Tending my own Heart

“My Christian formation did not prepare me to do anger or sadness well.”

This quote resonates deeply with me. I remember being taught that anger is a sin. I remember feeling sad, and being told that I “should be living in victory”. 

It wasn’t just in religious settings. Culturally, we have received very little modelling of how to be with uncomfortable emotions. The only emotions we usually get to see are expressions of completely dysregulated nervous systems, which often includes uncontrolled outbursts. So, as we were growing up, we learned to fear intense emotion.

The lack of healthy emotional modelling came with the subtext that if we’re feeling something uncomfortable or confusing, it’s because we’re defective. Emotional discomfort becomes entangled with shame, which makes it even heavier to bear. Our only recourse is to do whatever we can to numb it or stuff it into hiding.

One of the great gifts of the past decade of my life has been the companionship of people who have modelled for me what healthy emotional expression and processing looks like. Here are some of the lessons I’ve observed.

1. Emotional processing is hard work. It takes energy to be present to what I feel and to allow myself to simply feel it. The words sound easy. The practice is demanding.
2. Uncomfortable emotions often present with great intensity. Because I’m not used to feeling them, the intensity can feel overwhelming and terrifying. Experience has shown me that as I simply feel whatever I feel, without judgement, I grow in my tolerance for the discomfort.
3. Emotional processing is messy. While there can be guidelines for it, emotional work is not linear. it has its own timeline and its own pattern, neither of which are discernible by me in the moment.
4. Feelings are not meant to be fixed, only experienced. I don’t do the work of processing so that I can feel better (and I often forget this in the moment) but rather because attending to my emotions is necessary self care. The goal is not controlling how I feel, but rather learning to be a gentle companion to whatever feelings arise.
5. We are not meant to do this work alone. I am responsible for my own inner well being, but I am not meant to do it in isolation. Having trusted mentors and soul-friends with whom I can be my real, in-the-moment messy self is necessary.
6. The more I practice presence with my own feelings and experience, the more I grow the capacity to be with others in their heartache and struggle. 

Anger and fear are connected to our survival. Shame and grief have to do with our connectedness to our tribe. As a result, all of them often feel huge. They sweep in and take over our internal landscape. They’re not easily explained away.

When we’re taught to fear these emotions or to be ashamed of them, we lose connection to our real inner selves, and to what those emotions can tell us about who we are and what matters to us.

Anger is connected to our life-force. it is what motivates us to take action for our own wellbeing. It lets us know when something important to us is being threatened. It often gives us the energy we need to change that which no longer serves our wellbeing.

Fear is our signal that we’re facing the unknown. When it first shows up in our bodies, it feels like imminent danger. One of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is to attune ourselves to the real message of fear, which is that we just don’t know what’s ahead. As we companion this emotion with gentleness, we can then also feel the inner knowing that we have the capacity to meet whatever life brings us, no matter how difficult it might be. Our strength lies not in our knowing, or in our ability to control what happens, but in our ability to simply meet life as it is—which is rooted in our capacity to be with our own emotional experiences.

Shame is connected to our sense of worthiness. While I find it to be one of the “stickiest” emotions to work with, I have learned that meeting it often guides me back to my own value and remembering that I am loved simply because I exist.

Sadness and grief can show me what and who matters to me. Loss of that which I value, whether it’s a person, a life circumstance, or a deeply held belief, invites me to gentle companionship of my self, honouring the deep tenderness of the loss. As I allow grief to do its work in me, I experience greater depth in myself and greater capacity to be with my own experience.

These gifts from our emotions are valuable, but they’re not to be confused with simply experiencing what I feel. I don’t give attention to my feelings so that I can grow from them or learn from them. I give presence to my emotional experience simply because it is part of who I am. It is my expression of honour to myself.

As one of my mentors reminds us often, being human is hard. We are vulnerable creatures. We are affected by the experiences life brings us. There is no cure for this struggle. It is only meant to be honoured.

This is the gift that I offer each time I sit with someone in spiritual direction—my presence as as a safe space for them to be with whatever their feelings are and whatever their experience has been. We’re not trying to solve anything or make anything better. We’re just offering compassionate presence to the tenderness of being human.

What is your experience with emotions? Which one of the four I mentioned—anger, fear, grief and shame—do you find most difficult to be present to?