Monday, January 12, 2015

Feeling Your Feelings

I've been away from this blog for awhile. This is both good and bad. It's bad because I have things to say and I want to track my psychological and physical life in this space. It's good because the reason is that I've finally gotten back to writing a book I've been working on for nearly two years. During times of great stress, I've found that I can't write creatively, and this blog has been there as a way of dealing with some of the demons, both internally and externally.

There's a lot about a person that she may or may not put out there for public consumption because of the risks involved in such disclosure. I'm not afraid of being judged as I believe most judgement flows from the insecurities of the judge and has nothing to do with the person being evaluated. Mainly, I'm impatient with being misunderstood and the burden I place upon myself when it comes to how to make myself clearly known.

I mentioned in a previous post about a dream that I've had a series of revelations about life since coming to America and many of them have occurred in the past month. This burst of revelation follows a change in how I've been managing my emotional life. It's very difficult to explain because it is similar to telling someone who is blind what it is like to see or trying to explain with words what a food tastes like when no such food exists in the area that someone else lives in. Nonetheless, I can't track my life here unless I try and risk failure, and fail I likely will.

I read an article in the New York Times yesterday about grief and how the theory that there are stages has been very destructive to those who are dealing with grief. One of the reasons for this is that people feel that they have failed if their emotions aren't unfolding according to plan. One of the commenters on this article even said that she was told by her therapist that she was being indulgent by not getting over her feelings.

This therapist is not alone in her opinion that people should "get over" their issues and not feel the feelings that they do. Since I've been depressed for long periods of time, and I know how people's eyes avert or they start to fidget uncomfortably when the topic comes up. It's not unusual for someone to ask me how I am, and for me to look at them and smile when I say, "Terrible." I do this because of the conflicting impulses that I have in this situation. I want to be honest, but I also know that they really do not want me to be honest. So, I tell the truth and temper it with a social reaction that they may be comforted by. This ends up with them thinking that I'm kidding when I'm not.

One of the things that is clear to me since coming "home" has been the inability of people to tolerate emotions, particularly negative ones, in other people. This manifests in a multitude of ways including fidgety behavior, changing of the topic, minimizing of the weight of ones situation/feelings, denial of the right to possess such feelings, and recommending that one "chooses" how one feels. I've seen enough articles on how happiness is a choice linked to on Facebook to fill a terabyte drive.

The reason that people do this is not that they want you to be happy. That is what they tell themselves. They think that they're helping you stop wallowing, offering advice that will make you feel better, or trying to provide context that will modify your perspective. What they tell themselves is what they need to manage the cognitive dissonance they feel about pushing your needs away so that they won't have to endure the discomfort they feel when confronted with them. They can't bear your pain and want it to go away. They also want to be good people who "help" you. They reconcile this with rationalizations, but it comes down to not being able to tolerate feelings, especially strong or negative ones.

At one point, I reached a realization that we all do this internally as well as externally. We can't sit with other people's pain because we also refuse to sit with our own pain. How often have you told yourself to "get over it" or "I shouldn't feel this way" or "I'm being silly/sentimental/stupid" for feeling things. This sense that we should stop our feelings is no surprise because, if others tell us not to feel our feelings enough, we will learn to tell ourselves to stop feeling them as well.

The problem with censoring your feelings or telling yourself you're not entitled to them is that it creates stress. There is a rubber band effect that shoots back at you when you aren't looking. You might be angry, frustrated, antsy, etc. in situations that are relatively benign. You also then start inflicting your intolerance on others because their feelings dredge up what you're trying so hard to suppress. It creates a huge mess.

At one point, some time around Christmas, I decided to stop doing that to myself. My husband and I attended a re-enactment of the birth of Christ at a local church. During the performance, a woman sang hymns with the fullness of emotion that she felt. If you allowed it, you could see that she felt truly inspired by her faith. The state of her rapture, as reflected in her song, was powerful, and I felt it because I allowed myself to be there with her in that moment. I didn't try to distract myself by looking at a cell phone or yammering nonsense to my husband. I didn't look away at something else or pretend that this was just a performance with fake energy pushing the words out. I let myself be there with her and I cried, and I didn't try to hide how I felt from the other people there for fear that they'd witness me feeling some feelings and be embarrassed on my behalf.

That woman was followed by a young woman whose mother had died two years earlier (when she was 16) and she spoke passionately about how her faith and the church had sustained her. I cried when she spoke, too, as I was also "with" her in her passion and gratitude. It was a beautiful thing to be a part of the experience these people had. Their faith really brought them something meaningful. Even if their faith was not mine, I could fully inhabit and appreciate that.

Since that time, I've tried to stop pushing my feelings back and to engage with the world more fully on an emotional level. I walked to a memorial for veterans and instead of objectifying the experience, I inhabited the full emotional impact of it. Those names were people. Someone loved them very much and hurt horribly when they died. Their families remembered them and wanted them remembered. I was there with them in that memory and grief, and I cried as I walked around the memorial.

Being there with yourself and others emotionally is not an easy thing, but it has cleared some roadblocks for me in living life in America. In Japan, people were always suppressing feelings of all sorts, but, in America, they only suppress some of them. You can be mad, but you can't be sad. You can be happy, but you can't be passionately so. You can be smirky and skeptical, but you can't have the rapture of belief. There's a flood of emotion all around me, but most of it is inauthentic and transmuted into what can best be categorized as "aggressive" emotions (because those are "strong" and therefore "okay"). I shut myself off from a lot of things because of this, but mainly I lost any sense of connection to people in my efforts to objectify them for my own emotional safety.

I have had a sense of what can only be called "enlightenment" since I started this exercise in being fully present with people and experiences emotionally. I hesitate to use that word because it sounds lofty and oddly religious. However, not pushing back against my feelings when they come up has been liberating and has changed my dreams and my sense of how I navigate life. It's okay if I want to cry. It's okay if I'm feeling sad. It's okay if I'm incredibly happy because the phone rings and it's my husband who I've spoken to thousands of times yet he still makes me delighted when he calls. And if other people don't like those things, if they can't sit with them, that's their problem.

A Dream: January 12, 2015

Context: I have had recurring dreams since returning to America about either going back to the job I held there for the longest time (12 years) or simply returning there to live and work again. In each of these dreams, the situation has always been fairly chaotic in that there was a good deal to accomplish before leaving and the deadline for departure was very, very soon. Often, there were enormous amounts of items (clothes, furniture, sundry possessions) strewn chaotically about the room I had to clear and I felt considerable stress and panic at having to try and sort through everything before the deadline. This dream, or ones like it, have occurred at least four times previously.

The Dream: I was talking to my former boss, Darryl, about coming back to work at the company and I told him after he said he'd give me my old job that I loved him. This was an expression of platonic affection, not romantic. (Note: Recently, Darryl "came out" to me on Facebook after having known me since around 1991. When he told me that he was gay, but felt bad that he had never told me, I told him that I had known all along (and I had), but I loved him all the same.)

Unlike previous dreams in which I had been planning to go back to my old job or Japan in which I had to sort through tremendous, seemingly insurmountable piles of stuff in order to go, I was in a relatively clear room and there was a small pile of clothes and a few other items that could easily be picked up and put into a single suitcase.

Analysis: I think that returning to my former job/Japan are metaphors for finding peace of mind or adjustment to life in America. The enormous clutter that I perceived in former dreams was all of the psychological baggage between me and feeling okay about being back in America. Recently, I've had some revelatory experiences (more on that in a future post when I have the time as it is complex) here that have helped me progress to a state of greater understanding and peace. While I still cannot say that I am "happy" here, I can say that I'm moving closer to at least not fighting back so hard.

Interpretation confidence scale rating: Since this was a progression of a dream that I've had so many times and that started with my life in America, it feels very much that this is an indication of some psychological progress. 9.5 out of 10