Truth in Feeling

Truth in Feeling

• October 6, 2009 – 6:26 pm
• Posted in An Aha Life By Laurie Hawley

Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth. (Benjamin Disraeli)

Many of us grow up believing that experiencing emotions, particularly deep painful emotions, is a sign of weakness or flaw. When we fell down on the playground and skinned our knees, our teachers said, “Big kids don’t cry.” If we were anxious about something, our parents told us to settle down. Expressing our anger subjected us to disapproving looks or even worse.  We didn’t dare express our fear. Doing so meant that our friends would taunt us with names like “Chicken” or “Scaredy Cat.” I remember my father nicknaming me Sarah Bernhardt. Whenever I was emotional, he would say “Now Sarah,” dismissing everything I was feeling at the time.

When we experience painful emotions, we have a tendency to think, “Something must be wrong with me.” Experiencing such emotions, however, is not only natural but healthy. According to positive psychologist, Tal Ben-Shahar, there are only two types of people who don’t experience deep painful emotions: psychotics and the dead.  If you can experience deep painful emotions – Congratulations! That’s good news.  

Because painful emotions are natural, we must give ourselves permission to experience them. In Tal Ben-Shahar’s words, we must give ourselves “permission to be human.” We pay a heavy price when we suppress our painful emotions; we jeopardize our mental and physical well-being.  We also will jeopardize our ability to experience positive emotions. When we suppress negative emotions, we inadvertently suppress positive emotions as well.

There is nothing wrong about feeling grief, anger, fear, anxiety, envy, jealousy…. Acting hurtfully or otherwise inappropriately based on these emotions may very well be wrong. Experiencing emotions is neither good nor bad. It just is. Rather than judging our emotions, it is important to accept them for what they are. They are an inevitable part of our human nature.

If we suppress painful emotions, they will fester and possibly lead to inappropriate behavior. According to Tal Ben-Shahar, people who suppress their anxiety are more likely to act cowardly. Similarly, people who suppress their anger or hate are more likely to behave in a hurtful manner.

The question isn’t whether it is good or bad to experience painful emotions. The question is “What do I do with these emotions?” or “How can I channel these emotions toward a positive end?” In the future when we experience painful emotions, we can help ourselves by being present in the experience and allowing the emotions to flow through us. The pain will not go away, but it will become manageable. We also can help ourselves by learning the lessons our experience has for us – lessons about faith, strength, empathy, kindness, and compassion.

In a branch of psychology known as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (“ACT”), practitioners refer to two types of pain – clean pain and dirty pain. Clean pain results from real events that cause us to suffer a loss or injury. The death of a loved one and a broken limb are examples of clean pain. Dirty pain results from our thoughts, or the story we tell ourselves, about the real events. The hurt I felt when my last relationship ended was clean pain. After I experienced this hurt, my mind busied itself with thoughts such as “I’m not lovable,” “I’ll always be alone,” “Why does this always happen to me?” and so on. These thoughts were dirty pain. The more I harbored these thoughts, the more I became trapped in an ugly story. 

Obviously, we don’t want to trap ourselves in dirty pain stories. This does not mean, however, that we should suppress our clean pain emotions or pretend that we are alright when we aren’t. It’s okay to admit that we are having a bad day. It’s okay to say that we hurt when our rheumatoid arthritis is acting up. It’s okay to be disappointed when we don’t get the job….

We are human beings, and painful emotions are a basic part of our nature. If we deny our emotions, we can’t be who we really are. In order to live authentically, we must give ourselves permission to be human.   

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