Mindfulness & Working With Emotions

A friend asked me the other day, “What is mindfulness.” Asked point-blank like that with none of my notes handy, I had to come up with a spur of the moment answer. Hesitatingly, I told her “Mindfulness is being present to the current moment. But it’s not just physical presence. It’s also being aware of your emotions, and how you are responding to them in the moment. How they’re affecting you.” I went on to tell her that mindfulness had given me some of the tools I needed to climb out of the deep well of pain and isolation that had been created from various childhood traumas. My dad left when I was five years old. I spent many years, both before and after he left, listening to my parents’ frequent shouting matches and witnessing their abusive behavior towards each other. And I experienced their verbal and sometimes physical abuse directly. My parents were both deeply wounded individuals from their own childhood traumas. It’s not unusual that this stuff is generational. In time they both began to use alcohol as substitutes for emotional intimacy, or for any processing of emotions. My mother specialized in anger and rage. My father in anger and fear tactics. Between the two of them, well, I wouldn’t have licensed either one of them to take care of a child for a week, let alone have one of their own.

For me, mindfulness became a two-part strategy. The first part required me to come to terms with reality. I had to extricate myself from a semi-constant day-dream, that came from a mix of wishful thinking and reading too many books. Frequently, what we label as “hope” is really wishful thinking in disguise. While hope might be a positive outlook on life, despite momentarily adverse circumstances, wishful thinking is more of a “let me re-write how the world is going because I don’t like the way things are right now.” Someone else might use video games, or working for long hours for the same effect. Substance abuse also falls under this category – things we use to numb ourselves to what is going on in real life. Using wishful thinking and a strategy of dodging reality was my go-to format.

The second part of mindfulness training required me to develop an awareness of my emotions. I needed to develop an awareness and a vocabulary for what I was feeling emotionally, and learn to process those emotions once I found them. My emotional processing, up until that point, had generally been to ignore any emotions except “the nice ones” until they were too large to stuff into my suitcase any longer, and then to “explode” in emotionally violent verbal outbursts. It’s possible that I learned this tactic from my parents, but I don’t recommend it as part of a healthy dynamic. I found myself needing a more rational, healthy approach to feeling and sensing my emotions, and then some tools and techniques for processing them once I’d found them.

In my 40’s I went through a major change in life. I found myself going back to school, taking classes in mediation training and conflict resolution, anything that looked like it could resource me and get me out of the toxic hole I’d spent my life in. I eventually found my way into a business psychology program, learning to facilitate meetings and group process. Some of the prep classes were straight emotional awareness processing classes. It was sort of like being in reform school for emotional delinquents, although most of the other students were far more prepared to face their own emotions and talk about them than I was. I remember the first few months of classes as being particularly painful – I would have rather gone to face the dentist than go to those classes. Eventually I succumbed to my newfound awareness of my own emotions, and began to enjoy the classes. It was a novel experience, and one I began to treasure. Eventually, I became aware enough that I began to curb my negative self-talk and treat myself better. There’s no one quite like a person who suffered trauma during childhood for negative self-talk. In our own eyes, we often view ourselves as the lowest of the low. Even if we are kind people, good at what we do, and the outer world sees us as good people, we generally have little sense of our own worth or value.

Classes were eventually replaced with self-help workshops, and I had the good fortune to bump into non-violent communications (NVC) training, based on the program developed by Marshall Rosenberg. I took somatic focusing classes, work based on how emotions felt in my body. Like many other victims of early trauma, I had frequently been oblivious to my emotions until they’d stored up for a while. With this training, I began to be aware of my emotions in the moment, as they came up. Rather than being surprised to find I was reacting to an emotion, I began to be able to name it as I was feeling it. This was really exciting to me. I remember at least one argument where I burst out laughing, as I discovered the mechanics of how my anger had created the argument in the first place. The person I was arguing with was confused, but I think grateful for the interruption. Overall, I began to have a much better experience with day-to-day life, and found myself developing more satisfying social connections.

Continually, through these early years of mindfulness training, I came up against something that could not easily be resolved by simply being aware of my emotional state. This was my limited sense of personal value and worth. My dad left the household when I was very young – five years old. Sadly, this did not stop my parents from their incessant fighting. What it did was remove my active ally from the household. My dad had been my go-to person for parental comfort and friendship. That avenue was suddenly closed. He moved quite a distance away and stayed very firmly not available, whether through his actions or my mother’s. You can’t tell a five-year old child that they are not responsible for their parents no longer being together, or that they are not responsible for their father leaving. At that age, the world is still very much based on what you have done, and what people do to you. I couldn’t be told that my dad was no longer able to have a meaningful or stable relationship with my mom. As an adult, I can see that quite easily. As a small child, in a hurt voice I would have told you, “Daddy left me.”

His absence tore a hole in my stability, and left me no place to shelter in the face of my mother’s storms. My mother did not remarry, and was not able to develop a sustained relationship after my father left. She was mentally unstable, from a very tough childhood that included having no mother after the age of 1 1/2 years and a frequently absent father. Left in the care of various house-keepers, and moved from house to house, she had very little self-esteem and a high dependency on wanting others to take care of her. (Can you begin to see a repeating pattern?) My mom began to self-medicate with alcohol and Valium, and by the time I was 12-years old she was having alcohol-induced blackouts. Sadly, all this was under the smokescreen of her disguise as a professionally successful woman. She never felt herself able to go get professional help, so her friends and I were left with the mop-up. By the time I was 12, I was the responsible adult in the house. I remember, she introduced me to a friend at that time who said, “Yeah, 12 going on 40…” Whatever sense of personal security and value I might have had after my father left was destroyed by my mother’s mental instability, mixed with her controlling attitude. The severity of her angry outbursts, when she could no longer hold it together, rattled the foundations of our existence.

This was the household I grew up in. Strong emotions were unsafe – they might elicit an outburst from my mother’s mercurial temper. I learned to crawl inside books and my imagination. I hid for years in the worlds that the authors painted. With the occasional release of going outside for long walks, where I found a calm reprieve in nature. I used various forms of escapism for the first 40 years of my life, to give space between me and the outer world. Based on the experiences of my early years, I assumed an unkind, unjust world. It was only when I began to question some of my survival skills as an adult, that I began to discover that the world was a surprisingly good environment. I gradually found that it was far different than my earlier experiences had led me to believe.

I’d never considered before that many of my early fears were manufactured, or the result of living with an alcoholic parent. I used judgment and manipulation, much like my mother before me, to control the daily environment of my life. I would judge people at the drop of a hat, without thought to their personal feelings or sense of value. This brings up a point of personal shame that I have lived with for many years, and is perhaps common to people who’ve experienced trauma. I can access it easily, when I think about how I used to behave when I talked to people. I was sharp and curt with people I didn’t know. I was judgmental, sarcastic, and incredibly rude to ordinarily kind people, people like sales clerks and customer service people, who already have the weight of the world on their shoulders from the intensity and stress of their jobs. There is a sense of aloneness and isolation common to people who have experienced trauma, which offers a bitter reminder that “we are not like other people.” While this may be true, it is not necessarily true for the reasons we believe. In isolating ourselves, so that we will be safer in the face of what are perceived as ordinary threats, people who have experienced trauma also isolate themselves from the warmth of human kindness and ordinary affection. You will generally find people who’ve experienced trauma interacting as if from a distance, to avoid any close emotional contact that might induce further wounding. Before spending time with mindfulness training, I may have talked about emotions and I may even have appeared to be vulnerable occasionally. But those were just smokescreens to cover my confusion over where I fit into the world, and my sense of deep grief from what had passed before.

My life is quieter now. Where I used to thrive on drama, I have learned to appreciate a relatively peaceful inner world. The inner quiet I experience lets me hear what’s going on in the outside world, around me. What I hear doesn’t always reassure me… but it does let me know that I am present with what’s going on, both for me and the people around me. If I find that my thoughts or words are hurting myself or someone else who is nearby, I’ve learned that I can adjust my tone. My previous attitude to others was “toughen up, you need to learn to protect yourself.” That isn’t all that unique of an attitude from an emotionally wounded person, yet it doesn’t do much to encourage friendships. Over time, I found that other people’s emotional experience had become more and more important to me. I began thinking of others, and how my words or actions would affect them. Compassion crept into my lexicon, and along with it an increase in the level of kindness and friendliness I offered to people — even people I hadn’t met before. I began to feel more stable, and more resourceful. And all of these things created an even greater change in the way that I experienced the world. As I became more stable, I began to perceive the world as a kinder and more friendly place.

Where does mindfulness come in, as we look at our daily lives? Are we able to keep present every moment? Or is it more natural for us to tune in every now and then?

For me, right now, I find that I am easily able to tune in, first thing in the morning. I check to see how resilient my heart is feeling, or if maybe it is feeling a little stiff and not so friendly. If my heart is feeling checked out, I take some time to breathe into it, or put my hand on it and think of something good that happened recently. I’ll just sit with it like that for a couple of minutes until I sense it beginning to soften. When I get up, I take a little time to meditate. I started doing this regularly when I found that it brought a dependable level of calm into my day. Then I get going with my everyday activities.

At various moments during the day, I might find myself having a thought, and then wondering where it came from. “Wait a minute, where did that thought come from? That doesn’t sound like me.” When that happens, I make myself stop the seemingly endless chatter of thoughts and feelings that run through my mind. I invite myself to “Pause” what I am thinking. I let my mind go quiet for a moment, and then take a couple of deep, conscious breaths. That kind of resets me, so I get back to whatever I was doing. These are the ways mindfulness is present in my life right now.

I still sometimes argue with people, but not for as long, not as strongly, and not with any of the intent to hurt that used to be there. I am still impatient sometimes, but not as often. I sometimes catch myself before I start an argument, and just invite myself to be with whatever emotion I am feeling. Later, when I’m calmer, seems to offer a more successful time for talking about emotionally loaded content. I still feel frightened sometimes, or sad, or angry. Yet I have learned to accept this as a normal part of the human experience – having emotions and feelings. The reactivity has decreased as I’ve begun to navigate my emotions more mindfully. I try to use them more as information rather than a volatile launching point for the next argument. “Oh wow, that’s really frustrating! There’s dishes in the sink again. My partner just promised yesterday that he would do a better job at keeping the sink clean. Noticing I’m feeling frustration,” and then I investigate what’s going on. Call it compassionate action: “I wonder what happened? Oh, look, he’s stuck on a phone call. I’ll bet that’s the call from work he was waiting for. OK, gonna calm down and ride this one out. He’ll get back to the dishes in a minute. Even if he doesn’t, I can probably ask him in a calmer voice once he’s done with the phone call.”

In general, with mindfulness, I am calmer. I frequently find that life is less frightening than I used to find it, and more interesting. I enjoy my lived experience so much that I spend less time reading books. And finally, the most important part for me, is that I feel that I am part of things. I no longer have the sense of being on the outside looking in, like a little kid with their nose pressed against the glass of the window looking at a Christmas display. I feel as though I am a welcome participant in what is going on in life.