As I’ve already written, I’ve gone through a break-up somewhat recently. The why of it isn’t important but for roughly the first two months, I was bereft. I feel everything deeply: in relationships, in friendships, watching commercials. It has been this way my entire life. I used to call it my super power. I have the ability to feel deeply that empathy comes easily to me. Feeling hard leads to feeling empathy, which in turn leads to kindness. It’s hard to be cruel or indifferent toward other creatures when I have physical reactions to their sufferings and joys.
Yet, that depth and complexity of caring can be crippling. I didn’t have the confidence or clarity of who I was in my younger years so I turned to alcohol and drugs. Substances dissipated the intense feelings, which ramped up in my early- to mid-twenties, as I was going through some life-altering events. I no longer wanted to feel everything so intensely; substances gave me the ability to control how much I was feeling and control what type of feelings I wanted (hello ecstasy). My way to counteract deep feelings was to use external forces to manipulate internal issues.
Back to the break-up and being deep in the feels. I didn’t want them anymore, and I said this repeatedly to my therapist. She told me, time and again, that the quickest path to a healed heart is to embrace the feelings wholly and completely. To move through the sadness and loss, each time I felt the pangs of heartbreak, I had to allow the feelings in, cry and sob if that’s what I needed, and be sad, be hurt.
There were a few guardrails though. First, I had to curb my nostalgic remembrances of the relationship. What I mean by that is it’s sort of a human condition to look back on our past events with a positivity spin on them. We tend to often see the good when remembering something. Even those events that were hard, when we retell the story there is often a more light-hearted storyline. We have a nostalgia for events in the past that didn’t actually happen the way we remember. Second, I couldn’t dwell on the feels. My therapist said to Yes, feel the feels but don’t stay in the feels. It was hard to know when I was processing and when I was dwelling but that first guardrail—ban nostalgic memory—was often the cue that I was dwelling.
It wasn’t easy, those first two months. Even now, a little over three months from the break-up, there are a few moments throughout the week where I get sad. What’s different now is that they are remarkably short-lived, and when I have them, I embrace fully and then let go. I attribute this embrace-release philosophy (? Is it a philosophy? I need a better word…) with how quickly I have moved past the break-up. But what it’s really taught me is how to deal with emotions in general. What I’ve begun to do is move toward the feels, embracing them wholly, allowing them to pass through when they are no longer serving me.
The problem with having a super power of empathy and kindness is that it left me drained, spent, and my own needs going unmet. It also meant I operated in extremes, an all or nothing mentality. I was either kind and accommodating but when I became depleted, I would lash out, get angry or very quiet and not speak to anyone about it (it’s remarkable how much we inherit the coping mechanisms of our parents). So, I had a bit of a yo-yo personality, which led to me being accused of always being on my period. My friends also weren’t certain who they’d get on any given day. The magnitude of that has reduced much in my middle age but it has still been there. Now, what I am finding with this embrace-release philosophy, I am able to keep a more even keel. Fluctuations in emotions no longer bowl me over. My life, my emotional life, is more balanced. There is a confidence in knowing that I can be present—fully present—with my and others’ emotions, hold the hard bits, and then let go when it is time to let go.