Welcome to the fourth instalment in a series of articles featuring real-life stories of healing and transformation based on actual people I’ve helped over the years in therapy.
Last month we explored Anxiety and Finding the Courage to Love, and you can read the article here.
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THE SITUATION:
‘Karen’ had been sharing with me details of the various problems she was having with her husband. She said their difficulties had been mounting for the past five years which had driven her to the end of her rope. “He describes me as being ‘like an island’ when it comes to emotions,” she told me.
Throughout the fifteen minutes or so she’d been talking about her pain, Karen had been smiling most of the time. Was it nerves, embarrassment, worry? Surely the smile belied her true feelings?
It reminded me of a time when my own anxiety had become so strong, it was like I’d built a formidable fortress to keep others out and keep myself from experiencing my own feelings.
We needed to find out what lay behind Karen’s smile. What was it that she was unknowingly working so hard to cover up?
I asked her what she was feeling at that moment, sharing with her that I’d noticed her smiling while she was telling me all these painful things. “I’m not sure what’s going on for you in terms of your feelings,” I said.
Karen paused for a few seconds before replying: “I don’t know. I mean, I guess I’m upset.”
It came as no surprise to me that Karen didn’t know how she felt. I suspected she hadn’t made contact with her feelings – hadn’t become more emotionally mindful. So, I suggested she take a moment to check in with herself, and as she did this, I gently asked her what she was noticing going on inside of her.
Her smile began to melt away as, for the first time since sitting down in my office, she paid attention to what was happening with her.
“I feel a little tense,” she said. “A little nervous.”
“Where in your body do you feel that?” I asked, hoping that by becoming more aware of her bodily experience Karen would come closer to her feelings.
She pointed to her chest and said it felt tight. I encouraged her to keep noticing what was happening and as she did her eyes filled with tears, and in a small, tentative voice, she said: “Actually, I think I’m feeling afraid.”
“Really? Of what?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I guess about what you might be thinking.”
She paused before continuing: “It’s weird. I feel small all of a sudden. Like a little girl, and I’m afraid you’re going to think I’m bad for feeling this way. That I’m bad for having my feelings.”
THE ISSUE / PROBLEM
Based on her early experiences in life, Karen has developed a phobia about having and sharing some of her feelings. She’s frequently uncomfortable experiencing and trusting her emotions and has started wondering if there’s something wrong with her for feeling as she does.
THE PROCESS
Why would Karen believe that I would think she was bad for experiencing the feelings she was having? I wasn’t sitting in judgment of her or looking at her with disdain. In fact, I was feeling quite compassionate toward her and I’m sure it showed, but still she felt like she’d done something wrong.
In my work with Karen, we needed to get to the bottom of why she was approaching her emotions with such uncertainty. Why did she feel so conflicted about having emotions and expect others to respond to her feelings with disapproval? Why had she become like so many others, afraid of really believing and sharing her feelings?
I suggested to Karen that, as with many such issues, often the answer could be found by looking at her earliest emotional experiences. Behind the mask of her smile, Karen was experiencing pain, sadness, grief and anger. But I knew it was likely that during her childhood, even before her earliest memories, she had learned to hide these feelings away.
When we started exploring her past, Karen shared that her mother had been emotionally unpredictable, subject to big mood swings to such an extent she never knew when things might turn sour. Her mother ran hot and cold, she said. She was easily irritated and became volatile at times but could also be friendly and pleasant. This instability kept the family on their toes, trying their best to keep mom happy.
Karen said her mother could be really critical of her, and cited as an example a snowy day when Karen came home from school, excited that she’d been asked by other girls in the neighborhood to go out and play. Her mother, preoccupied with her own emotional angst, was unable to embrace her daughter’s joy and told her: “If I have to stay inside and not have any fun, then so do you.”
Karen then divulged that she had more recently discovered that her mother was a survivor of rape. The tragic incident happened when her mother was a teen and resulted in the birth of a child she had to give up for adoption. All through Karen’s childhood, her mother kept her traumatic experiences a secret, trying to extinguish the emotional pain she felt. But it was clear that pushing down and not processing through these feelings had a toxic effect on Karen and the rest of her family.
As a child, Karen developed strategies to deal with her mother’s erratic behavior. She learned to dismiss her own emotional needs, to deny any feelings she had that might make her mother feel uncomfortable. Karen tried to be the best little girl she could be. Always smiling, obedient and self-reliant. And while her mother often rewarded her for this, at times Karen was admonished for not trying hard enough, leaving her with a sense that she could do better.
In reality, Karen longed to be cared for, comforted and embraced in a whole and unconditional way. But her ‘smile through it all’ approach made sense at the time. It helped her get through some difficult years.
Over time, this pattern of trying to please others while neglecting her own feelings became her standard response to situations. But it disconnected her from her own emotional experiences and the people she was closest to, including her husband. While the approach had helped her maintain a connection of sorts with her mother during childhood, it had become a liability in adulthood. Her brain was operating on programming established during her younger years and would continue to do so until she ‘re-wired’ herself by overcoming her fears and experiencing something new and different, by opening up to, facing and dealing with her feelings.
Once Karen and I achieved a good understanding of these unwritten emotional rules under which she’d been operating, and the ways she’d been avoiding her feelings, we worked through her feelings phobia, and slowly Karen found the strength to open up to and face the long unresolved sadness and anger she’d buried deep inside her.
THE RESULTS
During our work together, fairly readily, Karen’ s pain began to transform into a renewed sense of self. She began to feel compassion toward the little girl inside her who had suffered so much, and her adult voice began to emerge.
One evening, Karen found the confidence to talk to her husband about the work we were doing together and to share with him some of her feelings. She tried to remain composed, but during their conversation she began to feel pain and sadness welling up inside of her. But, instead of smiling through it, or fighting off the emotions and staying distant from them as she had done in the past, she gave way to her feelings. She cried openly with her husband, not able to fully articulate what was coming up for her, but clear that something deep inside of her had been stirred.
And, as she told me during our next session, something amazing happened: “My husband moved closer, and held and comforted me. He told me he wanted to be there for me, wanted to understand and feel close to me. He said: ‘I’d rather have this than the island any day,”.
CONCLUSION
Many of the fears we have as adults are a direct result of early experiences in which we learned that having and showing feelings can have negative consequences. In Karen’s case, when she cried as a baby it was likely her mother felt overwhelmed and pulled away or expressed anger or frustration. Such a response for a baby is scary, bringing with it the threat of rejection or worse still abandonment – which to an infant is the equivalent of death. Karen learned that if she was sad, mommy would leave her. If she got upset, mommy got angry. So, in order to survive, Karen stopped herself from having certain feelings.
Karen had no awareness of the historical roots behind her feelings phobia. But by helping Karen become more emotionally mindful, she was more able to begin to recognize when she avoided her feelings and how she’d become, in effect, a master of denial. By giving way to her feelings, the mask that Karen had been using slipped away, no longer feeling necessary, allowing her to show the world who she really was and share with others how she really felt. Karen learned that being more open to herself and others was not something she needed to fear. It was something that could actually have a positive impact on her life.
