Something I’ve learned over the course of approximately a year’s worth of therapy is that I’m actually really, really bad at understanding and engaging with my own emotions. And how much I hate that realisation after a lifetime of priding myself on being so self-aware and incisively insightful. To no one’s surprise, I use my intellect as both a prop and shield. Especially now as a somewhat more mature and confident full-fledged adult, not only can I pontificate, but I’ve also developed the perhaps even more worrying ability to be so blunt in a humorous way that it’s created a very convincing screen of some modicum of authenticity. But my own emotions stymie me.
Here comes a therapy mantra: the here and now. Experiencing the emotions and then trying to understand them in a way that isn’t immediately seizing control with an intellectual stranglehold, or so they say. Sometimes I’d do anything to get away from the frightening ambiguous emotional mass I feel at times. Because if I can’t nicely compartmentalise and name and categorise that stuff, then what on earth am I supposed to do with all this raw emotional material? If I can’t strictly titer it out, how do I not get swept away?
I was surprised when my initial psychiatrist diagnosed me first and foremost with anxiety. Not that I’ve ever really thought they were wrong, it’s just that I don’t think of myself as someone with anxiety. But then I have an uncontrollable, whole-body panic attack on a flight that’s struggling to land in the Southern Anatolia region of Turkey, and it takes me thirty minutes for every part of my body to stop violently shaking and another thirty minutes to finally totter off the plane and hold myself upright by the baggage claim, all while my brain is screaming at my body to calm down. Truth be told, I don’t even think of myself as someone with depression most of the time. But then I’m sobbing disconsolately on the phone as my life falls apart and wailing to my friend, who’s known me for over decade, that “I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME” and they keep gently reminding me that nothing’s wrong with me, I just have depression. Even when I describe my psychiatric history to my new therapist, I frame my depression as something more intellectual than emotional, because I still don’t know what it really means for me.
Something that’s come to the forefront in the past several months with painful endings and beginnings is how much of my raw emotional material gets metabolised into shame. Okay, sure, we can all chuckle humourlessly and give each other knowing looks because all of us come from religious backgrounds with varying degrees of explicitly stated or implied shame-ometers, but that’s still not grappling with the reality in our day-to-day lives and how infuriating it can be at times.
I am filled with shame when I have to reluctantly inform people that the ideal life I had—or, at least, thought I had—is no more. Shame that I’ve always had the wild problem child role in my family, and my inability to make my marriage work is just glaring proof. Shame that I am still so awkward and clumsy at times in social situations, because in some ways I’m still so desperate to be liked and not othered. Shame and humiliation that I’ve now joined the unenviable crowd of people who can say they’ve been banned from a bar.
In all these situations, I understand intellectually why and how the mechanism of shame is working—it was always heavily implied in my religious context that divorce equaled relational failure; I should be over the petty insecurities I had when I was a teenager who was afraid no one liked her; being banned was entirely due to a personal misunderstanding with someone I thought was my friend—but knowing doesn’t do any good.
I know that there were legitimate problems that led to the slow and then breakneck speed of disintegration in my marriage, but I still feel like a failure. I know that I can come across as a very strong personality that some people might not like, although I’m actually very nice once you get to know me, but I’m still filled with pure anxiety in social interactions with my coworkers. I know that the person who got me banned was being an immature little dipshit and his treatment of me was unfair and I’m not incorrect for feeling hurt or wronged, but I’m still going to cross the street every time because it otherwise feels humiliating to walk by knowing the bartenders who poured my drinks and the regulars with whom I chatted will recognise me.
I know that, at its root, my propensity for shame stems from my lack of self-image. Or, rather, I have a decently confident self-image, but it’s remained grievously dissociated from the closer self, and it’s that self that still doesn’t believe she deserves anything good and therefore skews everything into some manner of believing she’s a terrible, shameful person. I know I’m a hedgehog of shame who doesn’t know how to unfurl. I’ve got the self-awareness step down pat—QED this post—but I can’t seem to get to whatever the next step is supposed to be. I want to shed some of my old and rotten quills, but good golly does it hurt.
