(read time: 3 minutes)
If it seems like your therapist is trying to get you to cry, they probably are. Here’s why. The healthy expression of emotions (called “emoting”) is a vital aspect of both the overall healing process and of simply being a well-functioning person. But why?
We learn how to emote from our primary caregivers, it’s one of the most important ways caregivers impact a child’s development and future mental health. Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott became famous for coining the phrase “good enough mother,” which has been updated more recently to “good enough caregiver” for obvious reasons. The idea is that caregivers don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be “good enough.” The sad reality is that, despite our caregivers’ best intentions, they couldn’t teach us what they were never taught, so many of us never really learned how to emote. The result is that we are raised in a society full of people who are terrified of emoting, so it becomes something to be avoided, especially in professional and social settings where painful emoting is wholly unwelcome.
The consequences of being unable to emote are, well, devastating. That negative energy doesn’t just magically disappear because we actively suppress it or avoid it by doom-scrolling or bingeing shows. All it does is recede into the shadows where it is then permitted to do real dirty work with our subconscious emotional states and all the associated physiological reactions, such as the release of the stress hormone cortisol, which is very damaging. I have even come to believe that the inability to experience painful emotions in a healthy way is a heavy contributor to addiction. It seems that when doom-scrolling isn’t a powerful enough distraction from our pain, it’s time to roll out the big guns.
How arrogant of us to refuse to emote. Our bodies are highly evolved machines that have learned how to deal with the inevitable stresses of life, and healthy emotional reactions are critical processes that need to be permitted. It’s part of what it means to be human, so being unable to emote means being unable to fully experience one’s humanity. In effect, we are emotionally abandoning ourselves, as so many others have done to us.
In the short-term, healthy emoting allows us to release the pressure of stress, sadness, frustration, etc. While some aspects of healthy emoting are not pleasant, such as snot and tears dripping all over the place, the end result feels great. Doing so also allows us to respond to a difficult situation in a saner way because our mental processes are not being clouded by jammed up emotions.
In the long-term, healthy emoting creates space in a mind so that it can calm down and see things that need to be seen for growth to take place. This is why many people are first taught a form of meditation called “shamatha” which means “calm abiding.” The basic idea is that the mind needs to calm down or it’s never going to be able to see what it needs to see.
A book I often recommend to my clients is “Living Like You Mean It” by Dr. Ronald J. Frederick, PhD. Of course, some of us are a wee bit more jammed up, aka terrified of our emotions, than others. For those folks, maybe a session or two with a therapist would be of great benefit, as it can be easier to walk into that dark and scary room for the first time with someone at our side.
