26 November 2018
I have quite a few pet peeves. (OK, I admit it, more than a few.) The one I want to discuss with you today is the common practice of designating certain human experiences ‘negative emotions’. You know: feelings such as sadness, anger, frustration, fear, loneliness, disappointment, shame and regret.
As a health practitioner who also has a counselling background, I see a lot of people who are experiencing the harmful effects of judging, denying and suppressing these so-called ‘negative emotions’. It’s damaging to both body and soul, not to mention relationships with others.
On just one day last week, my client list included five women dealing with very different types of grief. One had never known her own mother, as her mother had died giving birth to her. The next was a woman barely out of her teens, whose friend had recently committed suicide. Then came a woman diagnosed with stage 4 (i.e. terminal) cancer. Next, a woman who had suffered repeated miscarriages as she attempted to conceive a much-desired second child, through IVF. And my last client was battling an autoimmune disease that has robbed her of income, freedom of movement, and the ability to participate in all the outdoorsy activities that she formerly enjoyed with her husband and young sons.
Did my clients have strong emotions about their life experiences? You betcha. Would I categorise these feelings as ‘negative emotions’? Not in a million years. They are totally appropriate and comprehensible reactions to the undeniable fact that sometimes – in fact, not infrequently – life can really suck.
But – and here’s the thing that has been recognised by poets, mystics and sages since time immemorial – it’s only by allowing yourself to fully enter into the suckiness that you can be fully alive to the possibility of joy, connection, fulfillment and all the other experiences that we typically think of as ‘positive emotions’.
I’m on a mission to expunge this damaging and inaccurate binary thinking about our emotional lives from my clients’ vocabulary, and to restore a sense of normalcy to experiencing the full range of human emotions, from transcendant joy to the blackest despair.
As the Romantic poet John Keats put it in “Ode on Melancholy”,
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
Or, in more everyday language, ya gotta take da good with da bad.
Throughout all of human history (and presumable, prehistory), emotions such as anger, fear, jealousy and regret have been accepted as normal aspects of human experience; and all of the many human cultures developed a range of practices to help people work through their emotions, from individual and group rituals, to meditation and prayer, to vigorous physical activity.
None of these traditional practices label the emotions they are intended to succour as ‘negative’. It is accepted as self-evident that when people lose a loved one, they will feel sad – and probably for a long time. When someone faces a great challenge, obviously they will experience at least some degree of trepidation and even fear about how they will fare. When someone’s rights are infringed, the natural response is anger. And when a person’s hopes are dashed, of course they will feel disappointed, and possibly resentful of others who were more successful.
Although these emotions can feel absolutely terrible, there’s nothing about them that’s inherently ‘negative’. They’re simply feedback – a form of information from within on our life experiences that spurs us to recalibrate our approach.
That’s why the memoir or biography of any truly great person – if it is remotely interesting or useful – is not a litany of their triumphs and unmitigated successes. Instead, it fearlessly probes their failures, miscalculations, betrayals, disappointments, regrets, moments of moral cowardice and dark nights of the soul, and how they learned vital lessons from these painful experiences that ultimately shaped them into better human beings who are actually worth reading about.
Yet in modern Westernised cultures, there’s a pervasive tendency to pathologise and medicalise emotional suffering, strip it of its meaning and inherent value as a spur to examine our lives and realign our daily choices with our priorities, expunge all of those nasty ‘negative emotions’ and replace them with a state of continual happiness and contentment.
In his dystopian novel Brave New World, published in 1932, the English novelist Aldous Huxley conceived of a drug called soma, which was provided for free by the government to all citizens to prevent them from feeling sadness, worry, anger or any other emotions that threatened the individual’s sense of well being and, by extension, the social order.
Prescient as always, Huxley foresaw a time when these normal human experiences, which are often the catalysts for necessary change – the dissatisfaction which forces a couple to admit that their marriage is dead and divorce is the best option for all; the resentment which finally drives an overworked and underappreciated employee to quit her job and seek a better one; the righteous indignation that drives an exploited and oppressed minority to rise up and demand social justice – would be interpreted as bad, mad or dangerous and drugged into submission.
‘Mother’s little helper’ – benzodiazepines, like Valium – were prescribed to women who chafed against the boredom and constrained choices that characterised 1960s housewifedom; Prozac, the first of many selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants, promised that it could make us feel ‘better than well’.
But to those who wish to be happy all the time, all I can say is, “Good luck with that”. When we attempt to bypass the valley of the shadow and instead head straight to the mountaintop, we miss vital developmental experiences that develop our empathy, compassion and wisdom – and paradoxically, our capacity for happiness. To be fully realised humans, we need to experience the full range of human emotions.
If you’re experiencing painful emotions, you don’t need to ‘think positive’ or ‘raise your emotional vibration’. If you’re trying to help someone who is experiencing a dark night of the soul, please don’t try to cheer them up by reminding them of all the good things they have in their lives. Suffering needs to be heard and honoured, and never compared to that of others who ‘have it worse’.
What did I say to the woman whose mother had died while birthing her? I shared what a friend told me when my father died: “You will never get over it, but you will get used to it.” She cried, and then told me how helpful it was to simply have her emotions validated, and to know that she didn’t have to ‘get over it’ – she could coexist with her grief, and know that she was OK anyway.
What about the young woman whose friend committed suicide? I told her that she, and everyone who knew the young man, would mourn him, cry buckets of tears, be angry at him and at themselves, rehash every conversation they had with him in the months leading up to his death in an attempt to find signs of his distress that they had missed, wonder how they could possibly have stopped him from taking his own life, blame others, question how the sun could keep shining and life could go on without him… and eventually put their lives back together in his absence. It’s called grief, and there’s no way out of it but through it.
And the woman with cancer? I held the space while she cried out her pain, fear, guilt for the impact of her illness on her loved ones, and intense weariness from the years-long battle with her relentless disease.
Likewise, I encouraged the women struggling with infertility and autoimmune disease to give voice to their emotional pain – to plumb its depths and explore its darkest corners.
And I did Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT, or ‘tapping’) with each one. We talked and tapped, tapped and talked. Not to ‘tap away’ or ‘get rid of’ the emotions, but to honour them, experience them fully, and allow them to work their transformative magic on the psyche of each suffering human that I encountered that day.
So here’s my request to you: next time you find yourself labelling your own, or anyone else’s, anger, sadness, regret, despair, fear or resentment as a ‘negative emotion’, and trying to evade it (for example by eating, drinking alcohol, or mindlessly shopping, watching TV or checking your Instagram feed), just hit the pause button and ask yourself, “What information is this emotion conveying to me? What is it asking me to pay attention to? What is it calling on me to acknowledge, challenge or change? How might I grow if I really let myself experience it?”
There really is no such thing as a ‘negative emotion’. There is just feedback… and if you accept it wisely, it can transform your life for the better.
Leave A Response