Learning to Feel… Again
Photo by Joseph Frank on Unsplash
What happens when your primary path of decision making is broken? I usually make my decisions based on my feelings, but I could not do so for many years. Sometimes I felt things pretty intensely, and other times I felt numb. Regardless of which one I experienced, I felt paralyzed.
There are many times when I can’t tell you what I feel. This doesn’t mean I don’t know how to feel. But it does mean I don’t know how to identify what I feel very well. There is a breakdown somewhere in my brain between feeling something and being able to express it.
Photo by Sydney Sims on Unsplash
People have got different parts of their brains that do different things. One section needs to talk to another, and so it sends messages delivered on a particular path. Let’s say this message is “I’m hungry.” Assuming this message gets to the right location, it will prompt a person to get something to eat. The more times this message is received, it will prompt the brain to create something like a road, making it easy for the messages to travel down. This route is called a neuropathway, and as a general rule, the messenger will choose a road instead of creating a path.
Now someone can be starving and still not feel hungry. Why is this? The message of “I’m hungry” started down the brain road, but the road was somehow blocked. It never reached its destination. This happens with individuals that have eating disorders, for example. They have become so accustomed to ignoring their hunger that they can no longer actually feel it. They have created a road between “I’m hungry” to the ‘ignore hunger dumpster’ where it just gets discarded.
I experienced this with my feelings road. When I was relatively young, it worked just fine. I had no issues expressing what I felt, even though I didn’t have the vocabulary to distinguish between complex emotions (hurt vs disappointed). I would describe my feelings as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ which is typical for young children.
From there, though, some things in my brain changed. Sometimes a change can occur on the brain highway instantly, often through a traumatic event, and other times, it can be a slow festering that gradually builds on itself.
My feelings road was a bit of both. As a young child, I often didn’t feel like people took me seriously. If I shared my thoughts, they were often dismissed, which made me feel like my thoughts/feelings/opinions weren’t important — that I wasn’t important. It got worse for me, though, when a sibling of mine got sick. Much of the household already revolved around them, and so without realizing it, my parents began neglecting me to be there for my sibling. I withdrew more because my home didn’t feel like a safe environment anymore. At this point, I wasn’t sharing much of my feelings. I would keep them to myself most of the time simply because that was safer. But when a family member told me directly in front of my whole family that no one cared to hear from me anymore, I saw the expression of feelings, even feelings themselves, as a threat. Receiving this message forced me to create a road from that well-tread path in my brain, sending all feelings down to ‘ignore feelings dump.’
Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash
This was one of the most psychologically damaging things my parents did to me. Now some of you reading this may be horrified at this. It may be unfathomable to you that a parent could care so little about one of their children that they wouldn’t even want to know what their experience of life is. Others may think that this isn’t as big a deal as other situations kids deal with. You’d both be right; it’s all a matter of what you compare to it.
Regardless of which perspective you take, it created a way of thinking in me that was so ingrained and very destructive that I got to a place where I could no longer feel. It damaged my self-esteem, my communication, and my mental well being. I felt ashamed, worthless, and unlovable.
For many years it was believed that once formed, the brain couldn’t change — essentially that this would be my fate for the rest of my life (and for some people, it is). More and more research proves that the brain is malleable long after the neuropathways are formed. That means these roads are semi-permanent. They remain the default if nothing changes them. You will continue to think you are a failure if you keep thinking you are a failure. But here is the crucial thing — they can be changed, but only with effort. Those that have recovered from addiction have proved this.
For example, I’ve heard people say they like themselves more when they have had something to drink. That led to them becoming an alcoholic. There is a little pathway somewhere in their brain that has connected ‘liking myself’ to alcohol. Getting sober is a challenge either way but imagine the difference in that journey if they can change the mental link of “liking myself” to alcohol to liking themself when sober. It will change things.
Photo by Artem Labunsky on Unsplash
In a sense, we all have characteristics of an addiction. We all have ways of thinking or being that aren’t helpful that have become so ingrained in us that they become the default — we don’t know how to survive without them.
As an adult, I had first to allow myself to feel and then learn how to identify what I was feeling and then from there, I needed to learn how to accept those feelings. It was easier to start with the emotions that are often deemed positive like I feel ‘happy’ or ‘calm’ or ‘excited.’ It was also easier to do this with strong emotions because they are so up there in your face. So that was where I started. I would regularly stop and ask myself, “What do I feel right now?” And I would sit in that emotion, often for several minutes while the brain messenger tried to create a new path or travel down an old abandoned one. After a while, it would return with a word. I would then sit and reflect, “Is _____ how I feel?” And if it was, I would sit quietly for a while, allowing myself to feel it, and say, “This is what ____ feels like.” If it weren’t, I would start the mental journey again. I’d do this until I got the right word and felt confident that I could pair the emotion with the word. As I became more comfortable with this process, I moved on to subtler or uncomfortable feelings.
I’m nowhere near an expert at this. There are times when I take a long time to identify a feeling. Sometimes I can’t recognize it. I can only say, “I don’t know what I am feeling, but it’s not ‘x’ or ‘y’. There are also times when the feelings are rather uncomfortable, and I don’t want to experience them. Yet, I don’t think it’s possible to experience the ‘pleasant’ emotions while being cut off from the ‘unpleasant’ ones. You either let them all travel the brain road or none. You don’t get to pick. The pleasant ones make it worth it, though. And the unpleasant ones, well, I think experiencing them is part of being human, not always fun but still valuable.
For understanding the concepts I presented in here better please see the resources I’ve added. I can’t say I hold to everything presented in them necessarily but it can be a good place to start.
Resources:
Switch On Your Brain by Dr. Caroline Leaf
SMART Recovery Handbook/process
https://healthtransformer.co/the-neuroscience-of-behavior-change-bcb567fa83c1
https://human-memory.net/neural-pathways/
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-brain-plasticity-2794886