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Those Sticky, Weighty Feelings
Why is it that those bad experiences just won’t let go? You relive them, you remember the emotional impact, you tell yourself to just move on. After all, the event is over — why can’t the feelings be over as well?
The natural reaction to pain is to move away from it. You tell yourself it wasn’t that bad, it’s wrong to feel so angry, and you try to convice yourself to “just get over it.”
Unfortunately, this has the exact opposite effect. When you push the pain away and suppress your anger and frustration, it goes underground and starts nibbling away at your confidence, your ability to feel joy, and your relationships with others as well as with yourself.
You’ve probably noticed that it’s only the painful experiences that stick to you like this. Your good memories feel great to revisit, and they bring a warm sense of happiness with them. At the same time, they’re not as deep and immediate as the painful memories.
Why? Very simply, it’s because you completely experienced those happy moments. You allowed yourself to fully feel the joy — gladly, without self-consciousness, hesitation, or criticism.
The painful experiences, on the other hand, are to be gotten through as quickly as possible, moved away from, set aside.
So all that emotion is still sitting there, underground, waiting to be felt, waiting to be expressed. And it drags you down, like a weight on your shoulders or a ball-and-chain around your ankle.
Facing the feelings honestly, expressing them without judgment and with compassion, is the only way to free yourself from them, to put down the weight of them, and to stop being undermined by them.
Aside from the fact that most of us, reasonably enough, try to avoid pain, there are a number of reasons why people don’t want to face the feelings they’re dragging around. Here are three that my clients most often ask about.
I don’t want to wallow
Wallowing is when you allow yourself to be victimized by what happened and your feelings about it. Wallowing is much more about “poor me” than it is about an honest, forthright expression of what you feel. Wallowing is a search for sympathy, not for freedom.
When you face and express your feelings with honesty, simply acknowledging, “This is how it was for me, and this is how I feel,” it’s about letting those feelings out into the light of awareness. It’s not about getting anyone to apologize, to agree that you were ill-treated, or that you suffered. It’s about freedom — which is the polar opposite of wallowing.
It will overwhelm me
Fear is the main reason why people push difficult feelings aside. Those feelings seem overwhelming, like a tidal wave that might wash you away, cause you to do things that you’d later regret, or turn you into someone you don’t want to be.
As long as the feelings remain underground, lurking in the shadows, hiding in the corners, waiting to jump out at you, they’ll continue to feel threatening and overwhelming. Allowing yourself to turn and face the monster that’s chasing you isn’t about diving into the rapids again. Instead, it’s about compassionately observing how you feel, without judging yourself for what you feel or for the situation that caused the feelings. The monsters are a lot less threatening when you face them than when you’re imagining what they are as you run from them.
What good is it to relive the past?
Revisiting painful feelings may seem pointless — and if you’re cycling through old patterns of thought and belief, it is. If you’re analyzing what should have happened, what you might have done differently, or how others let you down, you’ll keep dragging the weight of those feelings around with you.
And that’s ok — until the day when it isn’t. Then you can look clear-eyed at the feelings instead of the various causes and circumstances around the feelings. When you do that, you’re not reliving the past. After all, as long as you’re dragging them around, those feelings are still with you here in the present. When you look at them, face them, and express them, they let go of you (instead of you letting go of them), and then they really do become part of your past, no longer weighing you down in the present.
Some tips to help
Because these feelings often seem overwhelming, here are a few pointers to help you face them.
First, don’t think about them. Analyzing them just keeps them at arm’s length. Don’t try to figure them out. Don’t even try to name them (“anger” or “sadness,” for instance). Just let them arise in you and watch what thoughts they trigger.
Second, don’t judge. All humans have feelings; there’s nothing inherently good or bad about any of them. One of my clients commented, “It should be as easy to cry as to laugh,” and she’s absolutely right. So don’t judge what you’re feeling, or the circumstances that caused the feeling.
Finally, write it down. Write how you feel, realistically and honestly, no matter how raw and painful it may seem. Writing lets these buried feelings out into awareness and out of the underground places inside you.
If you know someone you trust not to react in any way — not to respond with reasons, with pity, or even with sympathy, but just to stand purely as a compassionate witness for you — explain that that’s what you want, and show him or her what you’ve written. This witnessing process is a tremendously powerful part of my work with my clients.
Whether you show your writing to someone else or not, you’ll find that just having put your feelings on paper creates space and a sense of relief.
And that’s a big step towards true personal freedom.
“Feelings are like toes! They have to breathe free or they’ll stink to high heaven!” Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka, and Toshihiro Kawabata. (Google is unhelpful; these three may be Nintendo game designers, or they may be poets, or perhaps both. The quote was too perfect to pass up despite the unclear attribution.)
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