Emotions – When you will get hit with the emotion stick!

‘Emotions’ is a topic that I remember was challenging for me as I approached by thirties. But now, I hear it and see it all the time and often this little bird pops in my brain and says, ‘oh yes I remember feeling this too and I have some understanding of exactly what you are saying’.

Looking back in my teens and twenties, I remember thinking that getting older meant a degree in ‘craziness’. There used to be all these older people around me with big feelings of anger, sadness and trauma and it used to make no sense to me at all as to why people struggled to deal with their emotions. Such intense feelings and people’s inability to cope with them often fascinated me and I used to think ‘that will never be me’ or ‘god shoot me now if I become like that’. And then it happened….. I hit late twenties, early thirties and it felt like I got hit with an “emotion stick”. I began to experience huge feelings and didn’t feel like I had the tools to manage them at times. And then as I watched and paid more attention, it was happening to all my friends around us, all my friends’ friend’s and my clients and I could see similar patterns emerging everywhere. After time I was able to recognise that having emotions is okay and that we all need to go through them to make it to the other side … whatever that looks like for you.

So with these with these big emotions comes another big word – REFLECTION. Some people have it and some people don’t. Some people can continue to grow, reflect, learn, challenge themselves and embrace mistakes and other people just can’t. Some people I have met can’t change at all. They have no reflective capacity, can’t deal with big emotions and stay stale (there are labelled and diagnosed mental health conditions that make it impossible for people to have reflection, but there are also people who just choose not to as well).

I have often thought my degree has saved me in some ways. When my big emotions came, they came like a tornado and everyone in my way had to watch out! I wonder whether I would have been carted off to the looney bin if I hadn’t have worked in the social welfare field??? Hmmmmm. I am sure my husband thought so many, many, many times. I have learnt that emotions aren’t there to be feared. As human beings it is really okay to have different emotions at different times and it is really okay to own it, label it and accept it. We have many emotions but is the feelings of guilt, anger, sadness and frustration that people seem to struggle with the most (makes sense, cause we all tend to be pretty good in dealing with joy and happiness). To be brutally honest I have learnt a lot from working with people. Their raw emotions and big intense feelings, how they deal with them and how some can move forward and how some are simply just stuck.

The thirty something years is an interesting stage and by pure default brings many emotions and life stages. In your teens, you focus on self, friends, experimenting with love and lust and finishing school. In your twenties many people have a partner, a career path, often people get married, perhaps buy your first house and even have children. Then comes your thirties and the word….. wait for it….. REFLECTION. Many start looking at their lives and thinking “is this it?” “is this who I am and what my life looks like?”. The tricky part is that you are young enough to start over (if that is what you feel you need to do) and young enough to see if the grass is greener elsewhere. Within my inner circle of my early thirties many of my friends had either left their partners, had affairs or had dreams of starting over. I still see and hear these sentiments every day and wander whether there should be a course on ”life circumstances” or an adult ‘top-up’ class that helps to define all this stuff and compartmentalise that it is all very normal. I think it is all very normal for people to start questioning their lives, their decisions and whether they need to do things differently. Reflection doesn’t always mean starting over. Reflection can mean looking how you respond to certain things or how you feel about certain things. And it is this time of self-reflection that brings with it the journey of big emotions. Repressed memories, feelings around childhood and just seeing the world differently.

Whilst people seem to experience life and circumstances in similar patterns, no two people are ever the same. Everyone’s thoughts and feelings are individual. Although people may have similar childhoods, their experience of their situation and how they felt about it are never the same. So I have learnt not to judge, not to comment negatively and just to listen. I work with people to talk about their feelings, their emotions and sit with them. Even if they are uncomfortable you can still sit with them and accept that you are an individual made up of many complex emotions that are just part of who you are. (there was recently a great kids movie called ‘Inside Out’, that depicted a story in a beautiful way of the need to have all emotions). Although sometimes the sea of emotions feels as though they are coming thick and fast, you can choose how you deal with them. Do you let those huge emotions swollen you up and feel helpless? Or can you decide to except that they exist learn from them?