The Surprising Ways Difficult Emotions Help Us Grow (A case study. Of me.)
Intense emotions can help us heal, if we know how to work with them
Welcome, new subscribers!
Welcome to new subscribers! I’m so glad you’re here. Since my last newsletter in June, this newsletter has grown by about 30%, mostly thanks to my first post for Tiny Buddha. As with my gift book and Sounds True, I’ve been a Tiny Buddha reader and fan for a long time, and it’s heartening to see that this post resonated with so many people.
New podcast interview
A few months ago, I had a thoroughly enjoyable conversation with Thom Walters, host of the podcast Zen Commuter; the episode is now live. (You can also find it on major podcast platforms like Apple Podcasts or Castbox.)
Our conversation covered a wide range of topics, including meditation and spiritual awakening, as well as “applied mindfulness” and the chaos that our thoughts can cause when we believe them.
How painful emotions can show us where we need to heal
As in many parts of the Northern hemisphere in August, this has been a very hot week in British Columbia. I mention that only because extreme heat send our bodies into fight or flight, which means we’re all much more likely to react to stressors, rather than respond. My apartment has hovered in the high 80s, and it feels as though my emotions have been bubbling right underneath my skin.
I’d been activated by the heat, and yesterday, I was an outburst waiting for a trigger.
The trigger arrived by email, when I learned that my gift book had sold 5,100 copies since its publication in 2020—not the 7,900 I’d believed based on the publisher’s statements I receive twice a year.
I felt gutted and blindsided, even though this happens to nearly every author. My old conditioning reared up: Could there have been a mistake? Who made the mistake?! OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!! Another part of me noticed that I was—perhaps? Maybe?—over-reacting to the news. I became curious about why I felt so so so awful. Old stories and accusations came up: I’m a loser. I’m a failure. I’m unloveable. …wait, WHAT?
Investigating the pain underneath anger
Tears welled up. As they fell, I relaxed my mind so that subconscious insights could emerge. I had a flash of the moment when I’d felt most intensely gutted and blindsided: The morning I was told that my mother had died, when I was nine.
In that moment, back in 1975, I had fully dissociated, because my psyche couldn’t cope with the enormity and intensity of the pain.
Because that trauma had never been properly stored in my brain (I’m working on it!), I sometimes experience an emotional flashback whenever I feel blindsided. Like yesterday. The difference is that today, the child part isn’t in control.
I vacillated between awareness and self-pity: On the one hand, I knew that this whole book-sales thing was not nearly as big a deal as my ego (conditioned mind) was making it out to be. On the other, the child part of me felt the anguish of rejection with such intensity that all I wanted to do was to pull the sheets over my head and curl up in a ball.
Because I’ve been doing trauma-release work intensely for several years now, whenever I have an over-the-top emotional reaction to something, I’m almost immediately aware it’s not about the thing, but rather, it’s about the emotions lurking beneath the thing.
The news I received was a trigger, but my reaction was about me and my emotional history, not the situation.
As I cried, I kept redirecting my attention onto the pain I’d felt on that early November morning when my mother was suddenly… gone. I sobbed and raged, and as I did, I felt deep compassion for this child who has lived within me, holding this pain for nearly 50 years.
Also, I didn’t think about book sales once.
Heal the mind, heal the body
There’s another reason I knew this was related to my mother’s death: For several years, I’ve experienced mind-body conditions, including a mind-body form of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that kept me bedridden for the better part of 2019.
While I rarely have CFS flares these days, I’ve been experiencing intermittent muscle and joint pain for the past year. When I’m getting too close to a painful emotion, my brain creates pain as a distraction.
As I learned in 2019, the solution is to allow the painful feeling, allow the tears, allow the rage. Allow, allow, allow. And when I can create space to allow myself to feel the feelings directly, without any story (like “this shouldn’t have happened”), the pain subsides. Just as it did yesterday.
To learn more about how mind-body (psychophysiologic) conditions happen, visit the PPD Association website or Nicole Sachs’ The Cure for Chronic Pain. I also highly (oh so highly!) recommend reading The Myth of Normal by Gabor and Daniel Maté.
The upside of allowing ourselves to feel pain
Our emotions—which most of us have been taught to suppress or ignore—are extraordinary messengers that let us know which of our needs are or aren’t being met in a given moment. Today, part of me is grateful whenever I experience emotional pain, because I see it as a doorway to freedom.
And… I also spent a good part of yesterday (and even this morning) having a pity party. I’ve known for a decade how to end self-pity and rumination immediately—bring myself into fierce presence—but the ego looooooves pity parties. Buying into the story of myself as a victim only strengthens the ego.
The paradox is that the facts in evidence (about book sales) had nothing to do with the pain in my heart (about my mother’s death). I had to continually redirect my attention from my thoughts to the somatic grief I was experiencing.
Inner peace takes practice
Inner peace isn’t a once-and-done. It requires work—so much work, an enormous amount of work—yet the freedom is as liberating as the pain is excruciating.
Today, I don’t believe that anything in my life, even in childhood, should have happened differently. Everything that has happened has brought me to where I am now, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.
I’ve also learned to trust that the most difficult inner work yields the most significant shifts. Feeling and releasing old pain—without bypassing cognitively or spiritually—opens us up to see the people and world around us more clearly.
We’re all walking around looking through distorted filters based on our conditioning and our life experiences to date. As one of Anaïs Nin’s most famous quotes says, “We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are.”
I’d read the email about book sales through the activated nervous system of an overheated human and the pent-up grief of a nine-year-old child. No idea how or why my psyche did that, but once I saw what was happening inside me, I was able to separate the issues and see—clearly, for once—that “5,100 books sold” is simply a fact. It’s neither here nor there, and it’s definitely not a reflection on me or my worthiness.
Keeping things in perspective
When my ego starts to sputter “But!! But… But… I want to FEEL BAD!” (because to the ego, “bad” is a form of “special”), I remind myself that over the past 15 years, I’ve experienced and survived bouts of involuntary hunger, homelessness and prolonged stretches of extreme financial challenges. So what if my book hasn’t sold as much as I’d believed or hoped? Sales numbers don’t diminish or increase my worth, because my value isn’t tied to capitalism.
Until next time, be well!
Brilliant. Oh so brilliant Sarah. Thank you for this, it is unbelievably timely! ~sarah