What to do with emotions
According to Greek mythology, the Greek gods were once ruled by the Titans. Tired of being under their authority, Zeus rebelled against them and buried them deep beneath the earth in a big pit called Tartarus hoping that they would no longer pose a threat to him. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Although the Titans were now out of sight they had not disappeared; they remained alive under the surface of the earth. Their rumblings from below were believed to be the cause of earthquakes and tidal waves in the world.
Sometimes we deal with painful feelings in the same way that Zeus attempted to deal with the Titans, we bury them in hopes that they will just go away.
As the story of Zeus and the Titans illustrates, the problem with this is that it doesn’t get rid of our unwanted emotion; it just avoids the reality of its presence for a time. Just like the Titans from Greek mythology, our buried emotions tend to remain alive within us waiting to be felt and expressed.
Having such unprocessed emotion places us at risk of the emotion leaking out in ways we don’t intend for it to. Sometimes a person may yell at their spouse when they are actually angry at our boss. Or a person might have severe panic attacks every time they see a certain object because it triggers a flood of emotions that they have not processed yet. Or perhaps a person may experience depression around the same time every year due to unprocessed emotion connected to a tragedy that occurred in that season of the year. Whatever it is, that which gets repressed has a way of returning in disguised form.
Therapy is designed to be a safe space in the hopes that unprocessed emotions from our past are allowed to surface back to conscious awareness and be reflected upon. Each suppressed emotion has a story to tell. It has a message that it is trying to communicate. As each emotion surfaces our goal is to: name it, know it, and hold it.
When we give something a name, we tend to have dominion over it. In the Bible, God creates Adam and then commands him to name all the animals which were in the garden. God had created Adam to rule over His creation, and naming the animals was the first act in establishing dominion. When we give an emotion a name, we shed light on it so it’s not so mysterious and uncontrollable in our mind any more.
Once the emotion is named the next goal is to get to know it. Emotions are simply a response to life. When our needs are being met appropriately, we respond to that with positive emotion: joy, contentment, connection. When they are not getting met appropriately, we tend to respond with negative emotion: resentment, anger, rejection. Attempting to get to know painful emotions is an attempt at trying to understand what needs were going unmet at the time it originated.
The reward of naming and knowing an emotion is the hope of being able to hold it. We can accept the reality that we did feel a certain way; and we can choose to extend empathy to ourselves for having that reaction at the time. A person can say in their head, “I was feeing rejected, and I can understand why I was feeling that at the time”.
We are emotional creatures by nature. Having a fuller ranger of emotions, we allow ourselves to feel is part of becoming emotionally and mentally healthy. Sharing them with others is how we engage in more meaningful relationships with others.
There’s an old Swedish proverb that says:
“Shared joy is twice the joy, shared sorrow is half the sorrow”.
The goal with our emotions is to attempt to be as present with them as we can when they occur. To deny or avoid them is to exchange short term relief for long term discomfort. Our emotions can be known and felt; and to do so is to attempt to be more human.