Fake vulnerability and other unlearning
So what are you feeling?
Well, I think…
Nope, what are you feeling, not what are you thinking?
Um, well…I find it fascinating that…
Nope.
I think..
Nope.
I think…
Nope…
Okay, this is not a verbatim transcript of me in therapy, but it’s not far from it. My therapist asks me about my feelings, including where in my body I’m feeling them (???), and I respond with grand theories about why I am the way I am and why everyone else is the way they are, and what can be done to fix all of us.
At some point, perhaps at a very young age, I decided that emotions were overwhelming and often inconvenient so it was best if I didn’t register my own too fully. Life—this little girl philosophy went—would be more manageable, more fixable, less scary, if I detected other people’s emotions (or so I thought)* and used them as signals for how to respond, but didn’t let my own feeling confuse the cardinal directions.
The fact that I was highly sensitive made this approach attractive. If I muted my own emotions, I didn’t have to feel so totally whiplashed by the world’s hypocrisy and cruelty. I could, instead, put my energy towards perpetual perception—listening, watching, making meaning out of what was going on around me, rather than inside me, writing stories about it. I could observe the hypocrisy and cruelty and pin it down with language. The emotional distance, I’ve come to understand, was a form of self-soothing. It’s so much easier to organize the world into manageable schemas when your own mercurial insides aren’t part of the assignment.
Later on in life this unconscious philosophy became even more compelling alongside my worldview. Who was I—an American daughter with White skin and a safety net, plus an abundance of love—to sit around whining about my own feelings? I grew a vigilant and internal persona who was always poised to chastise me for taking my own emotions, especially dark, too seriously. Ya know, #firstworldproblems.
This part of me is political, to be sure, but it’s also cultural—made of the Western women I come from, who drive stick shift in snowstorms without complaint and never get pedicures or pay full price. I sometimes imagine this part of me like an old cowgirl in shit-kicking boots with calloused hands; she’s always ready to roll her eyes at the tender parts of me, make fun of them, remind them how lucky their lot in life and how silly it is to dwell on petty grief.
I have learned, through conversations with my therapist, how very fast and tenacious this shit-kicking cowgirl is inside of my own brain. These days we sort of chuckle together at how ready with a response she is; if she gets even a whiff of fragility, she’s ready with a cutting correction. Weakness is for other women, she reasons.
I know…it’s wild. Even as I write it, I am struck by how a feminist with ready access to a wide range of emotional tools can sound like such a boot-strappin’ asshole inside of her own head. My dearest friends have also been able to gently point out to me that I may be better at performing vulnerability than actually acknowledging it. I’ve made a career, in part, writing about the beauty of interdependence, and yet, I am too often embracing everyone’s neediness except for my own. I love to craft a good, complete story about emotional depths, but actually feel them fully and talk about them midstream? Naw, thanks. Sounds messy.
This year my intention is to feel more of my own feelings, including the inconvenient, messy ones. And share them midstream with trusted people, rather than waiting until I have a retrospective full of lemonade and grit to offer.
I’m already off to a good start. The other day I felt anger so viscerally that I could have run up a mountain. I texted a friend, who has much more ready access to her rage, and asked, “What the hell do you do with this feeling?!”
It was as if I were tasting this particular flavor of adrenaline for the first time. She advised screaming into a pillow and taking a walk. My husband, also more familiar with anger than me, said breathing helps, but also admitted that there’s not much you can do but just let it run its course. I had Maya, my 10-year-old, DJ us the most raucous song she could think of—Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball,” for the record—and we jumped around the kitchen for awhile. That helped a little. I went to a hot yoga class that wasn’t really yoga at all, but did allow me to sweat my face off. That helped, too. But the only thing that really helped was time and speaking my truth. Thankfully it landed with brave, loving people.
Sadness sometimes hits me like a semi-truck. I’m grieving a couple of important things these days; both clean and ambiguous losses abound. My beef with grief is it’s illogical emergence. There’s no predicting it! How rude! It evades my scheduling and strategizing. It’s hard to hide grief. Somehow it’s not as shy as I’d like. Someone says something idiotic about a disease that has come to define my family and I can’t put two words together, much less tell a well-made anecdote. Suddenly I’m outed as human.
If anger overtakes, grief betrays. That’s how the shit-kicker feels at least. I’m never going to shut her up completely, but this year, I’m going to sit her down in a chair on a wide, breezy porch and say, “Have a beer, girl. The rest of me would like to feel some feelings and maybe even cry or scream into a pillow for awhile. You’re off duty.”
She won’t like it, but she’s tired, truth be told. It’s a lot of work bullying a sensitive soul and having so much revulsion for frailty in a world filthy with it. Maybe she’ll have that beer, nod off for awhile, and my innate emotionality will creep out tentatively from the shadows of my girlhood. I’ll keep you posted.
*I, like most people, am not as good at interpreting others’ emotions as I have sometimes thought myself to be. The arrogance to think you know how people feel without asking them can send you down some seriously painful wormholes.
Are you good at performing vulnerability, but not actually that seasoned at feeling or expressing it? What do you do with anger? Tell me all the things please so I don’t have an incurable vulnerability hangover at expressing all of this. 😳
Whew! You are not alone! Instead, you are describing me in my 30’s as I began therapy and learned what a feeling was and then how to name them. It’s a lotta work, and if you’re married to man who doesn’t like feelings or expressions of them like I was, it’s even harder.
More recently, I’ve learned the secret for me: when I’m dancing around uncomfortably, trying to NOT feel, if I get conscious enough to notice, I will sit down and breathe and invite in the feeling. I look at it carefully and try to describe how it looks. I ask it to tell me what it wants me to know. Generally they are very generous with sharing. Sometimes I weep and sob. Sometimes I breathe through fury and understand fire-breathing dragons. What I’ve discovered is that, once acknowledged, once seen and listened to, it morphs. Gradually. Beautifully. And suddenly I’m no longer feeling the same thing. It has changed. And I feel more peaceful. Sometimes. Or more grief. But when I sit with the feelings, they pass. Like clouds in the wind. They’re like our kids. They just need our attention. I think of them as precious teachers who are trying to let me know when I need something I haven’t realized yet.
Anger tells me when I need to make a change and haven’t realized it yet. Resentment is when I’m not taking care of myself and am spending too much energy on someone else. Etc.
I’ve come to deeply appreciate my feelings as friends who tell me just what I need to hear even when I don’t want to hear it.
I started somatic therapy two years ago and have only recently been able to answer that dreaded question "where does this feeling show up in your body?" Anger is a hot face and restless body. Shame is a big lump in my throat. Grief is constriction in my chest, a literal aching heart. Sometimes getting outside helps, especially purposeful walk, a "moving to move through" vibe — uphill for anger and rage, something more gentle and cyclical for grief. But other times my therapist advised me to increase my window of tolerance and just SIT with the feelings. Feel my body flood. And then imagine that window opening enough to let in a crack of sunlight. This is the hardest work, so be kind to yourself as you're discovering these animal parts of your body 🤍