Allowed to Feel It All

About a week ago I was feeling all the grief, not about COVID-19 (for once), but about having to create a strong boundary with a person I care about. I shared my situation with a couple of people who listened compassionately, but even with their attentiveness, I couldn’t shake it. The grief still wanted to be heard. In the evening I was texting with another friend about it, who told me that I shouldn’t take on someone else’s grief, especially now, that it was even unhealthy to do so. My friend used the analogy that you may have seen by now- we’re all in the same storm, but in different boats. The point my friend was trying to make was that because I wasn’t in the same boat as the person with whom I needed to create the boundary, I shouldn’t have feelings about the other boat.

At that suggestion my grief turned to rage. Rage at the idea that being in the different boats meant I shouldn’t have feelings about the other boats. Rage that the person was telling me that feeling these emotions was unhealthy. Rage that my friend didn’t get that the point of the boat analogy was actually encouraging empathy, connection, and understanding rather than squelching them.

Rage feels a lot more powerful than grief and I was grateful for the energetic change. The conversation  ended shortly after that and I opened Untamed, Glennon Doyle’s latest memoir. I happened to be at the chapter in which Glennon wrote about her heartbreak at learning of immigrant family separations happening at the U.S.-Mexico border and the ways that she responded to that situation. As I read, my rage turned back to grief and then to relief. She understood. I felt heard by a stranger who hadn't actually even heard me. 

Being in different boats doesn’t mean we don’t get to have feelings about the other boats. It also doesn’t mean that if we’ve got a good sturdy boat with room for more people, we just wave at the folks in the leaky canoe. “Sorry about your luck! See ya later!” If we see and can do something, hopefully, we'll do something. That's a topic to explore another day. 

I kept reading. I allowed myself to feel whatever feelings arose.

I am allowed to feel it all. You are allowed to feel it all. 

That night I shed a few tears. I put down my book and I slept well. I woke up feeling lighter because the grief was no longer stuck in me. It had moved through.

Many of us have been taught that some emotions are good (joy, gratitude, relief, hope) and others are bad (loneliness, disgust, anxiety, confusion). Some of the “bad” emotions are even gendered by societal norms. Men can feel angry and express it, but women can’t. Women can feel grief and express it, but men can’t. Then there’s shame. Most of us have been told to feel shame at one time or another (“You should be ashamed of yourself!”), but few of us want to admit to feeling it. It’s too scary. Fear and shame, shame and fear, both are adept at disguising themselves as something else. Often it’s anger. And so we allow some emotions to surface and try to keep others from seeing the light of day. We feel the stress of holding them in our bodies, then we disconnect from both the emotions and our bodies because the accumulation becomes too painful. And...or...at the moment we least expect, all the emotions erupt out of us; we become the storm leaving wreckage behind us.

What if we allowed ourselves to feel more instead of stuffing, denying, numbing? What if we could name the feelings in all their nuance and even recognize when we were experiencing a whole slew of feelings all at once? What if, when someone else told us how they were feeling and it made us uncomfortable, we could both live with our own discomfort and also honor the feelings the other person was having?  

Since I’ve been practicing Compassionate Communication, I’ve gotten in much better touch with my feelings. I notice that they’re happening in the first place. I give myself space to explore them. I allow myself to be with them without judging whether they’re good or bad.

Noticing, honoring, and tending to emotions are practices. They are practices of connecting- to ourselves and each other. I believe these are lifelong practices. May we lean into the spectrum of emotions. May we lean into each other as we tend to them.