Feelings are too Feely

A very common statement: Emotions are messy.

An equally common statement: You're too sensitive.

I already understand the likelihood, Reader, that if you haven't heard both statements, you've at least heard one.

I would say this post is about emotional intelligence, but really it's about one component of emotional intelligence: understanding yourself and your own emotions. How your emotions interact with your environment and why. I am by no means an expert at this. Nobody is. Here, however, are my thoughts.

We are victims to our own insecurities and therefore others fall victim to our insecurities

Feelings are physically messy, yes. Feelings present themselves in snot-covered rags and sticky tears which have turned our cheeks raw red. Feelings are laugh lines and an urgently scheduled botox appointment. Feelings are grey hair and skinned fingertips from stress-peelers. Paint spatters. Calluses from guitar strings. Sweat in our palms. We see their effects on us in the physical world and, because we refuse to address them as they are in our personal little worlds, we label them as messy.

Feelings are inescapable. There's nothing we can do to avoid them, unless we fall "severe" under the psychopathic spectrum, and the more we try the more they seem to pent up within us. Doesn't it seem counterproductive, then, to call them "messy"?

Some of our deepest feelings come from our insecurities and expectations. We tend to think we're running away from undesirable circumstances while carrying our insecurities, when really we're running away from our insecurities which are the source of some of our most "destructive" emotions--in other words, emotions that appear "messy." However, it's those exact feelings that are trying to tell us something.

That something is important.

That something is what we instinctively want most--safety, security, love, recognition--all that jazz.

Let's look at physical pain. Physical pain is the brain's response to a physical injury of some kind. Physical pain tells us one of two things: "Get out of this dangerous situation," and, "If you don't tend to this injury you might die/get sick/get an infection/etc." A physical wound often becomes a scar when left untreated--especially when it isn't treated in a timely manner. Sometimes it becomes a scar regardless if it was treated well or not. Scar tissue, if it grows too heavy or heals awkwardly, can cause more damage to the surrounding areas of the wound in our bodies. I've known people who needed surgery just to remove pounds of scar tissue that had built up from another surgery. Our bodies mend themselves but not always so effectively.

Feelings are no different. 

When we feel sad, scared, anxious, angry, frustrated, helpless, or anything unpleasant, it's a signal for change. Change yourself or change your position within the environment so that you can achieve safety, security, love, and recognition. What happens, then, when feelings go ignored? They grow until they become scars.

Don't get me wrong--often times these emotional scars help us identify when we're being abused, neglected, or bullied again. They're important tools for us to avoid the pain and suffering we've already experienced. However, every strength overextended becomes a weakness, and our defenses as a result of conditioned feelings are no exception. We end up having the opposite results of what we most desire--safety, security, love, and recognition. We also cannot force our desires into a situation out of fear.

Example: Your mother neglects you for drugs, alcohol, sex--some kind of fixation. You don't receive the attention and care you deserve. You may even be abused. You begin to feel stressed out as a clueless, innocent child, and that stress becomes chronic--it becomes all you know. It becomes ingrained in you. You carry that stress into your interactions with other people, believing they might neglect you the way your mother did because your stress taught you to think that. You carry the scar of stress--trauma. You have some options: learn to protect and love yourself only for yourself and turn away any potential loving relationships among friends, family, and romantic partners, or become anxious in the way you interact with those people, constantly needing reassurance that they will not neglect you the way you were neglected. You, in turn, stress out the people you care about by either pushing them away or asking too much of them. You are not happy with either option.

Your emotional scars damage the surroundings areas of your life--especially your relationships. Emotional scar tissue.

If you, Reader, carry that stress with you everywhere you go, that's what you'll feel--stress and fear. Are you truly happy if stress and fear are constantly gnawing at you? Anxiety? This is why it's important to turn inward and address those feelings--especially if they're suppressed.

The pursuit of happiness is not one of materialism but of inner work and self-healing from our wounds.

Say it again.

When we don't heal ourselves we consume all our own energy and therefore ourselves in attempt to "quick-fix"

If you're not able to identify with this example, perhaps a more common one could help.

You were bullied. We all have been bullied at some point, right? Well you were bullied because you had funny teeth or short thumbs or you farted one time too many in a classroom full of apparent non-farters. Whatever you were bullied for, there are scars that developed over time as your peers continuously drove that stake into the wound with every comment.  It's not necessarily your fault--as children we are searching high and low for our role in the world and our social interactions are crucial to our development. We cannot help but care what people think--especially as children. We become victims to our own ideas of how we fit into the world. We develop feelings about who we are and who we think we should be and judge ourselves for not measuring up, and we carry those feelings into adulthood.

Those feelings are a survival response. The fight or flight. Leave them untreated without a pursuit of inner happiness and we develop scars in which we become scared of people based on assumptions that they'll bully us. Or neglect us. We become afraid of being bullied because somewhere along the way we began to believe what our bullies were telling us. Or that our loved ones will neglect us because we were taught that love equates to neglect--or abuse. Those beliefs become our insecurities. Our feelings of anxiety have been trying to tell us about those insecurities all this time but instead of addressing that within ourselves we try to control our environment.

We. cannot. control. our. environment. We can only try to influence it by being secure within ourselves and laying down healthy boundaries. If those boundaries are not respected, we leave or limit access.

If we use our feelings and insecurities as an excuse for trying to control people and our environment, we become narcissistic.

We can control our presence in the environment and our feelings or attitudes toward the environment. With those two principles in mind, we can potentially influence our environment but only if we wish to stay in that environment with forethought that it can still bring us the love and security we desire. We still cannot control it. We cannot force it to stop hurting us, but we can walk away from it and we can heal the hurts it caused within us by addressing the false narratives our environments dropped on us.

The highest form of materialism we should seek is the nesting we do within ourselves.

So I urge you, Reader, to look inward. Identify your feelings. Sit with them. What are they trying to tell you? What insecurities do you have left to address that could potentially cause harm to others based on your assumptions and conditioning?

Are you anxious? Maybe it's because you won't admit that you're just too afraid of failing if you leave your shitty job and chase your dream career instead.

Are you disappointed? Maybe you're letting too many people disappoint you with your expectations of them. That, or you're afraid of having expectations of people you would like to trust but can't seem to trust for no reason other than you've been conditioned not to trust despite how trustworthy they seem.

Feelings are not messy. They are just loud. They are loud because they want to be heard. 

Listen to them.

"Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge." 

             - Audre Lorde

Listening to: "Heavy" by Birdtalker