FEELINGS and EMOTIONS
I have been thinking and reflecting a lot lately on this phrase; “emotional regulation” and wondering is this just psychology speak for emotional control or suppression? In actual fact it brings up a feeling in me, anger! The reason I feel anger when this phrase is used and it is used a lot in the mental health care, is that we are not socialised to understand our feelings and emotions. No one taught me about feelings and emotions when I was a child or a teenager. Not my family, not my school. Even the dictionary can’t decided what the definition of a feeling or an emotion is if you look these words up. A feeling is a physical sensation and an emotion is how we express this. Is that the reality?
Try looking at the dictionary definition and you too will be confused. So if no one teaches us about our feelings and emotions as a child and more importantly as an adolescent when so much is going on in our physiological development and our brain development then we get to adulthood and someone says control your feelings or regulate yourself then how do we do this? We first need to understand ourselves and our feelings surely? In fact we live in a society, mostly dominated by the Anglo-Saxon way of being which is to not express feelings and emotions because we are ashamed or fearful. Think of the last time you felt like crying did it feel uncomfortable? Did you stop yourself, especially if you were in public? What about anger do you hold onto that feelings and push it down into your body?
I recently read an article about Kathleen Folbigg, the woman and mother who was convicted without real evidence, of killing her four children and spent 20 years in prison. The article which was interviewing the young lawyer who finally had her case reviewed and her sentence quashed, says she was convicted based on her diary entries. Guess what her diary entries were about, her feelings and emotions about being a mother, an isolated and traumatised mother. Kathleen has severe trauma from the experience of having her mother murdered by her husband. She was bought up in a foster family where she was told to not express her feelings because feelings had consequences. And guess what when she did later express her feelings and overwhelm about being a mother in her private journals, which her husband gave to the police, she was wrongly convicted based on her expression of her feelings which she did in private writing. Kathleen I am assuming grew up with family violence so expressions of anger were scary to the point of dangerous and then when she experienced the biggest grief a child could ever experience, losing her mother and her father, she was told to not express those feelings. Then again in prison when she was told that her appeal had failed in 2019 she says that it was the first time she cried but then stopped her self because “being out of control is a bad place to be because you’ll end up in a safety cell” in prison. Even expressing her sadness and deep grief again was not acceptable or allowed. In court and to the public Kathleen was judged as guilty because she didn’t express any feelings! We want to talk about emotional regulation in therapy but what about emotional expression? Is this allowed? I also grew up with family violence and learnt that anger was unpredictable, overwhelming and dangerous. People in our small country town who all knew about our family didn’t ask me how I was feeling, even though they knew I lived in fear. I learnt to push them all my feelings down, fear, anger, sadness grief and as a consequence have had to work hard to understand myself and particularly my self hatred and shame. This has been my life’s work and will continue till I die probably. I have deep empathy and a strong desire to listen to all feelings and emotions. They tell us so much, I want to be always curious about what feelings and emotions are telling us. Working with body held emotions and trauma is what helped me and now I truly want to bring that work to others. Come sit with me, I want to hear you, all of you. So next time someone tells you to control your feelings ask them what they actually mean.