feel emotions, to feel your body as it speaks to you, is a fucking gift. Embrace them.
Resources
There are many resources for this work, but for this piece I feel called to share that my teacher Jenny Florence has written a wonderful book called ‘mindfulness meets emotional awareness’ which is a supportive and practical guide to learning the language of the body, and how to express all emotions in a healthy way. You can find it here. Jenny also has a free online librabry of resources to support people as well, found here.
Notes
Sometimes we feel emotions such as guilt and shame for something which we were taught to supress as a child - like our deep, wild or queered sexuality, our energetic vibrancy or delightful weirdness - or perhaps we carry the shame of someone who has committed against us. Not all emotions (energy) are for us, they are given to us, thrown onto us, we absorb them from around us and hold them as our own. The task of shadow work is to learn to listen, and discern what is ours to express, and what is not. The serenity prayer is worth exploring here if this is something that you struggle to discern.
Language is important. I would like to call for a switch of language in our sympathetic nervous system response: fight to defend. Fight = an active engagement of attack in order for a winner/loser outcome, here you view the threat as an opponent. Defend = taking active measures to ensure your safety and survival, here you see the threat as something to deter, disengage and reduce to whatever level is required for your safety and survival. Life and death is not a sport, survival is the desired outcome.
