emotional living

If there is one thing that having anxiety and depression can teach you, it is that our society is absolutely obsessed with putting all our faith in emotions. We literally let them run, and ruin our lives.

And yet, 
emotions
lie

And our culture constantly lies about their importance and affect. 

Emotions


Popular culture tells us to embrace them, run with them, let them guide us, and to never suppress them.


Interactions on the internet over the last few year suggest that popular culture is quite successful at this task. Everywhere you turn someone is offended, shamed, judged, or angry.


Sometimes that's useful. Sometimes it's really not.


And when it's the latter, it shows just how ridiculous the societal belief that emotional responses are the be all and end all of life.


I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a demographer, but I am pretty willing to bet that over 90% of adults have no better emotional regulation than a child. An awful lot of them, no better than a 2 year old.


I've been actively working on mine for about 4 years now, and I'd still only say I'm sitting at about the level of maybe a 5 year old. I still have some pretty major triggers, that I need to overcome if I hope to ever be functioning at an adult level (which I do).


Most people however, would assume that they are working at an adult level.


They are kidding themselves.


An adult level of emotional regulation means that you take full responsibility for your emotional state, and reactions in all situations. It means that you have worked through and eliminated all triggers from your childhood. It means that no other person has the power to "cause you to feel" something. It means that you are able to resolve problems calmly, deal with conflict effectively and discipline your children without punishment or shame.  You don't take your bad day out on others, and you don't let someone else's bad day rub off on you. You can move on from a negative experience, and keep your day or you life on track. You can forgive easily, and you fully understand this truth:

Emotions Lie.

But this isn't what the adult world is like.

If there is one thing that having anxiety and depression can teach you, it is that our society is absolutely obsessed with putting all our faith in emotions. We literally let them run, and ruin our lives.

We are taught that love is a feeling. But it's not. It's a verb.
We are taught that "all you need is love". But you actually need a hell of a lot more than that.
We are taught that "you can't choose who you fall for". But you can. Because you can choose to only look for people who you have a likelihood of a successful relationship with. 
We are taught "I didn't mean to fall for someone else". But we are not taught how to safeguard our relationship, or that those feelings for someone else, are arbitrary and passing, if you don't let them have control.  
We are taught that "I can't live without you" means it's true love, when it's actually a sign of emotional co-dependency. A much healthier attitude is "I can live without you, but I don't want to"

When it comes to the "positive" emotions of happiness, excitement, love, our culture encourages us to chase them down, and never let go. No matter the negative outcomes for others. 

on the other hand we are taught that anger is bad and should be squashed, drowned, ignored (toddler tantrums anyone) or literally beaten out of us. But anger is useful, without anger, there would be no civil rights, no suffragettes and feminists, no Greenpeace. You have to feel it, squashing it doesn't work, it just makes it explode out the sides. Makes it volatile.

We are encouraged not to feel sadness, and grief, to the point that we now medicate it out of perfectly normal people.

We are taught that the ultimate goal in life is "happiness". Which has actually come to mean constant joy rather than contentment. Needless to say, we are chasing an illusion.

We are taught that "a happy mum is a good mum". Which is not only completely dismissive of those mothers out there battling depression who work their asses off to be a good mum, it is also often used to justify things that put the child's emotional development at risk, rather than (its intention) simply advocating for balance and self-care.

The list could be endless, full of the lies we are taught about emotions and the role they "should" play in adult life.

Couple that with the fact that for the last couple of centuries we have been actively parenting in a way that tells children their emotions and emotional responses are bad, that they should be seen and not heard, that they need to act like adults, that they deserve to be punished, that they are irritating us. For centuries we have been telling parents to actively stifle their child's emotional development, by convincing them that "giving in" to their child's emotional needs is "being soft" and will "spoil" the child, that their child needs to learn to "self-soothe" to be "independent".....it's no bloody wonder that the internet is full of people - adults - who clearly can't regulate their own emotions!

Unfortunately, I think we are going to be stuck with them for quite some time.