Emotions are dumb.

I imagine this is not the headline you might be expecting from a mental health professional. And yet, here we are. Reading and writing this blog.

This is something I have said both to myself and clients over the years.

Recently it has become a personal mantra.

Let me explain to you what that actually means to me and how I believe it could be helpful.

One of the things I hold close as a clinician is my own humanity. Recently I have had a situation occur in my life that has immersed me in pain and discomfort to a level I have not experienced for quite some time. My own personal healing journey began over ten years ago. I came to a crossroads and knew I had to find a different way of processing what was going on inside and around me. So many different modalities including yoga, therapy, energy work, writing and music helped me understand that I both had emotions stored in my body I didn’t know were there and that I did not know what to do with them. Let’s just say the extraction process of over 30 years of emotional junk was just that…. a process. It felt overwhelming, messy, confusing. There were many moments that I swore I would be crushed under the weight of it all. That I could not physically handle one more ounce of pain and suffering. Where I did not understand how the air was still moving in and out of my lungs because of the pressure in my chest. When I was convinced, it was so much easier to over function and ignore that anything was going on inside me at all.

Over time this process of navigating emotions became a little more familiar. I can feel the wave coming on. Am much more aware as my nervous system sends me little signals of visceral response. I can hold space for my sadness, anger, fear without complete panic and shutdown. I know the things that help ground me, such as plants and being in nature. Always being close to big bodies of water. I also know the tools that help me to make sense of what I am feeling. Sara Bareilles has been my heart and soul in song, and very often I find words she writes name things I can feel but do not understand. My own writing is also a place that can help me untangle the knots in me. Having both familiarity with and tools for navigating emotions became a buoy when storms roll through my world.

But it never gets easy. Or fun. And I think this is so important to talk about. Because so often I find clients who are frustrated with themselves and their progress. Irritated that they are having the reaction they are having, coping with old strategies, or that they are feeling whatever they are feeling at all. Believing that having an emotional and/or visceral response to something in their environments, or relationships, or even in their own head is evidence that they haven’t learned anything or aren’t “fixed.” Maybe that it makes them weak or vulnerable.

I am here to tell you after 10 years of dedication to my own personal work, a master’s degree, and six years clinical experience…I am currently being taken to my knees to a point I question if getting up again is possible. I am moving through my world with what feels like my whole body lost in visceral response. Stomach churning and dull. My chest is both heavy and at the same time full of ache and buzzing. I can feel the electric currents of unease in every limb. All leading me to emotions that I do not want to face, let alone process and make sense of. And I am aware of the thoughts “I can’t do this, the tools that I know aren’t working, this pain feels never-ending.”

Emotions are dumb. No matter how much you know or how much work you have put in, life can still happen. And something can take you to the edge like you have not known before. It never gets easy, or fun. What is helping me swim towards my buoys currently is something I have experienced from going through exactly what I am going through right now.

There is a “through.”

Yes, sometimes there you have a grief process to sort through, boundaries to set, or choices to make. But it does happen. Feeling all the things, allowing them to move and shape you, making sense of them in your own way…. all of these allow some release of what you are going through. Whatever is going on, no matter how painful. No matter how much it makes you question yourself and everything around you. There is a way you can go through it and release it some. Stop it from being stored away in your emotional junk drawer in your body. Use it to both understand and inform how you have been moving in the world and what might need to change. How you are already changed.

Even in the midst of everything I am feeling now, I do remember this is possible. And it is helping me breathe just a little deeper even if the tightness in my chest is still there. Giving me the courage to face these emotions I do not want to be here.

And allowing myself to speak honestly about how “dumb” or uncomfortable the process is. Knowing this just might connect to someone else’s experience.

This makes me feel connected and not alone in what I am going through.

Emotions are dumb, the process of experiencing and making sense of them torturous at best, but at least we are in it together.