There are two things to consider as you journey through the emotional treatment plan for your Expectation Hangover. First, don’t compare your life experience to anyone else’s. You may think it’s silly to cry over being laid off when you know someone who just lost a child to cancer. It is not: your experience is your experience. Understandably, hearing about other people’s struggles puts our lives in perspective and cultivates gratitude, but that happens in our left brain, our rational mind. Feelings come from your right brain, the emotional side. Minimizing your emotions in light of someone else’s journey is a form of suppression. For now, honor your personal Expectation Hangover and give yourself full permission to feel all your feelings about it.
Second, expect that the symptoms triggered by your Expectation Hangover will be tied to feelings you stuffed away in your past. Expectation Hangovers catalyze feelings that you have been unwilling or unable to face before. Your treatment plan on the emotional level gives you the opportunity to work through them so there is more room for the feelings that feel good!
Working on the emotional level was a very important part of treating my own Expectation Hangovers. At eleven years old I was diagnosed with depression and put on Prozac. For twenty years I took a variety of antidepressants, which numbed feelings of sadness and anger that I never really processed. Every Expectation Hangover I experienced reactivated suppressed feelings, and because I didn’t know how to move through them, my avoidance strategies kicked in. I distracted myself through work, numbed my feelings with food and television, or changed my prescription to a higher dose or different brand. It wasn’t until my late twenties, when I learned how to process my emotions, that I was able to stop taking medication. (I am not asserting that antidepressants are not helpful or necessary; this is just my personal experience.)
You too have the courage to let go of your avoidance and suppression tactics, whatever they may be. It may feel scary, but I’ll walk you through the process. I assure you that you will get through the darkness to the light — and it will be well worth it!
“As a natural life force, emotions are intended to flow freely through our bodymind, then dissipate once we have fully experienced them and assimilated their valuable message.”
— Tim Brieske
Growing up, we learn how to add and subtract, read and write. Our parents teach us life skills like how to tie our shoes and drive a car. But how many of us are taught how to deal with our emotions effectively? We are told to “shake it off,” “be a good girl/boy,” “stop crying,” that “it’s not such a big deal,” or that we are “overly sensitive.” Because of the dismissive responses we receive and come to anticipate in others when strong emotions come up, our natural emotional responses feel wrong, shameful, or inappropriate. People in your life, especially your parents, while attempting to make you feel better or just being uncomfortable with strong emotions, taught you how to not fully experience emotions. Perhaps they jumped in to soothe you so you never learned how to fully feel a feeling. Or maybe they distracted you from the negative feeling by diverting your attention with a positive distraction such as candy or video games (hint: this is how addiction as a way to avoid and soothe emotions begins). Even if you had very loving parents, they may have interrupted the full expression of your feelings.
This isn’t about blaming anyone. Everyone has always been doing the best they could with the tools they had. Chances are, your parents were not taught how to process emotions either. But it’s up to you now to reverse the trend of suppression.
| EXERCISEExploring Your Emotions |
The first step in treating your Expectation Hangover on the emotional level is to become aware of how and when you began suppressing your feelings. This exercise will help you access a deeper understanding of your emotions. As you move through the following steps, answer each question in your journal. Begin writing (by hand) immediately after you read the question — don’t stop to think about your answer. It doesn’t matter if you don’t remember a lot of specifics. Write anything that comes to mind; don’t edit, analyze, or judge.
1. Find a quiet, comfortable place to sit where you won’t be interrupted. Close your eyes for a moment and take yourself back to a time in your childhood when you were really angry. Go with the first memory that comes to mind; you can work through this process again as other memories surface. After you have a memory, answer these questions:
What was the reaction of the people around you, such as your parents, siblings, peers, teachers, or coaches when you got angry?
What were you told about being angry?
What beliefs do you think you formed about expressing anger?
2. Repeat step 1 for each of the following feelings: sadness, fear, embarrassment, and excitement.
3. How did you see people in your family express their emotions?
4. What do you do today when you feel a big feeling (like anger, sadness, shame, fear, guilt, or excitement)? What do you tell yourself?
5. What avoidance strategies do you use to suppress your feelings?
Acknowledge yourself for having the courage to do this exercise. You have now increased your awareness of how and when you began suppressing your emotions. Take some time to reflect on this process in your journal.
Emotions need a way to get out. If you do not express them, they will find another exit! For instance, through over a decade of working with people as a coach and spiritual counselor, I have noticed that unprocessed sadness creates lethargy and even depression. Unexpressed anger can manifest in irritability and anxiety. If you find yourself doing things like snapping at a waiter, road raging, crying over things that you don’t think should upset you so much, constantly feeling “blah” and passionless, consistently looking for external things to make you feel happy or peaceful, or using any of the common quick-fix avoidance strategies, it is time to really face your feelings. I understand it seems challenging, but suppressing and avoiding emotions is even harder work! The long-term drain on your energy from suppressing and avoiding your emotions is far greater than the short-term pain of acknowledging, feeling, and dealing with them.
Keeping your feelings inside is like attempting to hold an inflated beach ball under water. You can wrestle with it for a while; but sooner or later you lose your grasp on it, and it pops up, creating a huge splash and knocking you right in the face. If you have ever had a big feeling come up in a way that felt almost out of control, you know what I am talking about. During an Expectation Hangover it’s common to have a disproportionate emotional reaction to a situation. You also may experience feelings that seem inappropriate or out of context. I remember being irritable and quite rude to my family when I was going through an Expectation Hangover regarding my career in my twenties (which makes sense because one of the symptoms of repressed anger is irritability). Although I recognized and didn’t like that I was acting that way, I did not know how to change it until I learned how to process emotion.
Lynne met a man on a dating site and was excited about the potential she felt from their email and phone exchanges; but the morning of the date, he canceled. She was extremely disappointed, crying all the time, even though she didn’t know this guy from Adam. She was questioning why this particular event upset her so much. What Lynne realized from her inflated emotional reaction to this