You know the feeling — anxiety and slight dread sitting in the dentist’s chair as they check your gums. They poke away at your gums with a sharp measuring tool and apply gentle prickly torture to make sure you’re not suffering from gingivitis or some other horrible de-toothing disease. If you find this measuring as painful as I do, you probably heard from your dentist something along the lines of, “If you flossed, this wouldn’t be so bad.”
This year, at the ripe age of 32, I finally took up my dentist on this suggestion and started flossing regularly. It only took a weirdly sensitive lower gum and a fear of gum failure through COVID-19 to finally convince me that I should give consistent flossing a shot.
For y’all that are where I was in terms of flossing — ie not nearly as dentally hygienic as our dentists prefer — it turns out the first few weeks of regular flossing is also painful. But, eventually, the flossing stops hurting. In fact, eventually, it feels great to plunk that flossing thread into your gums. It feels good to floss now. I promise.
It occurred to me, as I became consistent with flossing and learned to enjoy the sensation, that feeling our darker emotions, like anger, fear, grief, anxiety, is a lot like flossing.
You know this feeling too. Experiencing difficult emotions while going through something — e.g. going through a break up, losing a loved one, just trying to stay sane through the insanity of a global epidemic and pondering life with ever increasing existential dread — you want to numb the feeling. To make it less stark, harsh, hurtful. To numb the pain.
Numbing takes many forms. I tend to drink, smoke a little herb, throw myself into a social scene, or lose myself in a workout. It might take other forms that might otherwise look like healthy distractions, like dancing, talking with friends over the phone, or going for long walks. But in one way or another, we all tend to avoid steeping ourselves in these emotions.
But the emotions that we numb or distract from have uses, purposes, and they can and should be embraced. Anger is important for setting healthy boundaries. Sadness reminds us that we lost something we cared for. Jealousy can be a signal that our significant others aren’t aligned with us. Worry, in the right context, can be our gut telling us to think more thoroughly through a problem that we haven’t given enough brain cycles to. There’s a time and place for every emotion.
And if these emotions are numbed or distracted from every time they come up, they feel like biting floss to the gingivitis inflamed gum of our psyche. We feel anger’s intense heat and lose control. Jealousy becomes so encompassing that we lash out at our significant other without communicating with them and giving them a chance to repair trust. Worry becomes nail-biting anxiety, trapping us with visions of possibly painful futures.
There is nothing wrong with feeling these negative emotions. It’s in holding them in, letting them take over, that we can lose ourselves.
And it’s in avoiding these emotions that we give them power. When we fear our anger, sadness, anxiety, or fear itself, that’s when these emotions take on a life of their own and can take over your life. And we definitely don’t want that.
So, let’s say you’re in this state, one where negative emotions have a biting sting. What do we do about it?
It’s a lot like flossing — the best way we can make our lives feel better, through good parts and bad, is by letting ourselves experience it fully. Instead of numbing and distracting, we can decide to sink into our feelings as they come up. Treat them like friends, no matter what form they come in, with welcome and curiosity at what truths they are helping us become present to.
So here’s an invitation, an exercise to try for yourself— the next time you’re feeling anger, jealousy, fear, or other “negative” emotions, take some space to sit down and sink into your body while they are with you. Feel into your body as the emotion grips you.
Sink into the feeling and give yourself space to ask a question, “What am I feeling right now?”
Don’t spin into why you’re feeling it, at least not yet. Rationalizing our feelings is in itself an escape.
Just ask yourself what you’re feeling and sit with that feeling.
After you’ve taken some time to really feel that emotion, decide that this emotion is okay to feel right now. All emotions have their time and purpose.
Maybe you’ll want to do this with a friend, sharing your emotion. Or you’re doing it by yourself. In either case, don’t worry about solving the problem that is giving you this emotion.
The point here is to feel the emotion and to be okay with it.
If you intentionally hold space for your darker emotions, you’ll find two things:
- They become less painful over time. Each time you make space for these emotions, they become easier to bear, just like flossing.
- They are part of our intuition. Like joy and gratitude points us towards parts of life we enjoy, anger and fear point us towards parts of life we wish were different. That’s powerful and worth acknowledging.
As you befriend your darker emotions, you’ll find an interesting thing happening within you — integration. Your darker emotions will find a welcoming home in your psyche that will make them both in your control, like tools of a master carving your emotional landscape, and will make them hold less power over you.
As these darker emotions become your friends, they no longer master you. You master them. And in doing so, you’ll find that these emotions come and go, just like your lighter emotions. It’s only in fearing and avoiding emotions that they become stuck in us. When they are mastered, they are subject to the same emotional alchemy and healing that is natural to all of us if we trust ourselves.
So treat your emotions like flossing. Feel them regularly. In doing that, you’ll find peace and meaning held within the depths of our darker emotions.
