'Feelings....Nothing More than Feelings...'

A central workshop in our All of Us group, is one where we encourage one another to 'make friends with our feelings'. For many seeking help from mental health services, the power of feelings can at times feel overwhelming and entirely outside of the individual's ability to cope with their effects. Often over the years I have thought despairingly of my overwhelmingly powerful negative feelings as anything but 'friends'. However, the reality of trying to live a life with purpose and connection with others means that I need to acknowledge the value and importance of feelings.

My Mum died earlier this year. My Dad is currently working through the news of bowel cancer along with the need to undergo a lot of significant surgery, in his 80's. I have been aware in the past of experiencing overwhelming feelings of grief and loss, which all but rendered me incapable of functioning. However, I am aware at the moment of not responding emotionally to the loss of significant people in my life. I know that at sometime I will feel the grief and loss, it is a necessary rite of passage. Having been given a diagnosis my emotional responses to this significant life stage, when I and my siblings move into being the 'older generation', throws up an additional question...do I need to refer myself for clinical support?

My own grief journey has coincided with some thoughts I have been having around the issue of medicalising emotional responses to difficult life experiences. I wonder if this need to address the pain of some life experiences is another aspect of our risk averse attitude to life in general.

Following my Mum's funeral, which happened during half term, I returned to my job at an after school club for primary age children. The questions about 'how was your holiday?' are a natural way to speak to one another following a break. My response to the children's question: 'Did you have a good holiday?' was instinctively, 'No, because it was sad for me.' Naturally, the question will follow: 'Why?' I find that I have been direct and honest in speaking about my loss, I seem to have an aversion to the euphemisms, 'Passed on', 'passed away' etc. My response is 'My Mum died.' I like that the children didn't hesitate to either tell me about their experience of grandparents, or for some, parents who have died. The other response which was common was curiosity, 'was she poorly?' That allowed me to talk about my Mum's long illness (18 years) and the fact that she wasn't in pain anymore. Speaking like this to the children was initially completely natural, we all returned to focusing on enjoying games and playing. However, later, at home doubts crept in, should I have protected the children more? Well, on reflection, no, they saw that I was sad, it was ok, I was ok, there was a reason for my sadness, which some had experienced in their own families and in those moments there was a connection in our shared humanity.

As someone with ESPD (Emotionally Sensitive Personality Disorder, formerly Borderline PD) my emotions have been swirling masses of indistinct, out of kilter, responses to the most insignificant stimuli. Naming emotions, was initially my biggest challenge, simply because I was seething within a fog of powerful, negative emotions. Happiness was problematic simply because I didn't enjoy it because I always expected it to come crashing in on my head. Such had been my often self fulfilling prophecy. The feelings themselves were not the enemy, nor were events that are a part of life. Like weeds in a garden, feelings need to be managed with help, when they are out of place or proportion to the stimulus.

Sometimes life hurts. Sometimes I will experience happiness. There is an expectation I think which is prevalent in our society, which demands that life should be smooth sailing, otherwise there is something deficient in my environment or, in me. Having lived for so long with rapidly cycling extremes of emotion, from absolute despair to almost unbelievable highs, the balance I worked hard to find through DBT felt 'boring'. The epiphany for me was that real life is mostly routine, that when I am well, I can experience life by enjoying moments along with being able to feel sad, or flat without it being the extremes of depression.

I am only part way along my path through grief for my parents. There are complexities because ours was not the ideal upbringing and there will be other emotions mixed in with feelings of loss. When we love others and they hurt themselves, we instinctively reach for the painkillers and seek to stop any bleeding, or put bones back together. If we could we would stop our children from feeling lonely, uncertain, sad because that means that something in life has hurt them. But I cannot take away the pain of a child's grazed knee, anymore than a psychologist or psychiatrist can remove the emotional pain of past trauma through medication alone.

Unlike the times when my emotional responses in the here and now connected in a torrent to the pain of unhealed trauma from childhood, my grief is natural, a response to life as it is. I will move through it in my own time and using my own ways of coping. I do not want to numb the pain of the grief, because, whatever the complexities of our relationship, there was love in our family and, a truism, I know, love hurts. I know I am well because I am able to accept that emotional pain in the right context is okay and 'this too will pass...' because life is about seasons.

One final note about seeking to take away emotional pain too soon through medications; I think that an unintended consequence of having an NHS which provides healthcare free at the point of need, is that we too readily turn to clinicians to remove our pain as humans. For mental ill health, this sometimes puts unrealistic pressure on the clinicians to protect me from the pain of life as it is, or it means that I become too dependent on medications which dull the pain.

Without being flippant, one lesson I have learned from waxing is that intense, quick pain may sting, but in the long term helps me to remove the hairs that betray my age and so escape endless internal monologues about whether people have noticed!

For years, I was so fearful of feeling the pain associated with some life traumas from my childhood. I imagined a huge torrent of feelings that would, literally kill me. However, when I was guided through facing up to the realities of what happened to me, (avoidance is a big way of evading pain) although it hurt, ultimately I learned that my feelings wouldn't kill me, even if at times it felt as if they might!