Getting Sane about Emotions
“If you don’t think your anxiety, depression, sadness and stress impact your physical health, think again. All of these emotions trigger chemical reactions in your body, which can lead to inflammation and a weakened immune system.”
While I posted something else somewhat like this not long ago, I think it bears repeating that we've been a bit culturally mesmerized by the idea of quick, easy solutions to life problems that deserve our full respect and attention. When we're in any kind of pain, it's so tempting to just silence that discomfort with a pill, a quick fix, a distraction, or by compartmentalizing around the pain. The sensations can be so frightening, and our mental habits so reactive, that we can't handle considering our options long enough to find a possible long-term solution. (I'm not saying that finding short-term relief is a bad thing at all, but using it as a way to numb out warning signals is maybe not the smartest thing to do over the long term.)
And after all, in the absence of good alternatives, this habit makes complete sense. Pain is no fun at all! It feels bad, it drains our energy and will and enthusiasm, it drops a roadblock in front of everything we want to be doing with our time, and we are certainly not taught any practical tools for dealing with it. Instead, we're often fed the line that pain and discomfort are just what it is to be human. Once you've got them, you better get used to them because you're not getting any younger, and you should just stop being such a whiney little baby about it! This attitude is a product of millennia of generations who had extremely limited life expectancy and little access to information about health and healing. The body/mind/spirit can often be astonishingly resilient, but solving any problem takes energy. We have to be willing to invest it. We also have to be willing to stubbornly hold to the belief that there may be solutions out there, even if they don't immediately present themselves. That takes mental discipline, which also takes energy to build.
I find that on the subject of emotional pain, we have very little guidance available, perhaps because emotions don't lend themselves to neat and tidy scientific study. In this article, we have an examination of the most common approach to addressing depression, specifically in the West. Unfortunately that approach tends to leave out much consideration of context, and tries to make an excess of any emotional state about a purely mechanistic chemical process. As a life coach, I find this particularly frustrating, because I find that no part of our lives exists as separate from the rest, and nothing is ever this simple. We tend to have all the same challenges/misconceptions around the other big, unpleasant human emotional experiences, including sadness, grief/loss, anxiety, fear, and anger. None of these exists in a vacuum, and there's usually at least some experiential reason for feeling them. For some, these experiences become more intense, but we can all recognize them as familiar; while the human experience is broad, it's not unique in its sensations. We all have all the basic emotions in common, and they all tend to be produced out of similar experiences. In my Tapping work with groups, I find that this realization actually tends to be quite reassuring for people. We often think we're much more isolated in our pain than we are, but it turns out that even in a small group, there will inevitably be a lot of crossover regarding what's on our minds. With honesty and the support of others, we can find ways forward that are a relief.
I do understand that everyone is unique, and bodies can sometimes malfunction such that someone has a tendency that needs constant intervention. I also know that it can be uncanny how when when we improve life situations that cause misery, physical symptoms can sometimes dramatically improve. Even finding ways to just release some stress and feel a bit better about something unpleasant that hasn't changed at all can help the body to inch toward healing itself. I hope that the way emotional difficulties are dealt with in the future evolves to include a broader, more wholistic approach that allows people more latitude to access multiple approaches. If each person could customize an overall plan that helped her/him to feel more supported and understood, I think our results would be drastically better. My contribution to being the change I wish to see in the world in this area has had to do with seeking out modalities that can gently bend a person's future toward greater balance, and sharing those publicly as best I can. If you feel so moved, I hope you'll do the same. The realm of emotions is one in which we drastically need improvements to become available as evidenced by the number of people acting out their pain with varying degrees of violence toward others. If we can normalize even the desire for people to find better long-term solutions, and start getting information out there about good work that's being done on such things, that will be the beginning of positive change.