This week I read a report in the newspaper about how farmers who have lost their entire crop due to flood are ineligible for a government hardship fund because their farms are too far from a major river. It’s a pity that the politicians didn’t think to inform the rivers when they came up with the policy.
The notion of rendering something inadmissible despite its obvious existence put me in mind of a conversation we had on the podcast this week about the phrase “Man Up” and how labouring under the belief that our emotions are ‘wrong’ just because someone ignorant has deemed them so, is ludicrous and dangerous.
Clients frequently say,
‘I know I shouldn’t feel like this, there are so many people worse off than me.’
Such comparisons never make us feel better they do the reverse, pushing us into a place of shame at our misery added to whatever it was we were already struggling with.
When I was growing up ‘don’t cry’ was a ubiquitous response to any sobbing child regardless of whether they’d stumbled and slightly grazed a knee or fallen down a well from which they were unlikely to emerge.
This fixation on closing down legitimate painful emotions does children (or adults) no favours at all.
In a sometimes revealing exercise, I ask clients to mark on a huge list of emotions, the ones they recognise experiencing, and those they don’t feel either allowed or able to feel.
It’s often the sad and vulnerable emotions that are off limits, and when you scratch beneath the surface you find they were not modelled by adults as they grew up, were actively discouraged or, attracted additional negative consequences, such as a smack.
My mother’s view of what she saw as impractical emotion was almost puritanical, which is ironic when you consider that a significant proportion of my childhood angst was rooted in a fear that her constant arguments with my father would eventually result in her leaving us or, more specifically, me.
As an anxious and therefore unsurprisingly superstitious young man, I had a range of rituals I’d follow to try and ensure that things turned out well. Some of them were harmless but they still managed to attract my mother’s ire
When I played or went to watch sport there was a certain mug I couldn’t drink from on match days.
One morning my mother made tea in the forbidden cup. I told her I couldn’t drink from it due to the inevitable defeat that would follow to which she replied that I was ‘naughty’ for having a superstition because it was un-Christian.
Not content with dismissing my genuine albeit unfounded attraction to karma, she proceeded to laden me with an extra serving of guilt and dragged Jesus into it who, I’m sure, had better things to do.
Although ‘Man up’ encapsulates succinctly the worst of toxic masculinity it’s far from the only phrase that attempts to close down expressions of healthy emotion.
‘Time is a great healer’ is another of my favourites heard most often when having suffered an unbearable loss, you have the additional misfortune of finding yourself talking to someone who’d rather not be bothered with your painful emotion and so tries to shoo you back to a state they find tolerable.
‘Boys don’t cry’ is another that reinforces harmful gender stereotypes and suggests that displaying emotion is a sign of weakness, especially for men.
In terms of putting that one to bed, it seems to be a benefit if you’re called Robert.
‘I try to laugh about it
Hiding the tears in my eyes
Cos boys don’t cry.’
Indeed Robert.
And Robert Bly wrote a book about it, kind of.
He proposes that through living a more authentic and holistic emotional life men will be happier and healthier, and perhaps as a consequence, the male suicide rate will not continue to be quite so alarming.
The other one I enjoy is ‘You’re too emotional’.
Telling someone they are ‘too emotional’ is the same as telling Motörhead they were playing too loud. It’s never wrong, it’s just how it is.
‘You’re too emotional,’ is nothing more than an attempt to close someone down and gaslight them into feeling that their emotions are indicative of something broken or weird when what’s actually happening is that the person making the observation is too much of a lightweight to cope with real feelings.
It’s true, of course, that behaviour resulting from powerful emotion can be wrong, but by closing emotion down we make it more likely to be processed harmfully.
Think about anger and the damage it can do. Part of the reason for this is that anger is a secondary emotion. That is to say, there is always another emotion underneath anger and it’s usually a more vulnerable one.
If we noticed more easily the fear, sadness, frustration, hurt or disappointment underneath anger and, more importantly, felt free enough to express it we’d not only understand our emotions better, but we’d be able to develop more constructive ways of dealing with them.
So any phrase suggesting that specific emotions are undesirable takes us away not toward such a worthwhile goal.
Like a river running too fast, too full, and bursting its banks causing untold damage to surrounding farms, emotions can be painful, frustrating, dispiriting, and devastating.
But regardless of how many lazy tropes are thrown at emotion, or how many lazy policies are thought up by bureaucrats and politicians, neither the river nor the emotion can ever be wrong.
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