Feeling emotions as they are
I reflected this week on a habit I have of using stories to stir up, intensify, and even manipulate my emotions. I’ve had a sense for quite some time that I do this, but I wasn’t able to put it into words.
For instance, every now and then I’ll get hooked on a song that makes me feel deeply. I’ll have the song on repeat, listening to it for days on end. As the song plays, I feel this intensity that makes me feel alive. It’s intoxicating, almost like a hit of a drug or the dopamine hit from receiving likes on social media. While feeling a song deeply is innocent enough, and honestly probably healthy, I use this same strategy when an event I see as negative happens in my life.
Too often, instead of feeling emotions after an event happens, I go quickly into story-making mode. I create a story around what I think is happening and use that story to intensify my feelings.
The story itself steamrolls my emotions. I use the story to avoid feeling, which can seem more intimidating — for example, fully letting myself feel sadness or disappointment.
Instead of letting emotions pass through, they get pushed down, or artificially intensified by the story. The event is what happened; the story is the commentary about what I think happened. The story is often far worse than the actual events.
Emotions are naturally occurring and helpful; stories are created, and can often warp our understanding of what actually happened.
When I stir up my emotions, I feel alive, stimulated, alert, and engaged. In a twisted way, it gives my life meaning and purpose. It gives me something to focus on, even if it’s distressing. It’s an addiction to emotional turbulence, and one that shows up frequently when navigating relationships.
In my romantic relationships, the same stories tend to get woven: I’m going to be left behind. I’m being abandoned, like always. Why did I get myself into this situation again? The difference between feeling an emotion, like sadness, and feeling emotions driven by a story are stark when they’re put side by side.
What I’m learning to do is truly feel the emotions at hand. To let them be present, heard, and run their course. This is what it looks like to honor my feelings and myself. It’s the opposite of trying to suppress or escape the emotion as soon as possible, which is what I use stories to do.
At some point, the emotions must be felt. I wonder if by not feeling my emotions, I’ve created gut problems that present themselves as IBS. There’s a lot of pent-up emotion in my body and if I’m not going to let emotions pass through, they will find a way to come to the surface.
Just yesterday, I experimented with feeling what I was feeling and it was eye-opening. For instance, sadness passed on much more quickly than I would have imagined. I acknowledge the sadness, felt it in my body, and it soon dissipated.
It was honestly shocking. When I use stories to intensify feelings of sadness, the sadness lingers for a long time — hours, sometimes even days. It can put me in a real funk.
This feels like a new beginning, a new path of emotional exploration. To finally let my emotions be present and do what they do best.