This blog post is brought to you by Graeme’s latest novel: The Guilt Busters
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Clearly many Victorians are very angry about the circuit breaker lockdowns the state is currently experiencing. Many are angry, and validly so, because of what the lockdowns mean to them personally. The inability to go to work, the cancellation of important events, financial loss and for some isolation from all family and friends. Others are angry because they believe their freedoms are being eroded by an unnecessarily authoritative and controlling government.
When you heard the announcement what did you immediately feel? Frustration! Disappointment! Confusion! Anxiety! What did you do next? Yell at the television! Swear! Call a friend! Curse Premier Andrews! Shrug your shoulders and say, “that’s life!” By the end of the day, you may have recognised some different feelings. Painful ones like anger, fear, depression or positive ones like relief and contentment, or more neutral ones like acceptance or complacency.
The most important issue is, what have you done since with your painful emotions? There are a couple of options. The first is you have externalized them. You have vocally expressed your anger, your feelings of anxiety and depression. If it was anger you may have got on Facebook and loudly blamed the Health Officer, or the Premier or those in charge of Covid-19 security, or the Chinese Government or Bill Gates or the Devil or even God. Or, more seriously you might have taken out your anger on your partner, your children or another driver on the highway. If you were feeling anxious or depressed you hopefully spoke to a friend, a relative or rang a helpline and spoke to a stranger. But, you also might have drank a little more than usual, withdrawn from others or just had a ‘pity party.’ Does externalising our feelings help? Yes, usually but there is a downside.
The downside is that some expressions of anger lead to others being hurt, especially by the words we use whilst apportioning blame for what has upset us. The feelings and self-esteem of people we love, who are not responsible for our anger are sometimes the collateral damage of our externalization of painful emotion.
The second common way of dealing with painful feelings is to internalise them. This may simply mean that we supress them for a while with the intention of dealing with them after we cool down. This is often a very good idea, like the old advice we give to our children. “If you are mad, count to 10,” or the advice the Bible gives, “be swift to hear and slow to speak.” However, if suppressing our painful feelings is helpful repressing them is not. When we use repression, we are essentially denying to ourselves and to others that the feelings exist, and we push them deep down somewhere inside our psyche. The trouble with this method of dealing with our painful emotions is that it exposes us to physical, emotional and relational harm. What do I mean? Well think of the problem of storing nuclear waste. It is so destructive and toxic that it defies all efforts to safely control it. So is with our painful emotions. We can push them down inside, but they will seep through the pores of our personality and impact our physical health, our emotional health and our relationships.
If then internalizing or REPRESSING our painful emotions is never a good way to cope with them and externalising or SUPPRESSING them, only sometimes works, is there another way that always works? To explain it I am going to use a word that most people associate with Church, but it has a much wider application. So, here it is. When dealing with painful emotions don’t REPRESS or SUPPRESS them. CONFESS them! The word confession carries the meaning of acknowledging and expressing.
When confronting emotions like anger, anxiety, grief, guilt or fear I need first to acknowledge that they are my feelings and that they are a normal response to a particular event or stimuli. I then need to externalise them by expressing them not as an attempt to blame others or to get revenge or to justify myself but for the purpose of understanding them and ultimately resolving them.
Confessing also implies that instead of isolating myself from others as I do when repressing my feelings, I reach out to a loved one or friend or a ‘people helper’ or God and seek their help in processing my feelings and even sometimes finding a new way to think about what has caused them in the first place.
As a counsellor I am aware that painful emotions are often the result of faulty ways of thinking and of perceiving, the world we live in. Many of these wrong ways of thinking have in turn resulted from past hurts and identifying and owning them is always the first step toward greater wholeness.
During a pandemic it can be difficult to know whether our thinking is right or wrong. So many conflicting theories! So much confusion! Too many self-proclaimed experts! Who do we believe? How do we decide what position to take. I find it helpful to remember several things.
1. I do not make the news, but I can decide where I get my news from.
2. No matter what the news is I have the freedom to choose how I receive it, and what I decide to think about it. What I decide to think will shape the way I feel.
3. I try to think of people who are more negatively impacted by the news than I am and reach out to those I know.
4. I try to remember that whatever the circumstances I am in the greatest blessing I know cannot be taken away. That blessing is the receiving and giving of love from and to my family and friends and, for me personally, especially God.
God Bless
Graeme.
To read more of Graeme’s work on pain, fear and anger visit the Book Shop today.
