This is probably the most frequently asked question by me in my practice of psychiatry. Troubled feelings form the core of mental illness. There are many factors that contribute to this difficulty. One of the factors is that our society places a heavy emphasis on the rational mind. Traditionally we are not taught in our schools how to deal with our feelings; it is something we are supposed to just pick up. Typically in our teenage years when there is much turmoil, teens have not learned how to identify their emotions and generally act out with misbehavior. In Hawaii, Orientals are notorious for not expressing their feelings. Also men, in general, keep to their “macho” image, devoid of emotional expression.
To have feelings is to be alive, yet often we can’t believe that we feel a certain way, or we think we shouldn’t feel it, or we don’t want to feel it. When feelings get into the way of our jobs and our responsibilities, that is when we should seek professional help, but dealing with emotions can be learned.
It all begins with awareness. The beauty of meditation is that your mind becomes so quiet, when you sit and do nothing in a quiet surrounding, you naturally become aware of your emotions. You cultivate a greater sense of what goes on inside of you and you can do something about yourself sooner.
Awareness achieves a second benefit to help process emotion. You accomplish this when your awareness is nonjudgmental. When you observe, “Oh, I’m feeling angry,” don’t’ say, “I shouldn’t be angry” or “I’m justified in my anger.” Rather use the old Ram Dass standby of “Ah-sooo”. Be neutral and nonattached to what goes on emotionally. In this way, the emotion surfaces, peaks, and submerges like an ocean wave. The more you let an emotion “be”, the more it disappears.
The hydraulic model of feelings works well because emotions operate very much like liquids. As in the case of a river, when you dam it up, sooner or later, it will break through or flow over the dam. Mental health means being able to let out your feelings on a regular basis so that you don’t have to worry about the dam breaking. If the emotion is dammed for too long, a great catastrophe will manifest in some kind of excessive emotional disturbance or in some physical illness. In the case of cancer, the “silent types” are those who hold in their feelings over their lifetime and gradually develop cancers. Invariably in many cases of panic disorder, the victims often have feelings about something, but won’t deal with them; when their tolerance reaches an unknown internal threshold, they experience an “irrational” anxiety attack.
The psychoanalytic model says that our present approach to life has something to do with our past relationships with our parents. Because of unresolved feelings with these most significant individuals, we operate in the world as if everyone and all situations were like our parents. We are thus caught up in this maladaptive pattern of reacting to the world when the world is not always like our parents. To break the habit, you need awareness of these patterns, giving up your emotions, and establishing a new pattern.
People with chronic emotional disturbances often express feelings too much and need to balance with more rationality, acceptance, or doing (Natural Success principle of “Balance”). Being more rational means cultivating attitudes that will lessen the emotional response. You might say to yourself, “Being angry will not achieve anything.” Acceptance means seeing the situation as the way it is, nothing more or nothing less. No matter how bad things are, we generally react more than is necessary and forget “What’s done is done”. Doing things means channeling your energies in active behavior to reduce your reaction. You are then being positively constructive and efficient with your energy.
Physical health is essential to emotional health (Natural Success principle of “The Whole”). When something happens in our external world, our physical health determines how emotional we will be. When you are in the best of health, you feel good inside. You can actually feel so good that if something happens you are not thrown off center emotionally. True enlightenment then is, like a Zen master, to let the emotion come and go with ease, and, like the Taoist priest, to have such physical health that emotion is transcended.