Emotions & the Body

How we experience emotions in the body and what we're forced to do to conceal these bodily knowings.

I was well into my thirties when I read somewhere that emotions are experienced in the body. My whole body reacted, it and my entire world simultaneously opening up. It felt so right, like I was coming back to a truth I had always known but long forgotten. Emotions are felt in the body. Nothing would be the same again. I could feel, deep within me, this remembered knowledge reorganizing everything I thought I knew about so very many things.

I remembered a time when I was seven. I was in the backseat of someone’s car, stomach roiling and twisting in knots. Maybe we were driving somewhere, or maybe my parents were standing around talking with some other adults outside or maybe they were inside someone’s house doing something. I don’t know why I was in the car, feeling terrible, but I know I didn’t want to be wherever I was, feeling how I was. An understanding was enveloping me, not in these exact words, but in a felt sense: what is wrong with you? Always having stomach aches and “not feeling good.” There is nothing the matter with you. You’re fine. Now stop it. And then, the insight: you’re not supposed to feel things in your body. Feeling things in your body is bad, wrong. You’re bad and wrong for feeling them.

The sheer physicality of what I did next still stands out in my memory. I exerted extreme effort in my muscles, grinding my jaw, clenching in my stomach and chest and fists harder than if I were running as fast as I could or doing sit-ups. To be good, I only needed to stop all bad feelings in my body. Was I getting sick? Was I scared or uncomfortable about something? It didn’t matter in the least. This reminds me now of a time in the second grade, when I suddenly realized that I had to go to the bathroom. I knew I couldn’t just ask because I knew what I was supposed to be doing, and it wasn’t using the bathroom. It was adding or multiplying numbers or matching states to their capitals or something along those lines. So, I forced my body to not have to go to the bathroom. The effort was similarly physical: sweat beaded my forehead and upper lip, and I worked even harder to draw the sweat beads back into my skin, lest they draw attention. I felt my face flush with the effort and worked even harder at concealing that effort. I locked down every single part of me I could find to lock down, erasing the humiliating truth: I had a bodily sensation and a need when it wasn’t the right time to express those sensations and needs. Was there ever a right time to express my body’s sensations and needs? I made my breathing as shallow as I could, and I gripped my pencil in my hand so hard my fingers blanched and cramped. My eyebrows scrunched together, and my forehead wrinkled as I commanded every cell in my body to do what I was told. I wouldn’t interrupt the class, draw attention to myself, or bother the teacher. I was always such a good student. (#mentalhealth, #emotions, #paradigmshift)