What were you taught in childhood about emotions and bodily sensations? Did anyone actually take the time to help you identify and name these important signals from within? When you expressed your emotions, were you heard and were your feelings validated? Did anyone try to talk you out of them? Did it feel safe to express all your emotions, or were you criticized or shamed for having particular emotions, such as anger, disappointment, or grief? Were sensations such as butterflies in your stomach, or headaches, addressed or minimized? Did your caregivers allow time for processing feeling states, or did they rush to solve your problems? I always knew my emotions were about to be dismissed and I was about to receive a lecture when my mother began a sentence with “Look, Julie. . .” How did your caregivers handle their own emotions and bodily sensations?
If it isn’t safe to express our emotions within the family, we resort to acting them out. Thumb sucking, bed-wetting, temper tantrums, moodiness, defiant behaviors, hurting ourselves, and substance use or abuse are behaviors we turn to instinctively to cope with emotional pain. We also unconsciously adopt defense mechanisms to push unpleasant experiences and memories out of awareness. Perhaps when painful memories surface, you distract yourself from the pain you feel by minimizing it through rationalization or intellectualization: “My parents did the best they could. Everyone has had challenges. It’s the past, and I’m over it.” Maybe you have a long-standing pattern of disconnecting from yourself and going numb: this is known as dissociation. You may notice that you have trouble remembering painful childhood events: this is known as repression.
Emotions and bodily sensations are like street signs, precious signals from within that point us in the direction of our needs. They do not go away when we disconnect from them. They do damage behind the scenes, until they finally get our attention, one way or another.
Hidden Hurts
I asked Jan what she remembered from her early childhood experiences, as I was sure that her emotional disconnect had begun a long time ago. She didn’t remember much before age five, when her mother was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, seemingly related to postpartum depression. Her father, a hot-tempered, distant man, told her that her grandmother would be coming to stay with them and that Jan needed to be a “good girl” and take care of her younger siblings. Her father, a litigator, worked long hours and retreated to his study every evening after dinner. While Jan never saw him drunk, he did have a few drinks every night. She was afraid of him: he rarely hit the kids, but he had a tendency to be verbally abusive, especially with their mother. One of the reasons she married Sam was because he was “the exact opposite of my father — he was even-keeled, kind, and patient, and he loved children.”
Jan recounted an incident when she accidentally burned the collar of her father’s shirt when learning to iron. “I feared for my life — the veins in his neck bulged out, and he grabbed me by the arm so hard I thought it would break off. He cursed at me and sent me to my room without supper. My mother did nothing, as she was quite passive and was also afraid of his anger.” As Jan recounted the story, I inquired as to whether her daughter’s “rage fests” felt similar to her father’s bouts of anger. She said that she had never made this connection because of their age difference, but agreed that they were similar and that her response was the same to both — to run for cover. Clearly this wasn’t helping Jan or her daughter.
The year her mother was hospitalized was a difficult and lonely year for Jan. She remembered being afraid that her mother would die. But it was no use sharing her concerns with her father or grandmother. “My father couldn’t be bothered with us kids, and my grandmother was a cold and stern woman. If I complained about anything, she would remind me how hard she had had it in her childhood, as one of nine children.”
Her mother’s recuperation lasted over a year. Jan remembered wanting to be closer to her mother but finding it difficult because her mother suffered from anxiety and depression, and was overwhelmed with raising three kids and coping with a volatile husband. She often went to bed early, leaving Jan to tend to the little ones. As Jan described this period of her life, her head and shoulders drooped, and her body slumped in the chair. I was sure that I could see some sadness in her eyes, but when I inquired, she said she felt nothing. She knew it was a sad experience and that she should feel sad, but she felt numb.
Escaping from the Pain
When I asked Jan if she remembered feeling sad or lonely in her childhood, she replied that she learned early in life to block out unpleasant emotions and retreat into food and things she was good at. From elementary school on, she excelled at schoolwork, and, like her father, she was a voracious reader. She was also athletic and took part in team sports like soccer and volleyball. Studies, reading, sports, and caregiving duties at home kept her away from “all those terrible memories and feelings.” I had a hunch that her older daughter might be following in her footsteps.
“Because I was a good student, I was allowed to stay in my room for hours on end, and I could block out all the family drama.” Jan told me she rarely invited friends over because she never knew what to expect with her father’s moods. “During elementary school, my brother and sister started fighting regularly, and I would retreat to my room with my books and a stash of my favorite treats. I know this sounds crazy, but sneaking and hiding bags of cookies, pretzels, chips, and candy was really exciting. I always looked forward to coming home to my books and my stash. I think that’s why the ever-changing array of junk food at the office is so appealing to me.”
Jan was aware that the environment she grew up in might be playing a role in her current inability to cope with and manage relationships. She recounted a recent experience of being humiliated by a colleague in a professional meeting. Unable to process the flood of emotions, she described the experience as “feeling like I was falling apart.” When she left the meeting, she grabbed a box of four ice-cream bars from the freezer at work and ate them all on the drive home. A couple of glasses of wine at home finished off any residue of emotion.
Jan also revealed that she found it difficult to stay in the exam room when she had to share disturbing lab reports with her patients. While no physician enjoys delivering bad news, Jan found her patients’ emotional pain and occasional outbursts unbearable. She usually called in her nurse, a sweet older woman, to do the comforting and soothing. I didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes — or a seasoned psychotherapist, for that matter — to see the parallel with her difficulties in handling her adolescent daughter’s outbursts.
Leaning to the Left
In traumatic, undernourished, emotionally empty childhoods, one side of the brain may be understimulated, while the other becomes more dominant. The right side of the upstairs brain is more directly connected to the downstairs brain: information flows up from the body to the brain stem, the limbic areas, and the right cortex. The right side, which develops earlier, offers us a more direct connection to our whole body and the electrical, chemical, and hormonal discharges that we call emotions. The left side of the upstairs brain is more removed from these sources of input.
Jan was raised in an academic family that emphasized education and work. She had learned to “lean to the left” — to stay logical, literal, and linear and to avoid right-hemisphere-generated emotion and body awareness. The right side of her brain’s neural circuits had, perhaps, been underutilized for decades. Jan strenuously avoided any situation — discussions with her daughter, intimacy with her husband, or interactions with upset patients and staff — that might trigger uncomfortable emotions and bodily sensations.
Jan’s adaptations to a traumatic childhood, including her determination to have a better life than her parents’, were resourceful and had helped her move through life and achieve professional success. But her unconscious “leaning to the left” was keeping her from connecting with herself and others. Imprisoned in a rigid and unemotional world, she was surviving but no longer thriving.
Listening to the Body
Infants and small children depend on their caregivers to help them regulate