Stop Disrespecting Your Emotions!
When you denigrate, diminish, ignore, bury, or block your emotions, it makes every single challenge in your life more difficult.
Éloge de la Folie (1970), Jane Graverol
When I was a TV critic, I sometimes interviewed famous writers, actors, directors, and filmmakers. Thanks to the inherent aggression of Hollywood culture, I expected a lot of these people to be insecure narcissists. And some of them definitely were.
But the artists I respected and admired the most were often very different than I expected. They were completely at ease in their own skin. They asked curious questions, listened enthusiastically, and seemed engaged and grounded throughout our time together. And when I asked them questions about emotions or ideas or their big-picture philosophies about how to live, they got very excited because they had so much to say. They could transition smoothly and confidently from talking about craft or the business to discussing their feelings, their motivations, and what they wouldn’t tolerate or accept.
When these very successful people discussed emotional topics, they weren’t afraid of becoming vulnerable, slowing down, showing their hearts. You could understand why they’d had such great careers, why so many people loved and supported them, why they kept working hard and setting the bar higher for themselves. They truly seemed to know themselves well and to accept their quirks and limits in spite of the enormous challenges of working in Hollywood for years.
I found this discovery both inspiring and intimidating. It was intense to meet people who were firing on all pistons like that — so insightful, charismatic, open, and sensitive, but with such firm boundaries. I wondered if I would ever grow enough to become like them: so relaxed, so eager to share themselves, so ready for humor or surprises, so up for new challenges.
Back then, my life was great, but I still saw my emotions as embarrassing. This fundamental fact about me colored everything I did. I stored up resentments and talked too much shit about close friends because I didn’t think I had a right to express what I needed to them. I closed myself off from big opportunities because I didn’t think I had what it took to interact with ambitious, charming people. And when I did show myself or take on a big challenge, the shame and dread that accompanied the intense vulnerability of trying something I truly cared about made it difficult to keep pursuing that goal.
In other words, my inability or unwillingness to grapple with and accept the intensity of my emotions kept me running away from engagement, community, beauty, brilliance, and fun in my life.
I’m not saying I never did anything! I had great friends, loved my husband like crazy, enjoyed the adventure of raising little beasts (human and canine), and wrote in order to express my intensity on the page. Nevertheless, my reluctance to not just accept the full range of my emotions but to respect and receive guidance from those emotions led me into a lot of frustrating, confusing, upsetting, shame-inducing situations. It also limited my career options and made my life small.
If there’s one gift I’d love to give to everyone who reads this column — and I’m thinking specifically about all of the recent graduates who’ve just signed up for free one-year paid subscriptions! — it’s the gift of respecting your emotions.
Respecting your emotions isn’t just accepting that you sometimes feel sad or angry. It’s not just allowing space for ambivalence, envy, confusion, and what you might currently be naming greed, laziness, or selfishness. It’s not just expressing how you feel. Respecting your feelings means that you also embrace, celebrate, and enjoy your feelings, even when they’re the so-called bad ones. Respecting your feelings means that you receive guidance, wisdom, insight, and inspiration from your feelings.
That’s what those very centered and inquisitive famous motherfuckers had that I never had. I know you think they were just very good actors, but trust me, over the course of an hour-long (or more) conversation in person, I was well-equipped to tell the difference between pretending and really showing up and speaking from the heart. (People with dysfunctional childhoods are often very good at reading other people, because we had to be in order to get what we needed.)
And what I want you recent grads to understand is that right now, you have two big jobs that seem to be at odds with each other, but they aren’t:
1. You have to tolerate the intensity of your emotions in the face of your vulnerability, your loneliness, your ambivalence, your shame, and your confusion over being in brand new situations among people who seem to know what they’re doing.
2. You have to keep working hard, keep showing yourself, keep exploring, keep trying to engage with the (often onerous) tasks and the (often difficult) people in front you while also noticing, accepting, embracing, celebrating, and above all, respecting your emotional experience.
At any tough moment in our lives, we are tempted to believe that managing, escaping, or shutting down our emotions is the only way to get through it. While this is occasionally true in short bursts, the big picture is always the same: The more you dare to let your feelings bubble up, show themselves, and guide you forward, the more grounded, confident, direct, flexible, and kind you’ll end up being as you navigate through big challenges.
What this often means is that you have to do the very difficult, very PRIVATE work of accepting and embracing who you are and how intense your moods and emotions can be. You have to stop looking anxiously for the right mentor, the right friend, the right partner and you have to dare to show up for yourself patiently and consistently, and demonstrate to yourself that you won’t abandon yourself when others disappoint you, reject you, don’t see you clearly, or don’t love you enough.
You have to dare to notice that your emotions aren’t just an important piece of navigating forward in life, they are EVERYTHING. If you want to do big things on this planet, and you want to do those things with integrity and sure, some swagger, and you want to enjoy doing them, you must learn to relish the wide range of emotions that spring from your body each day. You must learn to SAVOR how unpredictable and weird and deeply human you are.
Loving this world with all of your heart and changing this world as much as you can to make it a more loving place: these are goals you can only achieve through loving your full, unwieldy, imperfect, freakish self.
For this reason, respecting and enjoying your emotions, the so-called good ones and the so-called bad ones alike, is your first and most important job every single day.
***
Now let’s get real about the real world:
Bad managers are everywhere, because managers who don’t respect their own feelings tend to disrespect other people’s needs and desires.
Bad parents are everywhere, because parents who ignore their own emotions or feel ashamed of their own buried needs tend to punish or unknowingly discourage their children from expressing how they feel.
Bad leaders are everywhere, because leaders who secretly hate themselves underneath their bluster tend to target, blame, abuse, and torment their constituents as a proxy for their buried self-loathing.
People who don’t understand, accept, respect, or enjoy their feelings are everywhere. If you pay close attention, you will start to see them and you might even be able to cultivate some empathy for them: They sound like malfunctioning appliances, sputtering and throwing off sparks. Every tiny thing is much more important to them than it reasonably should be. They are not at peace. Control is everything. Their pants are itchy. The world chafes.
They keep feeling bad so they keep making bad noises, trying to fix everything, trying to control everyone around them, never slowing down and giving themselves a second or two to breathe, to change out of those terrible pants, to let their guards down, to attune themselves to how they’re feeling.
Don’t become a malfunctioning robot. Even though our culture will seem to suggest to you that your job is to choke back your emotions in order to get ‘er done, climb to the top of the ladder, win friends and lovers and money and status, and feel good at last, you have to take those instructions with a grain of salt. Because it’s extremely difficult for a person who hates their own emotions to succeed. And if they do succeed, they will not enjoy their success. They will not remember their values. They will not make the world a kinder, more loving place. They will not engage meaningfully with their communities. These aren’t small things. These are the building blocks to a full, satisfying life.
Having a good life includes these things. So building a good life must start with building a kind, accepting, loving relationship with your truest, fullest self and your most passionate desires. Even if your career can’t be an embodiment of your most passionate desires at this moment, you need to start to love and respect your feelings enough that you let them guide you in the right direction, and let them shape the big picture of your life in accordance with your hopes, dreams, and values.
If you don’t know how you feel, you can’t build a good relationship with friends. You can’t trust people. You can’t love with all of your heart. You can’t bring your passion for life into the workplace and manifest enthusiasm and commitment. You have to let your intense emotions in. You have to surround your intensity and your vulnerability and your fear with patience and love. You have to treat your flailing, bewildered, afraid body with respect.
Your brilliant mind and big heart deserve respect. Your spirit deserves to be honored and heeded. Your body deserves to be nourished and admired. You deserve to grow into a good adult, a good manager, a good parent, a good leader. You deserve to feel good, every single day.
Never tell yourself that you’re not cut out for that life. Never tell yourself you’re not good enough, not strong enough, not wise enough, not clever enough, not funny enough, not creative enough, not ambitious enough, not open enough, not brave enough.
You are uniquely qualified to milk every ounce of joy out of this imperfect day, by showing yourself the respect you deserve. That’s your first and most important job, today and every day. Do your job.
Thanks for reading Ask Polly! Let’s fucking reshape this world into something more beautiful, using our sheer force of will and our enormous love. I’m on your side.
Science has shown that without our thinking brain, we can still survive, but we cannot survive without our feeling brain. That tells me that the secret to self knowledge is in our deepest feelings. And when we "denigrate, diminish, ignore, bury, or block", we deny ourselves the guidance we very likely needed, up-front.
It is critically important to attend to your emotions. You may like them or be dismayed. This does not matter. Pay attention! Don't stuff your stuff, as was said in bygone days.
Interesting that Polly was impressed by the apparent openness and disclosures of public personas. Interesting in that we see so much of people in the altogether at this point that having a look at feelings provides an intimacy that cavorting naked just does not.
It is good to aspire to being open and authentic with others and, it can be hoped, each of us will meet and affiliate with people in our lives who will attend to us and accept us in that way, and we can reciprocate.
Not all people are so constituted. Choose wisely, and guard your heart.
Cultivating emotional knowledge and range is critical to creating a good life. But it is not all. Use all parts of yourself to the best of your ability. Eventually, you may alchemize many disparate parts into wisdom.