Not everyone fears a heart attack.
Some members of the community fear emotions. For these people, panic and anxiety become nightmares because of the emotional states they produce. Feeling anxious or experiencing panic means feeling a wide range of emotions including fear, vulnerability, disappointment, anger, or sadness.
For our friends that are having a hard time handling these emotions, feeling these things will drive them to reach conclusions about being permanently broken, never getting better, being defective, being weak, or being a disruption or disappointment to their loved ones. Anxiety creates emotions, then those emotions themselves are seen as failures or disasters .
Commonly, this is the result of being fused with our emotions. When fused with our emotions, one may believe that they are their emotions. This can often lead one to declare that emotions are indicators of worth or value. Success or failure is based on emotional outcomes.
“Did I feel the right way?”
This often appears in the realms of parenting or intimate relationships. For example, feeling anxious while interacting with a child leads to sadness based on the mistaken idea that a good parent would not be anxious around their child. Another common scenario involves feeling anxiety while interacting with a life partner, or during times of intimacy. The mistaken belief that a good partner would only be happy or joyful during these interactions leads to declarations of failure or broken-ness.
This can create a really nasty self-fueling cycle. Anxiety creates feelings of failure, which then create negative emotional states like sadness, which themselves get judged as failure, which then leads to additional negative emotions, and the cycle is ignited.
In a situation where emotions are your feared disaster, you will find yourself avoiding not based on the usual fears, but based on feelings of failure or confirmation of weakness. Most people might refuse to drive on the highway because they fear that panic means a heart attack or passing out. But some refuse to drive on the highway because having a panic attack while driving means they are failing and confirms the self-belief that they are broken and will never get better.
IMPORTANT: You are NOT your emotions. Your emotions do not determine who you are. They only reflect what you are experiencing.
How does one approach this situation? The same rules apply in a general sense. While other members of the community may have to learn how to move through the fear of death or loss of control, you will have to learn to move through those feelings of failure and negative self-judgments.
“Just because I think I am weak does not mean I am. I can allow these emotions, recognize them as part of being alive, and show myself that I can handle them.”
I understand that this is a tall order. If you’ve spent a lifetime seeing your emotions as confirmation that you weak or broken, this will not be an easy shift to make. This can be hard work, but we don’t need easy here, only possible.
Tomorrow we’ll continue with a look at some common misconceptions about emotions.
Hey it’s Monday and that means that today at 2 PM Eastern I’ll do my “Recovery Monday” livestream on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Come join in!
76. When Emotions Are The Feared Disaster