On Balance: Feeling and Processing

And Not Repressing Emotions

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash

I was thinking about the quote that I posted the other day from Dr. Danita Phillips, on anger.

The funny thing - when my father died and my brother died, I was not angry.

Many people were, other relatives, with them and their choices.

I was not. I didn’t feel that I had any right to be.

Because I knew they were extremely unwell: diseased, mentally ill.

It didn’t feel fair to them to be angry at them when they were so messed up.

And I also I felt like - aren’t I hypocritical if—in writing about the stigma of mental illness- if I don’t extend them grace? Because it wasn’t their fault - like I always say-

Would I be angry at them if they had cancer?

No, I would not.

So, likening mental illness to physical conditions-I intellectualized it.

And in doing so, I didn’t allow myself any degree of healthy anger.

I didn’t realize that I didn’t have to be angry AT them, but I was allowed to feel the anger at life, the situation.

I was allowed to grieve and mourn and feel how it affected me.

And I didn’t give myself that space and time to do so.

Instead, I powered on, as a hero, the child of an alcoholic.

After suicide number two, my body in a traumatized state of shock, I took to the bottle to calm to my anxieties and help me sleep. Insomnia had become a serious issue.

Abusing alcohol also helped me to further repress and stuff the feelings down.

Grief. Anger. Heart-brokenness.

All of it could be dulled with alcohol.

So, while I didn’t want to be bitter and resentful at them, I also didn’t allow myself any anger.

And because of it, now sober, I have to find better ways to process it, when it emerges.

It’s repressed emotion and I know now, that when I’m feeling it, it’s trying to teach me something.

It wants to be moved through my body - that’s the very definition of emotion, at its root.

But many of us don’t do that -move our emotions.

Instead, we repress - and we end up with a myriad of conditions - not just substance abuse, but inflammation, upset bowels and stomachs and a whole slew of auto-immune disorders: Lupus, Hashimoto’s, Fibromyalgia, psoriasis, Crohn’s, Graves’ disease, MS, and a whole list of other ones that Meta will list for you - some I’ve never heard of and can’t even pronounce.

Humans are feeling beings. We are meant to feel. We’re not supposed to become our feelings nor repress them; they need not take over our lives. But we are meant to move them through our bodies.

Now, I’m a very sensitive, feeling, Cancer. My feelings are big and deep and wide. They often feel all-encompassing: I’ve had ex-partners and friends and classmates all throughout my life comment on how - “you feel things very deeply.”

(Sometimes it was meant as: ‘too deeply’.)

To be quite frank, where my family’s deaths were concerned and suicide flood, I was scared of my feelings. I was scared not by the anger but by the enormity of the grief and how heart-wrenching my family’s stories were.

So I put up a road block for several years.

I think it was also directly related to how —for years as a teenager, I was angry at my father and his verbal abuse, his alcoholism and selfish choices, how they affected us as a family. Especially defensive of my mother.

My mother worried about this, my bitterness and resentment of my father.

She once told me, after I graduated high school but before I started college—

I’m worried the resentment you hold toward him will affect you long after he’s gone.

I don’t know if that is what halted me or just some time and space away from him, growing and maturity.

But in my 20’s and 30’s, up until my father’s death, I pitied him.

I truly felt sorry for him.

I had realized that my anger—was because—obviously—it felt more powerful than the sadness and heartbreak he had caused. I’m also aware that it was the [only] emotion he showed for the majority of his life.

At some point, I gravitated more towards my mother’s defense mechanism, which was - repress, bottle, shove down, numb.

She didn’t use alcohol - instead, an endless stream of pepsis and constantly inhaling cigarettes, and other modes of repression. And she too ended up with psoriasis, and trauma, and I believe fibromyalgia, as she talked about chronic pain in her later years - often times being unable to ascertain what was physical and what was mental pain, as she often said they bled into one another, for her.

Her methods were the silent treatment, to address her anger, at the injustice of her life.

These days, I no longer repress. I am not bitter or resentful toward my family members.

I feel a great deal of pity for them and sorrow for their life choices and their demises. I grieve for the lives they could have had and the help that they could have gotten to live longer and happier, healthier lives.

But in doing so, in giving them all that space, I neglected my own -

As I told my most recent therapist -

“I guess…I’m the only one still here. I guess I should allow myself to be angry…”

And, to accept, that it all does feel quite unfair. It feels incredibly Unjust. Devastating.

It is. And I guess I get to be angry about that.

Bitterness and Resentment - by definition—is anger withheld. It is velcro-stuck to our souls.

But anger — I am learning a healthier form of anger - one that does not have to be repressed or all consuming - it need not take over my body and mind - but still, I am allowed to feel it -

It is still hard to understand where my anger ends and where my deep soul-sadness and grief and heartache begin. They are hopelessly knotted and intertwined.

But I guess, I need not analyze or try to parse them out.

I am allowed to feel both. To feel and process and move through it all.

Because - I have learned - that not feeling at all, is to a great disservice to your body and mind.

And it does have its reverberating effects, its grave consequences.