“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Why do we let emotions rule us? Funny, or not funny at all, is that, when we become more aged, our body begins to rule us and all the emotional manipulation that we thought worked for us, no longer works because…surprise! There is always something new by morning that our body forces us to attend to.
There were those first months that our body was all body and we were demanding and manipulative with the only sounds we could express our emotions with. Then our mind got busy and we learned, better, how to manipulate with emotion. Some of us took a long time and drug some of that with us as we aged. Suddenly, I am noticing it is more about body and spirit now that I am billowing towards the end.
I have come to realize that it was always my emotions that betrayed me. I allowed my emotions to rule me for a time as most of us do. I was either defensive, felt threatened, or caused my own vulnerability. I was overly sensitive. I know it. I see it in my HerStory. I allowed emotion to rule and missed out on a lot of good stuff by focusing on emotion rather than real life. Sometimes it was wayyy too much.
My emotions allowed other people to manipulate me. I let others ideologies and ideas about me, judgments of me, (their story of me) to take front stage rather than live my own authentic life. I let circumstances and others rule me. I let them. I LET them. Accepting this is freeing. As well, accepting this empowers me. Instead of Me controlling Me, I allowed people, places, things, events, control me. I have learned to take all that back and to be more in control of myself, as best I can, now, almost too late. My most guilt-ridden times are when I allowed my own emotions to rule me, never mind, when I let others do it. Yes, sometimes I was too intense. Yes, sometimes I was angry, defensive, guilt-ridden, because I did not control my own emotions.
As babies, as children, as youth, we tend to turn to others to save us, to comfort us. As we mature, we tend to still seek others to save us, to comfort and support us. We are taught, by role modeling, how to deal with emotions (or not) and then we are conditioned by our significant others to react in certain emotional ways. Some of us look to others to soothe us. This thought was a real lesson for me and it took me long enough to follow things back to the triggers and key incidents when I needed soothing and comfort. Over these last months, I have begun to trust my own feelings and find ways to deal with them in a more dignified and graceful way. It took some trauma for me to seek out my own self-destructive emotions and learn to manage them by practicing what I preached.
I have always been an overthinker. Some things I have been adamant about, whether my thinking was true or not. I came to believe my emotional truths. Whew! I came to believe my emotional truths! I still do, betimes. My overthinking has not always been my best friend. My emotional mental noise drowned out reality, but, in a way, I knew it could, so I would sidetrack my thinking. For instance, when my son was in Afghanistan, I knew my emotional thinking could really go off the rails, if I let it. That was a huge emotional time for me and it could have been so much worse as I worried and stewed and fretted over the reality. I knew I did not need to let my emotional imagination take over. I would distract myself, thank goodness, in healthy ways, and I got through that year and a half. Yes, he got hurt. Yes, he got in peril. Yes, he came home more hurt in ways that none of us could have imagined, but I held it together. I had to be there for the rest of my kids, and my son, if they needed me to be strong and brave and courageous. They did not need my emotional chaos. They needed an emotionally strong mother. I learned to control some of those fears and I learned to soothe myself through healthy distraction, and we made it. I am in constant watch for emotional noise chattering in the background that might undermine that lesson.
I have found it is not okay to say, “I am a sensitive person!” That just ingrains the thought that it is okay for me to NOT be in control of my emotions. I am becoming more and more aware of when unrealistic fears, defense, sadness even begins to whisper in my emotional arena. I am better able to pause and think about where the emotional thought is coming from. I am better at not seeking others to save me or comfort me. I accept that I have the feelings and then deal with them at that moment. I have done it enough that it is becoming a habit to pause, to take stock, to seek out the thread of thoughts that would lead me to feeling overly emotional in any way. This is huge! It is huge for me, as it will be for you if this evokes thought for you. Man, I love how my brain works when I am thinking healthy thoughts. I can problem solve rather than fluctuate emotionally over things and stew myself into a mess. I was always good at covering, until I wasn’t. Now, I am good at recognizing whether my emotional thoughts are healthy or not, real or not, wise or not. No more do I find myself in a puddle of muddle. It has been a long time coming.
©Carol Desjarlais 16.10.20
Art done with Juna Biagioni
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