What is emotional work and why it’s difficult
My brother once asked me if I really think “emotional work” is work. My reply to him was, Yes, it is! Emotional work has more to do with awareness and going on an inner journey than doing something in the world—but it is still work. You have to intentionally feel emotions that you’ve been running away from for years. And this is very, very difficult.
What exactly is emotional work? In short, to me it means being with some uncomfortable emotion that you would rather ignore or suppress. It’s becoming aware of an emotion in your physical body and being with that emotion. Looking at what is actually going on in your heart, or solar plexus, or throat, or body. Looking at the discomfort inside, those feelings that you’ve avoided for years.
Is it really that simple?
No.
And there are a few reasons why.
Firstly, you have to unlearn the automatic reaction of running away or pushing the emotion away. You have to purposefully feel the discomfort. I’ve been working at this for years, and I still find myself pushing emotions away, sometimes subtly, sometimes violently. Other times, I don’t even realise that I’m pushing it away. This is because a full embrace of what is there, is different to a kind of energetic stand-off. I sometimes find myself looking at what’s there, but also wishing it away, resenting it, and resisting it. So, being with the discomfort with a full sense of peace is anything but straightforward or easy. It’s a process, and in my own experience, a very long one. Also, I did not find immediate relief whenever I brought presence to uncomfortable emotions. Sometimes the discomfort increased, other times it took days or weeks (in one particular instance years) to dissolve to a degree where it was no longer an issue. I have also not reached the finish line. I still make emotional work a daily priority.
Often, mindfulness teachers will say that presence will dissolve emotions quickly. This has not always been my experience. Yes, with certain emotions, like a quick wave of anger, I have found that the emotion can sometimes dissolve quickly when I stay with it. But with certain other emotions (sadness and loneliness for example) stillness brought an intensification of whatever I was feeling. And to worsen the situation some of those emotions took very long to dissolve.
So, emotional work is not easy or straightforward. We don’t know how long a certain emotion is going to stick around, and we don’t know how deep it goes, and we’re also going against the automatic reaction of avoiding pain. We are essentially going towards the pain.
How to be with difficult emotions
For me, the first step is just becoming aware of it and not immediately pushing it away. Again, certain emotions can dissolve quickly in the face of deep awareness. A wave of road rage, for example, might pass quickly when we become deeply aware of it. But I’ve experienced other emotions for which this was not the case at all. For those that did not pass quickly, I used various methods for being with it intentionally (and as far as was possible unconditionally) over the years.
These methods include:
- Talking with the emotion,
- Listening to the emotion,
- Imagining what it would look like if it was something physical,
- Energetically going into the emotion,
- Looking at it with my inner eyes, and
- Crying.
I have also at times journaled about it, focusing specifically on the emotion and not the story surrounding it. Going into narratives about what you are feeling is probably the worst thing that you can do. It has kept me stuck for months at times. This is such an important aspect that I have written an entirely separate post on this.
Asking certain questions about the emotion can also be beneficial at times. Questions might include: What’s the worst thing about this? What’s at the root of this? Where exactly do I feel it? What does it feel like? What does it look like?
Saying that, it’s always important to not go into too much mental conceptualisations about whatever the feeling is. The point is to become more aware of what the feeling is, not to create stories about those feelings. All of the methods that I mentioned include feeling it to a degree. Sometimes certain methods work better than others and the list is certainly not exhaustive. I have, for example, also used drawing to engage with an emotion once or twice. Some people might prefer something like that. The point is always to keep whatever the feeling is on the foreground and not get bogged down by any particular method.
Connecting with the body
Connecting with my body became the most important aspect of this journey. Yoga, massages, stretching, myofascial release, bodytalk, all of this helped. Yoga is particularly effective because it’s something that you can do daily for 5 or 10 minutes. There are books out there that speak of the importance of getting back into your body to process emotions, but I’ve also found that this aspect is often overlooked. To me this was the missing piece. Certain blocks and discomforts only shifted after significant dedication to some of these practices.
Final thoughts
So, what exactly is emotional work? The short answer is awareness of emotions. The long answer is a lot of methods and techniques that I had to implement to shift uncomfortable blocks and emotions that I felt in my heart and body.
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