How families can activate our most intense emotional experiences
Hello beautiful people,
How are you today? I am in London, the city of my birth, staying with family and enjoying the beauty of the city that has just burst into spring. It feels so opulent to be in such a dense and crowded place, surrounded by giant ancient trees covered in flowers and the parks and gardens full of pinks and yellows and reds.
When I thought about coming back to stay with my family I realised how far I had come in my journey of emotional healing.
Families are intense activators for emotions. The family we grow up with contributes to laying the foundations of how we experience emotion. Experiences with family are often at the root of our most painful emotions like shame or fear.
So it makes sense that when we see them it can often lead to some of the most intense emotional experiences of our lives.
The way that I work with what comes up around my family (which has in the past included a lot of shame, sadness, rage, guilt and loneliness) is that I have given my feelings a lot of space to be seen, heard and held.
By giving myself space – and getting a lot of support in this process – I have managed to integrate a lot of old emotions that would in the past spark me into defensiveness, argumentativeness, blame and intense sadness when I was around family.
By giving all the feelings, all the space they need when I am with my family now, I have a lot more capacity and a lot less emotional reactivity.
The rather amazing thing about learning to process and integrate your emotions is once you release emotions that have been stored in your body for decades, you feel naturally more open, at ease and relaxed.
You don’t have to struggle to not say things, or try to not get upset, or avoid certain subjects with people that used to drive you nuts before.
A great reason to work with our emotions is so that we can naturally feel more able to cope with activating situations.
But also because when we aren’t carrying so much of an emotional load around, we get to feel so much more joy and pleasure at being in the midst of family life. We can relax into, and appreciate, our families so much more. We can see and feel the love they have for us, and the love we have for them more easily.
That’s not to say you never have emotional reactivity with your family (or others) again – that would probably be impossible – but you are carrying into these situations a lot less emotional baggage.
You aren’t completely overloaded by past emotional experiences so that you have no capacity left for whatever arises now.
You can bounce back much quicker from emotional activation, you can prepare yourself more readily for activating experiences and you have a lot more empathy and understanding about both your own and other people’s feelings.
Because – of course – you’re not the only one in your family with feelings! That’s one of the challenges!
We are all bumping into each other’s emotional pasts in families, which makes it particularly ripe for stressful family gatherings.
My work is all about being able to handle with more grace, empathy and confidence the situations that previously feel too much, too stressful or too difficult.
My work is learning to walk towards those things that feel most emotionally activating, so that you can live a life that isn’t about surpressing, avoiding, controlling or managing outside circumstances.
It’s not always easy, it’s not always straightforward, but I can report that in the last few years I have developed what feels like a superhuman ability to hear comments from certain family members and not go into spirals of shame, or see responses from people and not feel filled with rage.
What I love about this work is that once you start doing it, everyone around you naturally starts to change their responses to you and their lives.
You don’t teach it to them, but just by modelling new ways to work with emotion, you affect how others do too. My husband says it’s like magic.
Love to you,
Diana
