A couple of weeks ago I was surfing, looking for something to watch, and I happened upon the 2013 production of Romeo and Julie. One of the rare times I found anything I was interested in viewing.
It’s not like I haven’t seen this before, but I’m a sucker for a pretty face (what woman doesn’t want to watch that face for two hours?) so I succumbed.
I remember the first time I saw this film, the 1968 Franco Zeffirelli version, with my sister. I was fifteen years old, and the entire audience was female.
When it got to the death scene, you could practically feel the walls of the theater heaving with the collective sobs of a hundred women. And my sister and I were among them, contributing to the deluge.
Predictably, with my latest viewing, I did some more crying. But I didn’t wait for that climactic moment. I was sobbing with their first kiss. Because I knew what was coming.
Why do we watch this stuff? Seriously. It’s depressing.
I didn’t know it until I started weeping, that I needed that emotional release. Personal stuff going on in my life was creating some sadness in me. But I was doing the same thing I have always done, because it’s how I learned to manage emotion. You probably learned it too.
Survivors are masters of avoidance. We distract, deny, or dissociate from our feelings. It feels safer. And it’s an automatic response, unless you learn to interrupt it.
Until I watched the tragedy unfold, and that wave of emotion came up, I didn’t even know I was feeling sad. Once the flood gates opened, I acknowledged the grief and just let it wash through me and out.
Why don’t we allow ourselves this cathartic healer more often?
Because it doesn’t feel safe to feel. Because we may be ashamed of our emotions. Because we’re numb (they went into hiding a long time ago) and resurrecting them requires mammoth effort.
Because we’re afraid once the faucet is turned on, it will never stop.
But here’s the thing. There’s only one switch for emotion. The good, the bad, it’s all controlled by that one switch. If you turn it off, there’s just nothing. Flat, numb, apathetic and depressed. That’s what you get when you shut it all down.
How to turn the feelings back on?
First, we make it safe to feel again. We learn to sit with ourselves and just notice, without engaging. You are an adult now, the emotions aren’t going to kill you, like you thought they would when you were a kid. And now, there’s no one there to blame, shame, or shut you down.
I talk about this in my upcoming book, The Survivor’s Compass – From Trauma to True Self. The decision for containment versus catharsis. It’s one of the many topics that I hope will help other survivors find their way through the difficult and sometimes confusing process of trauma healing.
The book comes out in a few weeks.
You can get started now by learning how to just sit with your emotions, without judgement, without engaging, just noticing.
A good way to start is with a “body scan”. Take a few deep nose breaths, then close your eyes and focus on your feet. Bring that attention up through your body, moving your focus up through each part, just noticing – tension, pain, sadness, stress or anxiety. Whatever is there that needs to be heard.
Your body is a doorway into your emotions.
And as you do this body scanning, tell yourself, “It is okay to feel what I feel. It is okay to know what I know.”
It’s a simple but powerful tool. Just one of the many tools that I teach in my upcoming book, The Survivor’s Compass – From Trauma to True Self. It will be available soon on Amazon for Kindle and hard copy. I’ll let you know when it is available.
Until next time,
Anne
You can learn more about the book here: https://www.annemarck.com/the-manual/