Emotions! I love Them! Let 'Em Out, That's What I Say! Down With Repression!

There’s the kind of miraculous aspect to searching for solution, or just wanting it.  Solution to anything that’s unsatisfactory.  Sometimes that's all I’ve been able to do – want it, I mean. I haven’t had a clue how to actively search for it.  But I didn't have to know that for solution to come to me, isn't that amazing?  In a world that's so driven by positive thinking and physical experience and the material, it's strange that this can happen but it does.  It’s happened over and over to me, in small ways and big ones, in purely material things and things more profound.

If you grew up in an environment where you didn’t see solution being reached –  among family or in your own life – you don't have a frame of reference for knowing how to go looking for what you need, or that solution even exists.  You absolutely cannot see it, even if it's right in front of your nose.  Often you don't even know how to define it.  Definitely you don't know you're allowed to have it.  I'm not talking about "knowing" intellectually.  I mean knowing in your heart and soul.

So when you find yourself in an unsatisfactory situation, you don't know how to get out, or that it's even possible.   But here's the kind of miracle: you don't need that knowledge at first.  Well I didn’t.  All I needed was the dissatisfaction with the not-enoughness of my experience and blind hope that there was something better for me.  I also needed to be willing to listen to my emotions of course, and accept the truth of them, not run from them.  They have always led me to what I've needed so that I could take the next step towards whatever else I needed.

Think about being in a bad job or a relationship that’s unfulfilling or worse.  We stay until we can't take it any more.  It's the discomfort of the emotion that motivates us to leave and find something better.  Tyrannies are overthrown when the people get angry enough to do something to protect themselves, and when they realize they have the right.  It’s all about feeling.

I love emotions, they carry so much thriving, bustling life.  They’re phenomenal tools for moving forward.  Think of the difference between feeling powerfully and getting a pep-talk.  The first will make you move and the second will make you debate.  Or resist.  Or get angry and move away from the pep-talker!  I’m always amazed that people think emotions are useless or damaging.  They’re just symptoms, that’s all.

It’s what we do with them – or don’t do – that’s damaging.  If we repress them we get depressed.  If we act them out and dump them on other people we cause hurt.  But those aren’t our only two options.  We can also express them in private and just let the fizz out.  You’re not hurting anybody.   In fact, the more you let out, the less you want to hurt in real time.

Well that's my take on it, anyway.  In fact let me get off my podium and just stick to my experience.  I hate podium-preachers, I always get red around the cheeks when I realize I've been one.  Ah well.  When I first started doing it - not podium-preaching, letting my emotions out! - I felt alternately very silly and unfeminine and just generally bad.  Not as in the fun of bad and likely to get into trouble.  Bad as in likely to go to hell.  Bit scary.

But as I got used to it I started having some fun with it, and as that happened the idea of hell kind of lost its hold on me.  It’s really satisfying for a start and I'm a sucker for pleasure, but also it’s about finding my voice, giving myself permission to be real.  That's no joke, it's pretty important to me.  Mind you, I come from a Catholic and very repressed, over-moralistic, fear-driven culture where everything that felt good was a crime or a sin.  Life in all its raw beauty was a sin.

That was never going to work for me for very long.  If I think about the difference between what it was like repressing everything – how dead and pinned down I felt inside, and fearful that anybody would see the truth of the boiling raging ferment within – and just letting it all out in a safe place, going as wild as I want to without hurting myself or anything or anybody –

It’s a no brainer.  Good or bad, right or wrong, I prefer doing life this way.  And my big argument is that evolutionarily speaking we don’t hold on to aspects of ourselves that we don’t need.  Well, much as we’ve repressed emotions and taught ourselves that they’re bad or useless, they haven’t gotten any weaker have they?  In fact they just get stronger.  It must mean something.  Or maybe I don't need a big argument.  Maybe it's just that I love the pleasure of feeling alive, and the rebel in me enjoys breaking all those Catholic rules!