Feeling Feelings: Surviving the holidays Part I of III
Dear Reader,
Connecting to emotions is a topic I’ve covered, Loss Letters experts have sharedabout, and will certainly come up again. Because I forget to feel my feelings and I bet you do too.
Here’s a reminder of our brain’s bilateral function:
The right hemisphere connects to our bodies for somatic or emotional experience. The right processes our environment and scans the big picture — it’s doing 97% of our mental processing. It’s running in the background, scanning faces, body language, atmosphere…making tons of micro decisions that inform our “gut reaction.”
You may recall the corpus callosum the nerve bundle that connects our hemispheres. McGilchrist’s work that shows the corpus callosum is getting weaker with evolution, meaning our hemispheres are less integrated than ever before. When we are in our right hemisphere we aren’t very engaged with our left and vice versa.
Our left hemisphere contains our language and goal-oriented focus. Our culture rewards left hemispheric behavior and we all lean into rationalizing and “thinking it over.” Here’s where we run into some trouble…the moment we start adding a story to a situation (languaging) we are cut off from our right hemisphere. Storytelling is neural disengagement from emotional experience.We can make globalizing (I’ll always…I’ll never…) or personalizing (why me?...) conclusions that are harmful and stop connecting to our somatic experience. These cognitive distortions work to confirm or conform the world around us to match our limiting views.
We lean on our left hemisphere to “figure it out” — we want a convenient story that answers “why?” Thinking represses the pain, grief or sadness we hope to avoid. Thinking is attempting to protect ourselves against getting hurt in the future. We develop conclusions that might sound like: I’m terrible, They’re terrible, Why does this always happen to me, I’ll always feel like this, I’ll never get better, I’ll never do that again… Not very helpful.
So, what can we do? Process! Feel the emotions. Be with the breath — feel it fill your belly or feel it at the tip of your nose. This is a connection to the somatic experience.
Here's what that looks like for me...
This week was a difficult one. I felt overwhelmed by fear and anxiety, I felt incredibly sad. This time of year brings up so much grief and loss over my parents’ deaths; it also brings up end of the year economic stress, seasonal shifts and omnipresent messages that I should be happy, joyful and buying stuff for people I love. The conflict of externals can make the grief feel even more isolating and devastating.
I forgot about my body. The fear voices got very very loud. First, I bought into it all. I globalized and personalized it and let my limiting beliefs reach all the way back into my past and all the way forward into my future. I am hopeless, I’ve always been untalented and unproductive, I’ll never have economic security, I’ll never “catch up,” I’ve never had an original idea, Why did this have to happen to me? Why am I the one who struggles with this stuff?… It turned every insecurity into an unproductive (and untrue!) conclusion. This fear mind state knows my weakness.
Then I tried to battle the voice with another voice. I do have secure relationships, friends who love and care about me, creative endeavors that challenge and fulfill me, I’m actively pursuing a career shift that will relieve economic stress…and on and on. Positive thinking is fine, but I was fighting left hemisphere with left hemisphere. I was desperately trying to “figure it out.” The brain’s negativity bias is incredibly strong and it will overpower my positive affirmations…
Next, I started adding stories — language turned my fear, anger, and grief into resentment. It’s an attempt to protect myself by coating one emotion in another less suitable one: sadness turns into self-pity and that self-pity gets deflected onto convenient targets.
It took my therapist, my Dharma teacher, and re-reading some journals to remember: the breath. To dial down that voice I needed to stop engaging in the battle. I’ve been spending the days since breathing slowly and smoothly, bringing awareness to the feeling at the tip of my nose, reconnecting with my body and my right hemisphere as soon as I start to feel that voice and that overwhelm. Emotions are messages from our bodies. If we can feel feelings, we can receive the message. Anger is telling us to set a boundary; grief is telling us to acknowledge a loss.
Today I woke up in fear
The moment I started the day my dark voice was waiting to yell at me. I sat in bed, set a timer for 10 minutes and just stayed with my breath (imperfectly). I tried to make a little space for the emotions to digest. All day long, I forget over and over and over. I kept returning to the dark place before coming back to the somatic experience.
with love,
Kiddo
Further reading...
If you’re interested in more about somatic marker hypothesis, read the work of Bechara and Damasio.
Iain McGilchrist’s talks on hemispheric theory are a great internet hole to fall into.
To hear more on this topic and try a guided meditation by Josh Korda listen here.
