Reclaiming Emotions
How do you cope with emotions that are difficult to bear? Highly sensitive people endure a range of strong emotions, including those that stir up deep psychic pain like sadness, loss or grief. These states are very much a part of the human experience however for highly sensitive people, their depth of feeling and processing can intensify emotions and bring them closer to the surface.
In understanding the root and meaning of emotional experience, it is important to look at how it is shaped culturally and socially. In social interactions, highly sensitive people are more susceptible to absorbing the moods and feelings of those around them, by virtue of their empathy they pick up on the energy of others. This is a wonderful gift and endows them with thoughtfulness, care and concern for those around them. The flip side of that coin is that a high level of empathy can lead to emotional overwhelm over time.
For highly sensitive and empathic people it is also hard not to be affected by what happens in the world around them, especially in the digital age when people are confronted with crises, wars and disasters on an hourly basis via their portable devices. It is a challenge to turn away from or suppress the distressing news that permeates the collective consciousness. As a psychotherapist I witness a lot of compassion fatigue and sadness amongst highly sensitive clients and oftentimes this is related to the global (human and environmental) despair and suffering that they are deeply attuned to.
How people relate to their emotions can also be understood in the context of our cultural situatedness. In our society there is a tendency to elevate happiness and related positive emotions over others. People learn to over-value happiness from an early age via family, friends, media and other institutions that influence our lives — and they learn that sadness is less desirable, both to others and to themselves.
Many people have had first hand experience of their sadness making others uncomfortable which can lead them to believe that their sadness is inappropriate, unwelcome or that they are not doing enough to pull themselves out of it. People may begin to feel ashamed of it or they realize that others can’t handle it, perhaps it feels easier to suffer alone than to risk being vulnerable around others. Others develop strategies to avoid or distract from their painful experience, and while these coping strategies may be effective stop gap measures, they are not effective for longer term emotional regulation.
Avoidance and distraction don’t make emotions go away, in fact symptoms of anxiety or panic can emerge when a person continues to push away what is a natural part of the human experience. So what can you do with those hard-to-bear (less socially accepted) emotions if you are highly sensitive and your emotions tend to feel overwhelming? Together and individually, we need to develop more tolerance for the range of human emotions and a way to permit feeling and expressing that invites self-compassion. Challenging emotions might bring discomfort or pain short term, but over time they become easier to metabolize.
It is important to have a space or a relationship in which you can begin to unfold and give shape to what is being held inside. Therapy provides one option for people seeking insight into their emotions and relief from their pain. A therapist or supportive friend is a witness to those uncomfortable and isolating emotions, they can help a person begin to access and process what is just below the surface.
When you start to give a voice, description or narrative to an emotional experience it becomes less unknown and frightening. Inviting it to be seen through a new lens allows a person to begin to relate to their experience with deeper understanding and compassion. What brings us pain as humans is intensified when we are isolated by what we feel. As a therapist, my duty of care is to let others know that no matter how burdensome or overwhelming they judge their internal world to be, they do not have to be alone in holding it.
