So Why Have I Been So Afraid?
Acknowledging The Existence Of All Emotions
Whether you believe in God, the Universe, Mother Earth, source energy, or if you believe in none of the above, there is something we can all agree on, and that is that emotions exist. They are real. Some of us believe they come from a spiritual source, and some of us believe that they come from the inner workings of our brain. It doesn’t matter. There is no human, not one, that doesn’t experience them. They are wonderful and complex and educational – all of them – but sometimes they scare the shit out of us. Sometimes we choose, whether consciously or not, to suppress them, ignore them, or pretend they don’t exist.
Without a doubt, I’ve been there, and I’ve done that.
Understanding Emotional Habits
For the better part of my life, only a select few emotions felt identifiable and relatable – anger being one of the most palpable and most familiar because of my complicated relationship with my father. Some, who shall remain nameless, may be able to make a strong case that anger was my love language. It’s not something I’m particularly proud of, but it’s the truth. My upbringing kept me in a hypervigilant emotional state, and I carried that into my adult life. Apologies have been owed, and apologies have been offered. Of course, I experienced a range of other emotions - I am human after all – but many of them did not feel particularly safe. So, I hovered in a defensive emotional posture most of the time.
Looking back, it’s clear that safety—or the lack thereof—dictated my emotional landscape. I can say that in all honesty, I wasn’t particularly emotionally intelligent. I leaned into anger because it felt protective, a barrier that shielded me from pain. But what I didn’t realize then was that this default mode also kept me disconnected from deeper, more meaningful emotions.
In Defensive Of Myself…
Having said all of that, I have to defend myself a little bit here (pun intended). I am a very emotive person—my face has captions, and my body language has subtitles—so it’s not uncommon for my passion to be misinterpreted as anger when, in fact, it might be pain, sadness, or even excitement. I do have a full emotional range. I just haven’t always been capable, much less comfortable, expressing them verbally. So often, my face and my hands speak for me. And neither is very good at it.
Emotional Breakthroughs In Times Of Crisis
When my marriage imploded, and my finely honed sense of safety dissipated virtually overnight, I was slapped in the face with virtually every emotion known to man. There was no place to hide from them. There were just too many, and they were just too strong, and they were coming too fast and furiously for me to try to numb them out or hide them under a cloak of anger. It felt terrifying and overwhelming.
As my therapist says, “with crisis comes rapid change” and she wasn’t kidding! My emotional growth journey had begun. With a bang!
Over the next few months (which led into years), and with a great deal of help from her and some Eastern philosophies and practices (which some might call “woo woo” work), I learned to identify all the emotions, to give them names, and to feel them.
A Brutal Yet Beautiful Journey
I was doing “the work.” THE WORK! It was brutal, but it was also beautiful. As Glennon Doyle says – it was “brutiful”. Much to my surprise, while painful as hell at times, it wasn’t all that scary after I stopped resisting, and my emotional intelligence increased exponentially.
I filled my toolbox with tools to process them. Writing was one of the most critical ones. It was a safe way to process. I learned so much through writing about myself, and others, and about the wider world. It was an experience for which I am grateful. Well, let’s be honest. There are days that I still resent the hell out of the Slump and some of my journals are filled with some not so suitable material for most readers, but my overall attitude is one of gratitude.
The Intersection of Emotional Healing and Spiritual Connection
“Woo Woo” Warning—bear with me! Recently, I saw my medium, Shari. Yes, I said medium. Shari is an emotional medium, which means that while, of course, she sees and talks to dead people (!), she works from the heart center. She connects with my energy and those of my spirit guides and helps me in a way that is as therapeutic, if not more so, than traditional talk therapy. Unlike talk therapy which works on and with the human condition - reconciling the past and putting it into its proper place while working on more healthy perspectives and choices for the future – energy work is a healing from within. It connects you directly to the soul source or, if you are not spiritual, to Self (yes, with a capital “S”). Self is who you truly are. It can have everything to do with your spirituality, but if you are not spiritual, it doesn’t have to. It can simply speak to who you are at your core, the ESSENCE of you.
The Grenade Effect And The Fear Of Feeling
In April of 2022, my father died suddenly. True to my good-in-a-crisis nature, I (as a daughter and as the appointed trustee) jumped into action. Just mere months later in June, while feeling quite alone in navigating the death of my father, the Slump ended abruptly when, in a single long-distance conversation, a two-year period of separation began, and the 18-year marriage entered hospice. After the death of my father, and the de facto death of my marriage, it was like pulling the pin on a grenade. Before I knew it, all of the feels that I had allowed and welcomed in preceding years receded into the background and largely ceased to exist. Well, they continued to exist, but they were not acknowledged or welcomed, much less felt. They loomed large and had become scary again because now I knew how much intensity they could and would bring. The trusted anger and its good friend resentment pushed their way easily to the forefront. You would think that grief would have loomed large, for my father and for my marriage, but the part of me that holds space for grief had been exiled to the place where we send emotions to take a nap when we don’t have the bandwidth to deal with them.
Quite simply, I was terrified to go through “all the feels” again after the kind of ferocity that they had brought the first time they exploded into my consciousness. Cognitively, I knew that allowing them and feeling them was not only safe, but necessary. And that there was much I still had to learn. But I was feeling incredibly fragile – emotionally and physically – so I was terrified to go through that level of intensity again. Shutting down, at least subconsciously, felt like the safest option. I was wrong, but I did it anyway.
Take note, friends: I’m not one to always take my own advice or even learn from my own mistakes. This is why I try to stay in my lane of storytelling and not one of advice-giving. I am a life lessons learned the hard way kinda gal.
Not Writing Disconnected Me From “Self”
Sometime during the Slump my writing practice waned. My then-husband John was, I felt, less than supportive and even derisive of the mackfiles mission, so it trailed off. After the grenade went off, I took an intentional hiatus from writing. Other than my father’s eulogy, I just couldn’t write.
Since then, I have had stops and starts. I know that writing is a way for me to connect with my Self and to connect with others. I have been frustrated with my inability to write. I have been even more frustrated with my lack of desire to write. At least anything that I feel is ready for public consumption.
Writing is what gave me purpose. Writing is what helped me to feel the emotions. Writing is what connected me to my Self. Not writing and not allowing those that vast range of emotion allowed anger and resentment to be back in the driver’s seat. That disconnected me from my Self.
I cannot blame that on John. I allowed his derision (what I felt was derision) to derail me. And, after the separation, I allowed fear of feeling again to keep me stuck.
Writing As A Bridge Back To Self-Discovery
When I met with Shari and talked about the writer’s block/shutdown, she said, “Of course. That’s because you are an emotional writer. You write from your emotions. They guide your hand across the page. If you are disallowing that or disengaging from them, you can sit down with a pen and paper for as long as you like, but nothing will come alive on that paper that is authentic or that you are proud of.”
A-hah! And also, duh… If my emotions are on lockdown, then so is my writing. And vis versa. Emotions create feelings…feelings can be painful…writing can bring about emotions…so writing can bring about pain. Before then, I hadn’t thought about it or recognized it, but when I tell you I am thankful that she keeps a box of tissues on the side table, I really mean that. I’m pretty sure I owe her a Costo coupon because she keeps a large stock of them for a reason.
That was an opening of my heart space. In that moment, I felt a flood of grief and anguish and shame. But much bigger and better than that, what I felt most of all was relief. Relief that I had an answer as to why I was so afraid to write. For me, writing and feeling go hand-in-hand, and I was more than a little trepidatious about feeling again.
Breaking The Cycle Of Fear And Reclaiming Emotional Freedom
Why have I been so afraid? The answer is simple, but as simple as it is, it is also extremely complex. (I love exploring a good paradox as part of the human condition.) As I started out in this article, emotions are innate to all of us. We all have them. But sometimes they can be scary. They can be overwhelming. They shouldn’t be. But they most certainly can be.
When I look back on the Slump, when I was feeling all of the feels – my brain and my Self know that it was safe, that it was healthy, that it was necessary, and that I learned an incredible amount. But my heart remembers the pain. It feels the pain. My heart is, without question, afraid of the pain.
Why have I been afraid? Because emotions are messy. They’re complicated. They can cut to the bone. Emotions equal VULNERABILITY. Gasp!
But the way through it is to allow them. Always allow them. It’s the only way to find peace. At least for me. I am writing again. I am feeling again. It may as hard as hell (it is). But I know that it will also be Brutiful.
I refuse to allow fear to guide me any longer. Fear is the first emotion I chose to confront. It was about damned time I got my head out of the freakin' sand! Grief is up next (and I promise to try to bring a little light sass into it) so stay tuned!
Connecting and Sharing Stories of Emotional Growth
What about you? Have you had a similar experience—a grenade moment that shattered your emotional framework? What have your emotions taught you, even in fear? I’d love for you to share your truths. Processing emotions is part of being human, and together, we can learn from each other’s strength and vulnerability.
“Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.”
– John Wayne
Tell me your story. Your experience matters, and you might discover you’re not as alone as you feel. We learn and heal in community. Feel with me, write with me, and let’s process together.