It isn’t a bad thing
I have been thinking about the CBT I took for my depression back in the day but how it isn’t that effective for chronic pain. How thinking positive is a thing that always seemed so false to me with depression. How the thoughts themselves rang wrong in my head. How realistic ones feel so much better. That is why CBT worked for me. All that thinking about thinking. And correcting thinking. And not a bit about feeling my feels.
When feeling is where there can often be a problem. I felt guilty for not being able to do the things society wanted me to do. Or I feel like I Should do. I blamed myself. I shamed myself. I felt sad, and feel like I shouldn’t. I used to get frustrated and feel like I had no right to that emotion either. I felt like I had to supress all these negative emotions because they were wrong. Or if I just put a smiling facade on, the pain will be easier for me to cope with, or for other people to cope with.
Compress the emotion.
Supress the emotion.
Like it is bad.
Like it is unworthy to be felt.
Like negative emotions make pain and illness worse somehow. Like feeling them makes me worse somehow.
All lies.
Emotions are an ever changing river. A flux. I know that. I know that I need to feel the emotion. Name the emotion. Acknowledge the emotion. Then release the emotion. Or sometimes, sit with it for a bit.
In no way are negative emotions somehow sinister and positive ones somehow benevolent. They are both simply manifestations of my experiences with the world and my concepts and beliefs. When I get a little bit too attached to an emotion and attached it to beliefs and concepts and the world, maybe then there can be a bit of a problem. In general though, emotions will come with every single experience. Every single experience is going to have a reaction. Maybe not a profound one, but a reaction nevertheless.
And pain, being a rather unpleasant experience, can come with unpleasant emotions. Chronic pain then can be complex in its emotional experiences. But like pain fluctuates in intensity so does the emotional intensity. And I breathe. I accept that pain is going to cause some emotional reactions that are intense. I feel the emotion. I let it sit with me. I feel self-compassion for that experience. And then I release the emotion. No judgement. No guilt. No blame. No shame.
I don’t know why I had to be so stoic in my youth. I don’t know where it came from. Except that I learned to mask the pain. From friends, co-workers, employers and medical professionals. And it takes a massive toll. A deep personal toll. Where somewhere along the way I began to see expressing pain and some emotions as a weakness. And the Facade, as a strength. The mask becomes more Real. And pushing down any negative emotion becomes easier, yet harder. Until it comes back up as overwhelming depression. A depression I could also mask because that is how good I had learned to do it. Practice makes perfect.
But seething under the surface is tremendous guilt for being depressed. For feeling this way when I shouldn’t have. Feeling even more guilt for not being able to function like I should have. Trying so hard to push though the pain, when the pain kept pushing back twice as hard. Having little to no experience in dealing with the intensity of emotions that came with high pain other than to ignore it. Put on the mask. Smile. Push through. And that just doesn’t work forever. You crash. You burn out. Hard.
Learning self-compassion and that my emotional experiences, negative and positive, are not something to hide from, is a personal lesson in resilience and strength. CBT never taught me to feel my emotions. Or accept them. Or not hide them. I wish it had. I had to find my way through that myself. Mostly through creative expression and art. And coming to the inevitable conclusion there is nothing wrong with my emotional expressions and experiences. I can choose how I react to things, when that is possible. And that is great for growth. But feeling the emotion is important. Vital even.
There is nothing wrong with ‘thinking positive’. And it can be beneficial in many ways. But there is something very wrong with feeling positive all the time. With supressing negative emotions and feeling like you have to for other people and society to be comfortable around your pain and chronic illness.
Chronically Nikki 