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From my earliest ages I was taught that negative emotions were something to be fought, combatted, and done away with. Whenever I expressed negative emotions, the response was always what can we do to make you feel better. Having repressed my negative emotions during middle school, high school and into college, eventually broke me down mentally and emotionally and I developed schizoaffective disorder, which is schizophrenia and bipolar disorder simultaneously. My emotional repression has been a major component of this ailment, so to combat the disorder I finally had to delve into the dark emotions.
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Working on negative emotions, experiences, and struggles has been a daily battle for years now that I feel I’ve finally gained a foothold on. In “The Guest House” Rumi advocates to honor the negative emotions. I’ve found recently that honoring the negative emotions has given me the most peace and clarity within my mind. For years I tried to fight negative emotions and quell them, however I had a great deal of mental fog because of it. Recently while journaling “I need to accept my negative emotions” my stream of consciousness immediately cleared up. Accepting negative emotions doesn’t mean accepting them forever and just letting them sit and brood for me. While working with negative emotions and honoring them this means listening to what they’re telling me and doing something about it. Beforehand when I was not honoring the negative emotions I was completely ignoring their existence, and this messed up my mind immensely.
One of the greatest forms of oppression we might have as a society is not creating a safe and healthy space to feel negative emotions. I realized there’s a threshold for the negativity that I need to be aware of, but negativity to a certain extent can be a good thing. I notice with a lot of people I work with as a peer specialist and also for myself, really emotionally dark music can be really pacifying to listen to. I think the reason being is that it creates a safe space to honor and allow negative emotions to exist. No one ever questions you when you’re listening to dark music, it’s a socially acceptable practice. I’ve felt when I can feel some of my deepest pains it actually gives me relief from them whereas when I tried to push them away I felt my brain fog up and I’d get headaches at times as well. Even one of the keys to getting rid of negative emotions is allowing myself to feel them and asking myself “What are these emotions telling me about myself or my life?”
One of the keys to honoring the negative emotions has been to realize to what extent are they healthy and a part of my everyday life but also where do I need to draw the line with feeling too much negativity and deciding to work towards getting rid of it. Feeling a mix of positive and negative emotions has been an important key to staying emotionally and mentally healthy. Both types of emotions have had time and place but I’ve found the moments where I’ve felt as though people were getting under my skin have been when I’ve been encouraged to ignore the negative emotions. Being told to stay positive when in reality I felt anger, depression, frustration, and I wasn’t able to express these things was the most damaging part of growing up for me. The inability to even have space to feel negative emotions was incredibly oppressive.
As a kid, I never learned how to navigate my negative emotions because I was constantly told to ignore them and to not face them. This meant any time I felt negativity I wasn’t developing the tools and resources to explore those emotions and to put them to good use by asking myself what they were telling me. Rather, I was pushing them away, and creating increasingly more buried emotional pain and resentments that came out in awkward ways within my interpersonal dynamics. Another facet of emotions being buried was having had a cognitive impairment and immense social anxiety that negated my ability to talk in moments of conflict. Whenever in a social conflict it usually wound up that the other person was right and I was wrong because I wasn’t capable of expressing my thoughts. This in turn created even more repressed emotion that made me increasingly more dysfunctional.
In later years I’ve developed better skills within putting negative emotions to good use. I think one of the first questions after feeling any emotion I like to ask myself is “What is this emotion telling me?” I sometimes feel emotions before I think thoughts so I like to listen to my heart with my mind to figure out what some of my deepest intuitions and feelings are. Listening to the emotions and then figuring out healthy ways to express them, act upon them, and or put their energy to good use has been a learning curve but I feel I’ve improved at it over time.
Feeling and honoring negative emotions is not about being negative towards others. For me it’s simply asking myself the meaning of the emotions, thinking of positive ways of expressing them, or finding ways to get them out that are not damaging to others. When negative emotions are managed well I feel like I make progress. However, when I’ve mismanaged my negative emotions I’ve tended to create emotional quandaries.
I’ve realized there were many incredibly painful emotions that I’ve explored and tried to neutralize in order to improve my mental and emotional health and this has been a tremendous process in becoming healthier. However, one of the first steps in expunging these emotions has been allowing myself to experience them. Experiencing the dark emotions gave me more insight into them and allowed me to figure out the reasons they were happening. Being cautious in this process is incredibly important and also knowing what your threshold is for experiencing negative emotions is also incredibly important to keep in mind.
There were many times I went well over my threshold for pain and ran through emotional brick walls to become healthier which I don’t necessarily recommend. When working on certain mental and emotional complexes I would stumble upon in my journaling I was reminded of Winston Churchill saying ,“When you’re going through hell, keep going”. There were many times I was in the midst of a complex and reliving my trauma in an effort to combat it. I was working through the depths of it and experiencing intense phenomenology but in the midst of it I realized I had to keep going to the other side of the complex. I had to fight my way through it and that stopping simply wasn’t an option because the way I felt when I stopped was too intense for me to stay put. I mention this because it’s a common phenomenon in exploring trauma that sometimes it brings us right back to the worst moments of our lives. However, with enough guidance from my therapist within this exploration I’ve reached a point where my traumas are becoming distant memories that no longer influence my life.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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