Expressing Emotions
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How many emotions can you name?
It’s an interesting exercise - give yourself 3 minutes and list off as many emotions as you can think of - write them down. I came up with 20 before I started repeating myself - only 20! Brene Brown surveyed 7000 people and they averaged 3 emotions (anger, sadness, joy). I find this so hard to believe and yet it makes sense based upon the dysfunction I see in our society today and my inability to list a significant number of emotions..
Emotions can be complex and as beautiful as a dandelion about to go to seed. (EXIF data f3.5, 1/2500s, 35mm, ISO200)
As humans we are not particularly good at naming emotions let alone expressing them - I most certainly am not. Some cultures are even less proficient at openly expressing emotions than others. I have spoken in the past of how I come from a family that did not encourage openly showing feelings especially “bad” feelings such as sorrow, grief, frustration, etc. - you get the gist. This actually made it quite confusing for me to understand and name what I was feeling. I really appreciate that many children today are taught to verbalize what is going on for them and use words to name what they are feeling.
I also tend to tag emotions as negative or positive (good or bad) as though some are ok and should be embraced and expressed while others are to be hidden from public view. In general those “bad” emotions that I listed above fall into the category of difficult emotions to openly express and work through. Labeling emotions as good or bad makes it so difficult to process and move through different emotional experiences because a level of judgment is introduced which can inhibit the flow of emotional energy - it can get stuck.
The life cycle of emotions
I have been reading a book that I think is much more interesting and deep than the title implies - 90 Seconds to a Life you Love by Joan Rosenberg. She talks about the fleeting duration of emotions and that in fact unless you are hanging onto a feeling that their natural duration is about 90 seconds. She talks about riding the wave of emotions and especially difficult emotions and that they will move through us in a minute and a half if we are open to really feeling them.
This sort of blew me away as I find that many “difficult” emotions such as anger, grief and sadness tend to linger for much longer periods of time. The thought that I am hanging onto them and it is not some emotional cloud that hangs over me was something I wanted to dig into.
My go to fear is that feelings are a bit of a pandora’s box and once open these big scary feelings (especially overwhelming feelings like grief) come flooding out and my anxiety is that these feelings will take over and overwhelm my life. I’m concerned that I’ll be thrown into an abyss of dark emotions that I can’t climb back out of. (ok I can get very fanciful in my imagination)
For me the biggest emotional fear is around grief. It feels huge and overwhelming and endless - as a result I have spent a great deal of my life trying to avoid it. To me grief is about loss - loss of self, loss of something you want or need, or loss of someone. I feel it is about this hole that is now in my life that I desperately want to fill - or make sense of - or make go away. I have a very difficult relationship with loss and grief - in fact I’ve been trying to outrun it my whole life - it hasn’t worked well at all.
Emotions have limited lifespans like melting ice on a beach. (EXIF data f10, 1/20s, 65mm, ISO500)
I have lost four significant family members in my life - two sisters and both of my parents. I did not allow myself to grieve for my sisters as I was quite young (I was 6 months and 14 years old) at the time of their deaths, but I also didn’t know how to process these heartbreaking events as no one taught me. I come from a long line of emotion avoiders and non-questioners (I wrote about it here - Curiosity). Seriously, I don’t know if my parents were ever taught how to process grief and I can’t honestly imagine what it might feel like to lose two daughters before either reached adulthood.
My recollection of those times was that we all pretended that life went on and we held onto our grief privately - burying it - not sharing it with each other or allowing anyone in to support us or offer comfort. As a result I feel like I was stuck in that state of incomplete feeling for decades. That unprocessed grief became part of my shadow self (the part I orphaned and didn’t want to own - I wrote about it here) - and it would erupt quite unexpectedly becoming more and more difficult to shove back into the Pandora’s box.
Processing Difficult Emotions
Sitting with grief and pain and feeling it …. well it is uncomfortable - it feels never ending - bottomless and I understand why I have tried to avoid it. However that avoidance has not made the feelings disappear and in fact has held me frozen in a sort of emotional time warp.
When my mother died back in 2012 I was in a much different place in my life and I grieved - I felt the pain and I allowed my family and my friends in to help me and show me how to process these big difficult emotions. Maybe because I had seen my mother’s death coming for a long time (Mary blog post) the grief was different, but no less deep and important to experience and work through. I remember journaling a lot during this time.
When my father died 6 months later and very unexpectedly - it shattered my world - I remember getting the call from my brother, but don’t remember many details. I was very close to my dad and we had formed an even deeper and more honest bond since my mum’s illness - long raw talks about life and our family - how precious and fleeting love and relationships can be.
It felt like a void had been created in my life - something I would never be able to crawl out of - I grieved for my dad and for myself. For all of the loss and the things that we would never be able to share. Mostly I grieved for myself and what I had lost. By sitting with these difficult emotions and allowing this time of pain - I found that I underwent a transformation of sorts.
Grief leaves us scarred and marked which fades, but still remains unlike these tidal water marks on the sand. (EXIF data f4.5, 1/160, 24mm, ISO100)
Interestingly, I recently listened to someone talk about how we as a culture have an expectation of not experiencing pain or suffering - that if we do experience these feelings then there is something wrong or there is something to be fixed. The speaker then went on to say that by sitting with these feelings and leaning into them, sharing them and allowing others in we emerge a different person - growth occurs and I definitely felt that in my parents’ passing.
The experience with my sisters’ deaths was much different - not processing the emotions created a hard shell to form around me whereas grieving the loss of my parents cracked that shell and I emerged a different person - more able to express my feelings and make sense of what was going on - more in touch with my need for connection and more willing to let other people in to help me.
When grief rings: Surrender. There is nothing else to do. The delivery is utter transformation. (Glennon Doyle, Untaming)
Moving on
Brené Brown states that something has to die for you to move forward through grief. By that she means expectations, a relationship, a person, or something you long for needs to cease to exist in its current form. All of these situations require you to let go before you can move on.
Letting go allows something beautiful to emerge like this wild orchid. (EXIF data f11, 1/40, 84mm, ISO160)
It took me a while to understand what she meant when I thought of grieving around an expectation or something that I longed for and then one day I got it. I have a habit of wanting to be right and actually hanging on and really digging in my heels with an expectation of getting an apology or admission of wrong doing. It never goes well for me and I often end up in a stalemate with Kory as he wonders what is going on. As soon as I let go of that expectation of being acknowledged as being right - I mean what does it matter in the grand scheme of my life? The death of that expectation suddenly opens up this space of compassion and connection - it is a wondrous transformation.
I use journaling to process emotions and I use my photography in a similar way - being in touch with how I feel inside and expressing those feelings through words or images allows me to sit with difficult emotions and feel them flow through me. I am able to make sense of the emotions and in the end I have also created something that captures those feelings and evokes a memory in me when I revisit them.
Feeling all the feels
Well this is another blog post that didn’t quite unfold the way I expected, but it seems like sometimes my thoughts and words take me on the path that I need to go.
I am in such a better place in my life when I allow all the feelings to flow and I’ve also learned that I have control of when and how I open that Pandora’s box - I also have control of closing it too. Those big difficult emotions only overwhelm me when I let go of being present and I become a bystander in my life.
In the end, life seems too short to me to not feel all the feelings.
Are you an expressive person or have you had to find ways of figuring out these big feelings in your life? I’d love to hear from you in the comments or reach out to me directly by clicking on the Connect With Me button.
Savannah Sparrow singing his heart out - makes me feel so joyful. (EXIF data f5.6, 1/1600s, 400mm, ISO1400)
I hope you’ll come back soon, share a cuppa, relax and enjoy more of my musings.
