We are doing it all wrong. We are trying to escape our emotions, when they are our greatest teachers. There is no healing without feeling. Emotions are our key to freedom. Dr Wayne Dyer wrote that “Strong emotions such as passion and bliss are indications that you're connected to Spirit, or 'inspired,' if you will. When you're inspired, you activate dormant forces, and the abundance you seek in any form comes streaming into your life.”
Paradoxically, your mind doesn’t know the way forward. Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe wrote “All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.” David Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian, and essayist, wrote that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” So why do we insist on emotional emaciation when we have access to emotional emancipation? Mooji said that “Feelings are just visitors, let them come and go.”
Why do we insist on suppressing our emotions?
Industrial societies are becoming as soulless as the electronic-icons they elevate above humanity. Industrial societies treat feelings as if they are obsolete parts. We need to reclaim the emotional richness we are stripped of in childhood. We need to discover how feeling and emoting naturally re-prioritise our values so that love and intimacy are once again elevated above acquisition and consumption, which paradoxically lead to emptiness and misery in the midst of either a dearth or aplenty.
As John Bradshaw, Pete Walker, and Dr Gabor Maté argue, our culture is afflicted by an epidemic of poor parenting. The dysfunctional family is where society’s dictums against feeling are most stringently enforced.
These ideas about family dysfunctionality concur with a number of modern books whose titles alone vividly capture the collapse of the institution of parenting in our culture: ‘Prisoners of Childhood, Betrayal of Innocence, The Secret Everyone Knows, Hearts That We Broke Long Ago, Soul Murder: Persecution in the Family, After The Tears: Reclaiming the Personal Losses of Childhood, Getting Divorced From Mom And Dad , Healing The Shame That Binds You, and My Name Is Chellis, I’m in Recovery from Western Civilisation’.
Family dysfunctionality is so commonplace and normal in our society that it is difficult to recognise. Ironically, those who did not suffer extended physical abuse in childhood are the most likely to ignore the adverse effects of their childhoods. Nonetheless, most of the adult suffering seen by many psychotherapists, according to Pete Walker in ‘The Tao of Fully Feeling’, is rooted in nonphysical forms of childhood abuse and neglect. The most common characteristic of adult suffering is self-hatred, and the most common focus of this hatred is our feelings. Most of us were attacked, shamed or abandoned for being emotional at very early ages. Before we can remember, most of us were forced to renounce our feelings and hate ourselves for having them. We need to learn to break this unconscious, self-destructive habit.
As a childhood trauma survivor, I fully concur with the writings of Pete Walker. He also published a book ‘Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving’ which gives a comprehensive review of the subject, and one with which I resonate with deeply in the causes, consequences, and solutions to childhood trauma. Walker's work is informed by a wide variety of personal life experiences and studies. His experience was that being in the army made him happier than during his childhood. A sentiment that I share – all of my adult experiences have been happier than my dysfunctional parenting by my mother. Walker adds that, when comparing pre- and post-industrial parenting practices, it seems evident to him that Western parents have lost touch with their emotionally-based parenting instincts. This factor alone causes most of our children a great deal of unnecessary and inadvertent damage and deprivation. This observation is epitomised in the reaction of the Native Americans of California to the first Western settlers. They were so taken back by the Europeans’ lack of compassion for their children that they disdainfully labelled them ‘The-People-Who-Beat-Their-Children’!
Walker had innumerable experiences of envying the relationships between parents and children in so-called ‘primitive’ cultures. Parents in these cultures guide and care for their children in common-sense ways that we have long abandoned, just as we have abandoned many of our feelings and instincts.
Alice Miller describes the parenting process that robs us of our feelings before we can consciously own and value them “We have all developed the art of not experiencing feelings, for a child can only experience his feelings when there is somebody there who accepts him fully, understands and supports him (the Enlightened Witness). If that is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother’s love, or that of her substitute, then he cannot experience these feelings secretly “Just for himself” but fails to experience them at all.”
Parents in non-industrialised societies love their children in ways that are beyond the capacity of most Western parents. As much as we genuinely try and sincerely want to love our children, we customarily fail miserably because we are divorced from our emotional natures. Afraid and ashamed of our emotions and our inner experience, we do not inhabit the parts of our bodies that generate loving feelings.
One simply needs to walk around any supermarket to see evidence of parents barking at their children as if they were dogs. We need to take an urgent journey back to feeling and back to authentic, emotionally-based experiences of love. If we are ever to reacquire our inborn ability to effectively love our children, we must first learn to love ourselves in all our emotional states. We begin this, as absurdly as it may seem, by forgiving ourselves and others for having feelings. We accomplish this by refusing to emulate our leaders and our parents – by breaking the habit acquired from them of blaming and shaming ourselves for most of our emotional responses to life.
Walker writes: “I have been down many blind alleys in my attempts to come to terms with my emotions. I’ve repressed them, swallowed them, drowned them in drink (Ringo Starr wrote that “That's all drugs and alcohol do, they cut off your emotions in the end”), ascended above them in clouds of hemp, starved them out, interred them with food, transcended them in meditation, outrun them, outsmarted them with rationalisation, exorcised them, handed them over to higher beings, transmuted them into pretty lights, and even briefly felt them before purging them in dramatic catharses that promised to render them finally extinct. I was mislead by a plethora of self-help books, workshops, hands-on cures, psychological disciplines, and ‘spiritual’ practices in my attempts to procure permanent relief from the emotional pain that so besieged me. Most of the cul-de-sacs I explored in my flight from my feelings shared a common characteristic: The promise of an everlasting transcendence of normal emotional states like anger, sorrow, and fear. The most detrimental of these were those promising permanent attainment of “preferable” emotional states like happiness, love, and peace. I vividly remember the abject disappointment I experienced when the short-lived benefits of one approach or another became so historical I could no longer pretend they were mine. Time after time promises of permanent contentment were broken as the emotions that were supposed to be permanently resolved inevitably returned. Inundated with toxic shame for failing once again to transcend my suffering, I inevitably embarked on yet another desperate search for a new panacea for my feelings. How novel and amazing that all I have to do now with my feelings is accept them! Sometimes I can hardly believe how easy it is to simply feel them or give them benign expression. Am I really the same person who twenty years ago belonged to that vast contingent of men who don’t know a feeling from a fig?”
Thomas Moore in 'Care of The Soul' labels the be-all and end-all pursuit of happiness “The salvation fantasy.” The salvation fantasy is a beguiling, useless detour in our personal evolution. Sheldon Kopp titled his book ‘If You Meet The Buddha On The Road, Kill Him’ to encourage us to bypass this detour and save ourselves from the unnecessary self-sabotage of emotional perfectionism. The uplifting emotional effects of any growth technique or teaching, no matter how healthy and genuine, inevitably give way to normal, equally healthy experiences of less exalted feeling. At such times those who believe they should be unshakeably cheerful and transcendent can only resort to blaming themselves as intrinsically flawed for this normal fluctuation in their sense of happiness and equanimity. Human beings were not created to be permanently anything in their emotional experience. No one binds us to the rack of emotional perfectionism any longer. We can climb off and strive instead for more realistic emotional goals. A steadfast self-regard – one that is not diminished by emotional fluctuation – is something that we can all healthily aim for and increasingly attain.
Walker writes “There are all too many spiritual leaders and cognitive-behavioural psychologists pointing us in the wrong direction by insisting we can and should eliminate unpleasant feelings. Many New Age leaders erroneously proffer the concept of Enlightenment as if it were a permanently attainable, pain-free state; yet in my twenty-five years of spiritual practice and twenty years of psychological exploration, I have yet to meet a guru, therapist, teacher or devotee who has achieved a permanently blissful state and who no longer experiences occasional bouts of emotional pain. How sad it is to see so many still chasing this illusory carrot, and continuously scorning themselves for not attaining it. Please understand that I am not in any way devaluing the wonderful gifts that are available with effective spiritual practice. Rather, I am trying to expose the fallacy that spiritual practice can do away with the necessity of “emotional practice.” We cannot be healthy human beings without accepting and experiencing the full range of human feelings. Perhaps I am misinformed about this, and maybe there are some rare souls out there who truly embody permanent Enlightenment or unshakeable joy. Maybe the newest avatar of the latest training has a formula for truly achieving total mastery of the emotional nature. Maybe walking on hot coals without feeling pain, as participants do in the latest popular weekend seminar, proves that we “should” be able to transcend other less intense, emotional forms of pain. However, since I’ve yet to see anything but hubris in those who claim they have found heaven here on Earth, it strikes me that the odds of attaining imperturbable bliss are extremely poor. How grateful I am that I have finally come to understand R.D. Laing’s wise pronouncement: “The only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid unavoidable pain.” I now know that the lion’s share of my past emotional pain, well over ninety percent of it, came from the myriad ways I was taught to hate, numb, and run away from my feelings.”
Walker continues “The greatest turning point in my life was supplanting my quest for permanent happiness and transcendence with a stubborn willingness to be there for myself in every feeling state. The rewards of this have been wondrous. Sometimes my tears are like jewels that refract resplendent colourfulness into my life. My anger now comes as a gentle flame that warms me with an ever-increasing passion for life. My fear is sometimes a beacon that illuminates new pathways for me to follow into a wider appreciation of life. My envy shows me what I still yearn to develop in myself. I have even found wonders in depression. Depression sometimes calls me into stillness, liberates me from crucifixion on the clock of time, invites me into an ever-deepening place of peace within myself, and allows me to rest inside my body as if it were the most luxurious easy chair imaginable. And grieving, particularly when it is intense, delivers me into a sleep so deep that I feel as if I am a dormant seed safely hidden in the rich loam of mother Earth with nothing to do but wait for the rays of the sun to awaken me. The willingness to fully feel bestows a liberating emotional flexibility on us. I continually marvel at how allowing myself to feel bad resolves that feeling and restores me to feeling good much more quickly than resisting it ever did. Our feelings vitalise and enrich us to the degree that we accept them in their full diversity. Now is the time to renounce stultifying allegiances to TV heroes who encourage us to monotonously hum singular tunes of toughness, coolness, sweetness, or forced frivolity. Our emotions are our own music, and no monotone or three-note ditty can create in us any fervour for being alive. We become symphonies when we reclaim all the notes of the emotional scale. I pray that you will find the sense of belonging and fulfilment that comes from being emotionally free with yourself and your intimates.”
The importance of recovering the emotional nature
Carl Jung wrote that “Feeling tells us how and to what extent a thing is important to us.” Dennis Wholey wrote “America is a nation of emotional orphans... Adult children grew up without effective parents. Tens of millions of our friends, neighbours, spouses, and lovers had childhoods where their parents were not emotionally there for them.”
Feelings and emotions are energetic states that do not magically dissipate when they are ignored. Much of our unnecessary emotional pain is the distressing pressure that comes from not releasing emotional energy. When we do not attend to our feelings, they accumulate inside us and create a mounting anxiety that we commonly dismiss as stress.
Stress is not merely a detrimental physiological reaction to noxious external stimuli such as noise, long work hours, and ‘Hustle Culture’. Stress is also the painful internal pressure of accumulated emotional energy.
Grieving is the most effective stress-release mechanism that human beings have. Grieving is a safe, healthy release valve for our internal pressure cookers of emotion. I have had numerous experiences of feeling as if I were about to explode that were immediately discharged with a good cry. I never used to cry. Now I cry almost every day, through either joy or sadness, or both, sometimes at the same time.
We suffer many dire consequences when we are unwilling to feel. The price of emotional repression is a constant, wasteful expenditure of energy that leaves many of us depressed and taciturn. Perpetually enervated, more and more of us sink into the apathy and ennui of the ‘Seen that - been there - done that’ syndrome. When this occurs, we forfeit our destiny of growing into the vitally expressive and life-celebratory beings we were born to be.
Our war on feelings forces our emotions to turn against us. Much of our unnecessary suffering is caused by the ghosts of our murdered emotions wafting into consciousness and haunting us as hurtful thinking. Denied emotions taint our thoughts with fearful worry, dour self-doubt, and angry self-criticism.
We also risk ‘acting out’ our emotions unconsciously when we are unwilling to feel them. Sarcasm, criticality, habitual lateness, and ‘Forgotten’ commitments are common unconscious expressions of anger. Ironically, these passive-aggressive behaviours leave us in even greater emotional pain because they cause others to distrust and dislike us.
The epidemics of overeating, over-medicating, and overworking that plague the Western world are also rooted in our mass retreat from feeling. When we are feeling-phobic, we are compelled to distract ourselves from our emotions with mood-altering substances, behaviours, workaholism, or constant busyness. Many of us, if not most of us, as Anne Wilson Schaef points out in ‘When Society Becomes An Addict’, are addicted to at least one self-destructive substance or behaviour.
Ironically, our distractions typically add to the underlying pain we are trying to avoid. With chronic use, they eventually do grave damage to our souls and our bodies. Our frenzied pace and use of chemicals (prescribed, illicit, or over-the-counter) numb us so thoroughly that we often don’t feel their debilitating effects until we are seriously ill.
We have become so resistant to feeling pain that we are continuously inventing new ways not to feel. The widespread narcotisation of housewives with Valium in the fifties and sixties set a precedent for the current mushrooming anaesthetisation of both sexes with modern anti-depressants. Drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil are currently being used as 'Designer drugs,' and many general practitioners, with little psychiatric training, liberally prescribe them to anyone who complains of feeling bad.
Examples of this were reported in a Frontline television special. This program documented the current widespread trend to overuse Prozac and focused on a Washington state psychologist who prescribed Prozac for 100% of his clients, and who wouldn’t treat new clients unless they took Prozac. On camera, he told one prospective client: “Your true Self is not available to you without this medication.” There are more and more therapists who immediately recommend Prozac to their clients without first exploring grieving as an antidote to depression and stress.
In the war that our culture wages against feeling, emotions are becoming an endangered species. We are ubiquitously besieged by familial and societal expectations to remain ‘cool’. The pose of acting as if nothing can hurt or affect us has insidiously become our model of health and evolution. Many of us have become so cool that we are emotionally cold and chillingly aloof. In the words of Robert Bly “The covering up of painful emotions inside us has become in our country the national and private style. We have established, with awesome verve, the animal of denial as the guiding beast of the nation’s life.
Nowhere, not in our most private moments, nor in the company of our closest friends, do we feel safe to explore our feelings. Anger, depression, envy, sadness, fear, distrust, etc., are all as integral to life as bread and water. Yet these feelings commonly evoke shame and dread in us the moment they arise – even in those of us who are stalwart in the face of every other life contingency.
Those who dare to express feelings that are anything but positive are increasingly seen as pitiful and unevolved for not choosing more exalted states. What a terrible abandonment of the natural human inclination, still extant in non-industrialised pockets of the world, to offer compassion to an anguished friend.
A shoulder to cry on and permission to have a “Good bitch and moan” are disappearing sacraments in industrialised societies. In our culture, empathy – at its best – is advising our aggrieved friends to “Look on the bright side” and to remember that “It could be worse.”
This contrasts with tribal New Guinea where men and women alike participate wholeheartedly in annual festivals of grieving; all day long they hold and comfort each other as they cry about the loss of the truly halcyon days of their childhoods.
We are cut off from the normal human kindnesses of encouraging our intimates to express their feelings so that their pain isn’t locked inside and transformed into anxiety, worry, and self-disgust.
Year by year we manifest more and more of the prediction of noted psychoanalyst Rollo May “I do believe that there is in our society a definite trend toward a state of affectless-ness as an attitude toward life; a character state.”
Did God make a terrible mistake imbuing us with the feeling function that so distinguishes us from the robots and androids we seem to be emulating? Perhaps God is about to issue a new commandment: “Thou shalt not feel or express emotional pain!” If so, we may all wind up in a world that is chillingly devoid of feeling.
We need emotions for our creativity. Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote that “Rational thoughts never drive people's creativity the way emotions do.” P. D. James wrote “Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.” This is the way to emancipation. Charlotte Brontë wrote in Jayne Eyre that “Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive.” Do you want to feel alive?
In any case, as Anne Frank wrote “Feelings can't be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem.” Emotions are our guide. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote “One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.” Helen Keller wrote that “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.”
Nick Hornby wrote in ‘How to Be Good’ “That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity - the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: If I don't attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself.”
Brené Brown wrote that “We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions. Vulnerability sounds like Truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren't always comfortable, but they're never weakness.” John Cleese wrote that “The idea that you have to be protected from any kind of uncomfortable emotion is what I absolutely do not subscribe to.”
Jeanette Winterson wrote “To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.” Robert Greene wrote “The Truth is that creative activity is one that involves the entire Self - our emotions, our levels of energy, our characters, and our minds.”
Morgan Matson wrote “It's always a risk. Wherever there is great emotion. because there is power in that. And few people handle power well.”
Steve Maraboli wrote “Do not let another day go by where your dedication to other people's opinions is greater than your dedication to your own emotions!”
My father acted lovingly. He gave my mother space to live the life that she wanted. He tried to show me love but he didn’t know how to as he hadn’t been shown, and I didn’t know what love looked like so I didn’t recognise it. He wrote me a letter when I turned 18 talking about how he always thought of me when he saw a field of daffodils as he had spotted one on the way home from the hospital immediately after my birth. Having read that this week I don’t remember ever having seen that letter before. Also, my mother had poisoned me against my father. My mother sometimes acted overly lovingly towards my borther and me but more often subconsciously acted aggressively and with hatred in often violent ways; in the same way that her father had done to her. My mother‘s birthday cards were always gushing with demonstrative affection. Perhaps these came from a place of guilt and shame over her chronic aggressive behaviour. My mother was never happy with her life and she judged everyone else’s. No wonder I became a Plastic Surgeon. My mother brainwashed me into her mini cult. My perfectionism was only matched by my self-loathing. It is only now that my mother has passed away that I am finally becoming my Self. And what a joy that is! I am writing a new chapter of my life with a new denouement. Watch this space...
Other people’s opinions do not matter. Your emotions do. Those who try to hurt you are most likely stuck in their own childhood traumas and trying to blame all their historical emotions on you.
The next article will be about halting the flight from your feelings…
Namaste.
These are the emotions that I have covered for you in my series on emotions (click on the link to be taken to them):
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I have a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge; a PhD Doctorate in Scientific Research from University College London (UCL); a Medical Degree (MD/MBBS) from The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London and have been a doctor and reconstructive trauma and cancer surgeon in London for 20 years. I have published over 50 peer reviewed scientific journal articles, have been an associate editor and frequent scientific faculty member, and am the author of several scientific books. I have been awarded my Diploma in Transformative Life Coaching in London, which has International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accreditation, as well as the UK Association for Coaching (AC), and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). I have been on my own transformative journey full time for four years and I am ready to be your guide to you finding out who you really are and how the world works.