Numb/Encore
- saoirsefitz
- May 7, 2021
- 11 min read
Emotions are energy in motion. For a long time, I think I portrayed emotions rather than letting the motion occur. I was a great actress at happiness. Oscar worthy. The definition of Ross ‘I’m fiiiiine’.
Now there were definitely times emotions would bubble up and burst forward, usually anger or sadness. In terms of motion though they were like an angry spike on a heart monitor. Rather than question, ‘where did that come from?’, I returned to playing the part of the happy yes girl. There was also many a time I did feel the emotions of happiness, and love, but by not processing and numbing from any I deemed ‘bad’, I never fully felt them. Definitely not in the way I feel now.
Furthermore, I did not even understand how to feel happy without becoming attached to happiness or joy. Rather than letting the emotion flow, I would grab onto it with a lasso. Therefore, any time I was not feeling happy, and another scary emotion was lurking I was desperately trying to pull it back.
By not processing or feeling any emotions. Running like an athlete from any emotion I disliked, I subconsciously began to look for external ways to numb or control. My main coping mechanisms were over-doing, over drinking and over exercising.
I think it is important for alcohol and food to mention the spectrum of disorders. You do not need to be at the end of the spectrum to know you have an issue with your experience of either.
Over-Doing
The best way to numb, was to be too busy to allow the emotion to catch up with me. We live in a society that celebrates busyness with a constant urgency culture. I consistently felt like I was both running out of time and that there was not enough of it. I filled my diary. A diary without a dot on a date gave me anxiety. Rather than flowing with the seasons and seeing January as a time of hibernation and rest, I would panic and book a Ryanair flight for each weekend so fearful of just sitting and being. If I did not have weekend plans, I would panic and quickly fill them. More often than not the weekend plans were filled with boozy drinking.
Alcohol
A society that promoted urgency culture and also one that marketed off binge drinking. I was fully caught up in this one. Casual abuse occurred in the non-drinking days to then the excessive drinking days. I would drink subconsciously to numb out from whatever I was feeling, again too afraid to sit and question what was I running from? Alcohol allowed me to move outside my body.
I would then wake up Sunday mornings wracked with hangover guilt and shame. Each hangover I would hate myself more. I always remember a time where my best friend had slept over the night before as we had been at a party. As she was leaving, I was lying down probably looking despondently at the ceiling thinking of what a horrible human I was, and she said to me ‘I hate leaving you like this, I know you are just going to beat yourself up all day’. I was in a heavy shadow phase of trying to validate myself through love, and if you read my ‘He’s just not that into you, Ergo I love him’ blog post, I was in the Best Friend stage. I actually cannot remember my reply, but I know how seen I probably felt with that sentence, so I can imagine it was a laugh, a joke to knock it off and a fake smile as I was not ready for that.
But it was true. I was in an endless cycle of casual alcohol abuse and beating myself up. As I reached my 25th birthday, I started to realise I needed to change. However, I was not ready to look at the reasons behind the numbing so instead I thought if I moved flat, that would solve all my problems.
So, I moved flat, a flat I actually went to see on a massive downward spiral after a heavy weekend. Oh, the irony. I was moving in with one of my best friends and in hindsight I think I wanted both the flat and her to save me. We had a heavy Summer of drinking and partying, but I also had a great Summer. I was making great memories and not every night was going over my limits. Some nights I operated within them. But while there were feelings that I was avoiding by using other substances, they were never going to help. This is what numbing means, there is no balance. I was not checking in and feeling the feels alongside the good times. I was beginning to live fully outside my body.
Food
Around this time food and exercise took off to a new level. With alcohol I numbed and moved into out of control, with food I punished and controlled.. I never once believed I had a problem. I continued to believe I did not have a problem until the past year. Only during my last stint of heavy shadow work did it come up. I had completely denied this part of myself.
I would hyper control the number of calories I would consume, but I never counted them so to my logic I was all good. I would beat myself up if I had a ‘treat’. Or if I knew I was going out to dinner that night, I was restricting what I was eating the whole day. I had a goal weight which was well below a weight that was healthy for my height or build. I met it more than once, and when I was not around the mark I exercised excessively, without balancing it with food to fuel my body.
I was in the gym a lot. Usually, 5 days a week of heavy cardio plus weights. I started running. Then a weekend of binge drinking and right back at it Monday. Exercise can be great for your mental health, but not if your decision making has been tampered with.
An urgent society, a society that promotes binge drinking and finally one that correlates and pushes happiness with ideal weight.
When the feels catch up
It took another two years from my 25th birthday but the feels finally caught up. They came with a vengeance. Pandora's box in Greek mythology was a present Pandora received at her wedding ceremony. Upon opening it she released into the kingdom of Earth, death, sickness, and other evils. The story goes that she shut the box before the last element could escape, which was in fact hope. When my pandora’s box opened and every emotion that I had deemed evil finally caught up with me, for a long-time there felt like no hope.
In a society that offers a wealth of distraction, when it finally came time to feel everything, it was overwhelming. The dark night of the soul is a term linked to Christianity which is deemed to be the time of painful experience in order to lead to your own spiritual awakening. In order to make it true I had to meet my shadow. Every part of myself that I had spent the last few years previously rejecting.
Your shadow
What made it easier to feel, was to learn to breathe. One step, one breath became my mantra. Taking each day slowly and surely. The shadow is every part of yourself that you have denied. All we deny in ourselves, that parts that we deem unacceptable become our shadow. They can be deemed both positive and negative qualities. Every time we deny ourselves the ability to look at emotions we deem ‘bad’, we feed the shadow.
When we receive negative cues from the environment, we can build them into our cognition. These can be so subtle that we do not even remember them. For example, being told good girls do not cry as a child. Your parent might not have ever met it in such a literal way, but we can begin to believe that showing emotions are ‘bad’. I was also quite a silly giggly child, and I was told often how great my happiness was. Unfortunately, as a child we are unaware how to separate our own cognition from others, so it is easy to pick up thoughts such as ‘they want me to be happy all the time’. Anger, guilt, greed, selfishness, sadness. All these emotions are meant to flow through us. The more we supress them the more our shadow rules the roost with the coping mechanisms.
“ How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole” Carl Jung.
Shine a light on any areas of your life that bring forth the emotions you may deem ‘bad’ and the shadow will be there. Shadow work is not to judge. It is to greet this part of your self with love. To let her know that she is worthy, she is worthy of it all, that there is no good or bad. All aspects are necessary to come home.
(Taken and all rights vishsharma_ Instagram).
Decision Making
Now the Shadow is another psyche, which comes from Jungian psychology, but it is also important to understand how your brain works in regards decision making, when we have numbing coping mechanism.
Decision making has multiple components to it which are intertwined based on the neurobiological underpinnings. Taking Rangel et al (2008) they postulate five main computational processes of decision making. These processes include (i) representation of the decision problem, including internal and external states (e.g. environmental factors) that provide information on the decision at hand; (ii) evaluation of available action choices by assigning a value to them; (iii) action selection based on the valuation process; (iv) outcome valuation; (v) and learning . There are then two major neurotransmitter systems involved in decision-making: dopamine and serotonin. Substance use disorders are generally linked to impairments in dopamine signalling (Volkow et al., 2004) and depression or anxiety related disorders may involve divergent serotonin (Dell’Osso et al., 2016).
Our emotions can then directly affect our decision-making skills and hence our attitudes and behaviours. The Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980) explains how the primary determinant of behaviour is the person’s intention. The intention can then be further broken down into the person’s attitude of behaviour and the perceived social norm.
So, let’s break this down easier into the three coping mechanisms I had mentioned:
Over-doing: Decision making process; feel or run, valuation and learning it was easier to run. Dopamine signal spikes, short term gain. Serotonin begins to diverge. TRA, attitude of this outcome is known and safe, social norm; people like when I am busy.
Over-drinking: Decision making process; feel or run, valuation and learning it was easier to run. Dopamine signal spikes, short term gain. Serotonin begins to diverge. TRA attitude of this outcome is known and safe, social norm; everyone is out drinking.
Over-exercising: Decision making process; feel or run, valuation and learning it was easier to run. Dopamine signal spikes, short term gain. Serotonin begins to diverge TRA attitude of this outcome is known and safe, social norm; I think we all know this one.
It is so easy to come into a behaviour decision making loop. Not everyone needs a dark night of the soul to come back from it. We just need to question why am I doing something? Is it truly to help me or am I running from something? What do I actually hold space for right now? Do I need to hold space for myself? Am I seeing my body as part of my self or as a vessel?
Finally, if you do feel in the midst of a dark night of the soul, I think its important again to remember that your brain might not be working with you. But once you keep going you can integrate them together it just takes each day ‘One breath, one step’.
Depression affects your memory. For example, in periods of depression, your brain is more likely to automatically circuit to remembering other times you felt depressed. In 2014, researchers (Romero et al., 2014) examined a group of people who were formerly depressed, they were better at remembering negative adjectives from a list of words than the control group (not suffering from depression). The hippocampus, the part of brain that deals with learning and memory is sensitive to stress and can become smaller in people suffering from prolonged depression (Watkins , 2002). Finally episodic memory (which is our emotional memories) is mediated by complex circuitry in brain regions. Estradiol (a form of estrogen) can affect our circuit activity (Schwabe, 2020). In times of heightened anxiety our estradiol levels can become effected, which can in turn affect our emotional memories and level of anxiety. So allow it to take its time. Knowing that you are retraining your body.
Conscious Consumption
My body in all that time of not feeling and running from labelled tough emotions, was actually operating in fight or flight mode. I tried drinking alcohol in moderation, but to be honest, even if I was only having one glass of wine, I had abused alcohol for so long that it still gave me consistent anxiety. My body is sensitive to fluctuations in the nervous system. The mind can catch up but the body it takes longer in my experience to heal it and shift the energy.
Traditional Chinese Medicine is beautiful for this for showing how our body can hold emotions and this in turn can lead to health diagnosis. My IBS issues went out the window when I started working with emotions. Similarly, I used to have a lot of skin issues, they also left. I am still working on my hips. One of the main areas that women hold tension is within their hips unfortunately I held many a year here, so it is taking its time, but yoga and tapping have really helped, and I see changes now each day. I also do not judge them. They are exactly where they need to be in their own journey.
Exercise is funny one. As it can often be seen as a great anxiety cure. However, it is important to see why you are using it. If I feel sadness. I sit with it, if there was something triggering that caused it, I question why, and then I run to shift the energy of the emotion, not the emotion itself. For me I feel I need an important distinction that exercise will not make me feel better if I am running from something. If I am running with the energy and working through it, then yes, we get on well.
I learnt to cook. I always knew the basics, but I began to learn how to actually nourish my body. I avoid processed food as much as possible or high anxiety foods. The same with coffee. Integrating with your body allows you to begin to notice the cues of what causes heightened reactions and what allows it to feel in rest mode.
Conclusion
Society is deemed to have us operate outside our body. Seeing it as a vessel to do rather than to be with. Integrating mind, body, and soul has been my favourite journey. Sometimes exhausting, sometimes beautiful but always worthwhile. In a world that pushes us to live outside ourselves, coming home to your self is the rebellious act. Feel the feels, they are here to guide you home.
References
A framework for studying the neurobiology of value-based decision making
Memory biases in remitted depression: The role of negative cognitions at explicit and automatic processing levels
Rumination and executive function in depression: an experimental study
Understanding the Dynamics of Decision-Making and Choice: A Scoping Study of Key Psychological Theories to Inform The Design and Analysis of the Panel Study
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