When I was very young, I learned that there are good emotions (loyal obedience, approval of authority figures) and bad emotions (anger, sadness, simply feeling down) and that I had to avoid expressing the latter.
That trains in incredibly unhealthy emotional reflexes. Before I have even properly felt what comes naturally, I have begun a frantic plan to behave the right way externally. So, for example, if I feel fear, even before I have fully felt it I am feeling guilt and shame about feeling the wrong feeling. Perhaps most oddly of all, when the underlying emotion is already more than I can handle, somehow the extra guilt and shame can be even stronger.
I have put years of effort into breaking that long-trained instinct to rapidly interrogate and suppress ‘wrong’ feelings. It has taken literally years of practice to simply be able to feel and identify my original feelings, holding back the impulse to jump immediately from feeling their beginnings to implementing an instantaneous response plan. Despite all this work, I struggle with a sense that all strong feelings are suspect or somehow the wrong ones, or that they are something that I can and should change. The ideas that emotions are good and bad and that they are controllable are both massively, tragically wrong but they are near-impossible to fully extract from yourself after being programmed in during childhood years.
That whole effortful process of questioning childhood training is a third layer. I don’t just feel my natural emotions with the destructive programming now removed. Instead, I feel the emotions that I have grown so much better at naming and teasing apart. Then I can’t help but feel the training from early childhood to never express the wrong ones, and to feel awful if I do or even for feeling those things in the first place. Then I have to go through all the memory and knowledge and experience about how damaging and inappropriate that training is, remember that emotions are a natural internal phenomenon not appropriately subject to the judgment and control of others, and work on experiencing emotions in a healthy way instead of through dismissal or short-circuiting.
Two things I suspect about this process are that it will never be entirely done, and that progress toward a healthier relationship to my emotions can be knocked back and derailed through exposure to people who assume inappropriate and authoritarian control over them. I can’t keep the old obedient mode available in a box for use with the people who demand it. The only way to get healthier is to commit to the gradual and irreversible erosion of that old trained mode, without reversing or abandoning course for the sake of demanding others.
