Yes, there is.
The point of feeling a feeling you can’t do anything about is to let it discharge, complete the cycle, so that it can end.
I was talking about the nonjudgment research with my colleague Jan, and she told me she’d had a relevant experience over the weekend. She had noticed herself getting disproportionately enraged about a small thing— losing a stamp when she was trying to mail a letter—and she later made the connection that her anger wasn’t really about the stamp. The anger had been activated the night before, when she watched a movie about a misogynist jerk, which triggered her own history with a misogynist jerk from two decades ago.
“So what did you do with the anger?” I asked.
“I told myself I didn’t need to feel angry, because the jerk is gone from
my life now.”
“You judged? You hit the brakes?”
“What else was I supposed to do? Be mad at a guy I haven’t seen in twenty years?”
The threat—the misogynist jerk—wasn’t around anymore to fight against or run away from . . . and yet she still had these feelings. So what could she do with them?
She could complete the cycle. The Feels exist in her body, without reference to the jerk whom she successfully left behind.
But this is not the habit most of us learn early in our lives, and it takes practice. When we have feelings we can’t really do anything about and we don’t know how to let ourselves simply feel without doing anything, our brains will look for some situation it can do something about, and it will try to impose the feelings on that situation.
So don’t be mad at the guy who’s long gone. Just allow the anger to move through you. It doesn’t matter what it’s about, it’s just random Feels, left over from the past, that have to work themselves out. Don’t hit the gas pedal, but don’t hit the brake either. Notice the anger and allow it. Be still, and it will blow through you like a hot desert wind or a typhoon. healing trauma with nonjudging When a person experiences trauma, it’s like someone snuck into their garden and ripped out all the plants they had been cultivating with such care and attention. This is particularly awful when the person who tears up the garden is not a stranger but someone the person trusted. There is rage and
betrayal, there is grief for the garden as it was, and there is fear that it will never grow back.
But it will grow back. That’s what gardens do.
And you facilitate that growth by allowing the garden to be what it is, in process, rather than what it was or what you wish it were. How? Self- compassion: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness. Patience.
Feeling okay with feeling not-okay.
Healing hurts. If you break your leg, there is no stage in the healing process when your leg feels better than it does after it has healed. There is pain and itching and loss of strength. From the moment your leg is broken, it continues to feel bad . . . until, gradually, it starts to feel less bad. It’s appropriate that it hurts.
If you numb physical pain, healing can still happen. Alas, if we try to “numb” emotional pain, we get a break from the pain . . . but the healing is put on pause, too. People who are more evolved than I am can go through emotions like grief and panic without suffering, but for most of us, heart healing doesn’t happen without suffering. Sorry.
I recently worked with a survivor of sexual violence who was early in her healing process. She was by turns angry and despairing and frozen— and she was afraid all the time. Though she had been practicing meditation for a long time, the intensity of her emotions felt too big for her to allow them to move through her; they bottlenecked inside her. She felt panicked and stuck in the pain. She wanted to know what to do with all the feelings, how to fix them. She wanted to know how to stop hurting and how soon the pain would end.
“All I can tell you,” I said, “is that everything you’re experiencing, all the contradictory feelings and all the pain, is a normal part of the healing process. Everyone goes through it differently, and there’s no way to know how long it will last. It sucks for a while, and then gradually it gets better.
But I can tell you this for sure: Every single survivor I’ve ever known has found their way through it.”
We sat in silence while she absorbed the idea of not knowing when the pain would end and having to simply trust her body and her heart to heal in their own time. At last she said, “It’s like . . . I’m sitting with a stunned bird in the palm of my hand. If I get tense and try to hurry it, it will just stay frozen. But if I’m still and patient long enough, the bird will wake up and fly away.”