Emotional Pain
I am writing this piece to clarify the misconception about emotions and give you the first step on how to begin acknowledging your emotional pain. This is my opinion on the state of the collective, emotional pain, and how we can all start healing as a collective. My opinion is based on years of readings, professional experience as a psychotherapist, and personal experience connecting with ancestral knowledge about emotions.
Our health and well-being depend upon our willingness to acknowledge emotional pain.
Let me be clear:
Health and well-being do not equal your weight, happiness, or worth. Health and well-being equals our ability to function as a society.
Acknowledging emotional pain does not equal living a painful life. Acknowledging emotional pain equals our ability to release it and evolve from it.
Emotional pain is everywhere, but most people choose to ignore, avoid, numb, or dismiss it because they do not understand it and most likely fear it. It's not your fault you don't understand emotions and hold fear around emotional pain. It’s not your fault you were taught to toughen up and swallow your pain as if emotions were something to be ashamed of. It’s not your fault you were never taught how to understand emotions. This lack of education has been a problem for centuries that continues to be passed down generation after generation. Denying education of any kind will only continue to devolve us.
Our society carries emotional pain that is centuries old and rarely acknowledged. This unacknowledged pain is accumulating in our bodies and is devolving us from intelligent, compassionate, loving beings to ignorant, apathetic, harmful ones. I am not saying this to hurt anyone, I am simply stating an observation. Our society is moving away from being intelligent, compassionate, and loving because we have lost our ability to recognize pain in ourselves. We are in a state of collective dissociation.
Unacknowledged emotional pain is slowly killing us physically, mentally, and spiritually. To learn more about this phenomenon, I highly recommend reading “The Myth of Normal” by Gabor Mate, MD. In his book, he shares decades of research showing how unacknowledged emotional pain leads to physical illness such as cancer, ALS, MS, and mental illnesses.
Is it too late to turn things around? Maybe for our generation it is. Too many people don't care about their own emotional health and care far less about others' emotional health. Too many people ridicule and belittle emotions. Too many people rather avoid the pain and numb their bodies. I get it. Emotional pain is still pain, and no one wants to feel pain.
But there is a misconception about emotions that can be clarified. I have hope that it will be clarified for the next generation and maybe even ours. The misconception is that emotions are also behaviors, thoughts, and stories. I have practiced as a psychotherapist for the past ten years (including my training days), which is not a lot compared to my white-cis-male counterparts. But I have debunked this misconception for people my entire career thus far:
When I ask people, “what are you feeling?”, or “how are you feeling?”, or “how does that make you feel?” The answer I get sounds something like this: “I feel like my mother doesn’t love me” or “I feel like I know what I should be doing but I don’t do it.” These answers do not contain any emotions, they are pure thought connected to some kind of story, which can cause even more pain than the emotion itself.
Emotions are not thoughts. Emotions are not behaviors. Emotions are not stories. Emotions are best described with a single word and a physical sensation because an emotion is simply energy that lives in your body.
Sad, hurt, angry, disgusted, frustrated, joy, and peace are some of the basic universal emotions all humans experience. Emotions are inevitably tied to thoughts and stories, but in order to acknowledge emotions all we need is our body, a vocabulary of emotions and sensations, and focused attention.
The next time you feel an emotion, identify one physical sensation tied to the emotion, not the thoughts or the story. Let it exist in your body and focus your attention on the shape of the sensation for as long as you can. To assist your attention, trace the shape of the sensation with your imagination over and over again. It may move, change, stay the same or disappear. Acknowledge it, follow it if it moves, let it move through you, and wait for the release. There is no need to attach a narrative to the emotion to acknowledge it and release it.
Learning to be with the physical sensations in your body is the first step to healing from emotional pain, and this takes practice– daily practice. Seeking guidance to facilitate this process is up to you– listen to your body.
The next step, if we are to truly heal as a society, is to acknowledge the pain we cause each other and dismantle the stories we’ve been given about ourselves and others.
