“ANGRY THAT I’M SAD” — AND OTHER EMOTIONS ABOUT EMOTIONS

I come from a generation that has an almost ubiquitous desire to “be present.” This phrase has so many different definitions, but the one I’ve found helpful for my own life is this: to have as little emotional, mental, and physical barrier between me and the present reality in which I currently find myself. A lot of times it feels like I’ve got this translucent gray wall between what’s around me and what’s in me, as though I am a spectator in my own life. It’s pretty frustrating honestly, and I wish I could flip it off like a switch. There are probably a few possible explanations for why this is (past trauma, overwhelming experiences, and/or sometimes I’m just tired), but one explanation friends and I have been exploring lately is the idea that we often have emotions about our emotions.

Sometimes raw emotions are hard and confusing. And often, without thinking about it, we mask these raw emotions with additional layers of emotion to hold back the (usually painful) power of our raw emotions. Before we know it, we could have layers and layers of emotions covering up one another because there was a powerful emotion that we weren’t able or didn’t know to approach and be honest with. How about some examples?

Have you ever been angry that you’re sad? I know I have. Anger is a much easier emotion for me to feel than sadness, because sadness is admitting my powerlessness over a situation, and I don’t like that. So instead of approaching my sadness with compassion, I approach it with the productive feeling of anger. This usually leads to me being unnecessarily angry with those around me, with myself, with God, and enjoying my life a whole lot less. I sit in unproductive anger while my body is actually asking me to sit in the healing of sadness.

Sometimes I get confused that I’m insecure. I see someone else who I feel like I don’t measure up to, and I can’t quite pin why. So instead of approaching my insecurity with kindness and affirmation, I approach this imposter confusion and try to solve what exactly is making me insecure through measures of comparison to someone else, which only leads to more insecurity. This whole situation could’ve been cut off at the root if I had only stopped to feel and speak to the insecurity in me.

How about being ashamed that you’re happy? This one’s complicated. It usually stems from the expectations we’ve imposed on ourselves about what should make us happy and sad. If something difficult has happened to or around us, we can feel like we shouldn’t be allowed to be happy about anything for a while. Then all of a sudden some small pleasure (a good meal, a laugh with friends, a sunny day) brings us to the familiar shores of happiness and we feel like we don’t belong. Shame rises up and says something like “you monster. Only somebody as sick as you could feel happy right now. Don’t you see the suffering happening in the world?” Before long, we’re sitting in unnecessary feelings of shame instead of accepting our body’s gentle invitation to delight. What that voice doesn’t know is that delight doesn’t negate or invalidate pain.

I think you get the point. And sometimes these emotions aren’t only two-layered, they can be three, four, or even five-layered until all we can feel is this dull numb pressure in our being that doesn’t know what to feel, or honestly doesn’t feel anything at all. I heard somebody say once that numbness is not “feeling nothing,” but rather it’s feeling too much and not knowing what to do about it. And this numbness, this gray translucent wall, is usually what stands between me and reality. These emotions about my emotions take me out of the current moment and into an unhealthy place that feels safer or at least easier to control. Instead of feeling what the current moment has inspired me to feel, I pass judgments of anger, shame, and confusion onto myself in an effort to feel safe. But if I am going to “be present,” I must learn to approach with honesty the emotions of the present. 

The same person once told me that mindfulness (another buzz word we all wish we had) is to be in the present non-judgmentally. In this reflection, I’m reminded that no “first-level-feeling” is wrong and that there is no feeling I can have which deserves immediate judgment or condemnation. We all deserve understanding, even from ourselves. Have you ever told a friend that you were angry about their sadness and you wished they just weren’t sad anymore and did that go well for you? Probably not. It probably caused some kind of rift in the relationship. The same is true within yourself. Disintegration is what happens when we don’t accept and give space to all parts of our complex internal world. And disintegration is one of the fastest ways for you to lose sight of reality and who you are in it (presence).

This takes courage, as I’m learning. It is not easy and usually not fun to accept the feelings that happen inside of us on any given day, but it is the path to the integration we all so ache for in our lives. I trust that as we walk this road, we would find new levels of compassion for ourselves and for the world around us, that each and every moment we are invited to show up with honesty to the deepest inspirations in us, and in that, we may learn more of who we are, who were are not, and what we so long for in this passing life.