How Do You Feel Today?

My mother and brother left today after a 4 day visit with us for Christmas. We had a great time together, and we rarely get to spend this much time at one visit. After they left this morning, my daughter was very sad. She looked distressed and when I asked her what was wrong she told me she missed her Nana and Uncle. As she was crying in my lap, she told me that she felt like something was missing--Nana and Uncle's leaving left a piece missing in the house.

As I held my daughter while she cried and talked to me about how she was feeling, I had a parallel thought that I need to comfort myself the way I do with her. I make a very conscious and deliberate decision each time she is experiencing any emotion to support her through it. To be there for her; not to try to fix it, but to let her FEEL it in a safe, loving and supportive way.

Even before I entered therapy and discovered that I had a very hard time feeling anything but ennui, depression, anger, frustration, and impatience with my feelings, I knew that I needed to help my daughter to grow up emotionally healthier than I did. It is so fascinating to learn what helping her is teaching me. I am by no means as well versed as she is in handling her emotions!

I'm spending quite a bit of time in therapy, and in my life outside the hour of therapy every two weeks, trying to identify what I am feeling. Once I recognize what I'm feeling, I'm working very hard on just feeling them--accepting that they are a part of me. As I think back over the past few months of this practice, I have to laugh at how limited my vocabulary was--and how basic my feelings were. Most of the feelings I could identify were sadness, anger, frustration and rage. Shortly after that, the feeling and label for "disappointment" became part of my repertoire. It was soon after that my therapist found a sheet of line drawn faces that showed and labeled about 70 emotions. This has been so helpful to me!

For me, it was (and still is) easiest to feel sad or feel nothing after my father died. Even sadness was pushed away in favor of closing myself off from all emotions. When you've spent a lot of time (like 30 years!) spending most of your time pushing away how you are feeling, it isn't very long before you can't identify all those feelings you haven't been feeling!

Much of my depression is the result of not being able to identify and accept my feelings. I admit that this may seem ridiculous for some people to understand. You ask, "What's so hard about knowing what's going on in your head?" Feelings are scary when you don't know how you'll react, when you haven't given yourself the opportunity to practice them. Happiness, anger and grief can feel really weird if you're not experienced with it. And for me, happiness and emotions of that ilk felt disloyal to my father who had just (or 5 or 10 or 30 years later) died.

I've recently joked that it is much easier to just not feel anything--I'm very good at that! It's exhausting identifying and experiencing emotions and I'm not really good at it yet! But I am committed to this process and to the process of grieving in a fuller way than I ever have before. If that means crying jags because I'll never have Daddy back or incredible rage at the unfairness of it all, that's what it means.

I'm so grateful to have a very supportive husband and the ability to afford therapy and medication to help me stay stable and able to work through these feelings. I'm also blessed to have a daughter to help show me the way to my feelings.