Emotional Memory

Our Emotional Memory is Below the Neck

If this is your first visit to my blog, you might also want to read the 

Introduction Page.

I hope you have been following those posts.  If you are new, this commentary specifically relates to the second post, “Emotions and Intellect.”  Reading that will offer a foundation for these comments.

As I have discussed before, humans function (best) when we can integrate our emotions and intellect as a team to process life and make self affirming decisions.  

Our intellect is very good at storing information, and experiences, neatly catalogued, sanitized, explained and rationalized.  But our emotions reside in our body.  We hold emotional experiences in our bodies.  This is why when we have a noteworthy emotion, our body responds.  When a person experiences elation, we feel jubilant.  Some folks will make loud noises (screams, “Oh My God”) crying, jumping up and down, etc.  Elation is a good feeling, most of us don’t “hold back” (depending on how our culture teaches us to express emotions).  

Some cultures teach that the display of ANY emotions outside of the family is vulgar.  I have many Korean friends, one of who is a (now retired) Social Worker.  Our friendship includes long and detailed conversations about culture and how different cultures socialize people to deal with emotions.  I once asked her why photos of northern Asians in public assemblies often had rows and rows of people with stone somber faces, no matter what.  She explained that in northern Asian culture, the display of any emotion in public is considered vulgar, the equivalent of walking around with one’s private parts displayed.  

So one of the things you might consider is how your ethnic heritage and family may have contributed to how you express your emotions.   In Family Systems practice, we look at how this affects family structure and processing.  A classic scenario, one parent is from northern European background, the other from southern Europe. (I.E. German married to a Greek)

Then there are all the layers of “Class” and how one defines it.  In Europe and the United States, as well as many other cultures I have encountered, social class is often defined by emotional reserve.  Upper class people tend to keep their emotions “tightly wrapped.”  Lower and middle class people who wish to climb socially quickly learn that it takes reserve and “polish” to move upward on the social ladder.  The classic example of Eliza Dolittle in “Pygmalion” (also “My Fair Lady”) is one such story. 

So most of us grow up with an expectation that our emotions are best kept “private” if we are to be “successful.”  Those who don’t buy into that expectation are often judged harshly by those who have bought into it.  I often heard the terms “refinement” and “breeding” when I was a child, the blatantly stated expectation that certain (if not most) emotions were to be “reserved” and not openly shared.

Folks who are formed in this way are often called “stiff.”  We can feel their inflexibility, and are unconsciously suspicious.  What is behind the mask, what are they hiding?”

What they are often hiding is an overwhelming sense of insecurity and fear that if they reveal too much they will fall from whatever rung on the social ladder they have climbed to.  The development of a light and pleasant social persona that glides easily through social situation, most notably cocktail parties, golf, tennis, and other social settings enjoyed by the upper classes (and at virtually all employers) is essential to attaining and retaining social status and secure employment.

A classic example of this is illustrated in the film “Good Fences.”  Danny Glover plays an aspiring black attorney, who completely “sells out” to the white establishment so that he can move his family up into the upper class.  They move from Bridgeport CN to Greenwich, as he explains, their neighbors are people who have buildings named after them.  Just when you have decided that he is a totally despicable character, he finally reveals his own deep trauma, an attempted lynching (of him) that forced him to flee for his life from Mississippi, because he beat a white kid in the state spelling bee.  He has never been able to process that terror, so now he has become his oppressors, if not surpassing them in expected behavior.   He explains in voiceover that it is sacrifice to elevate his race.   It is both compelling and humorous, and excellent film, well worth watching.  A clip from the film is here.

We may find his experience amusing, odd, even pathetic, but it is also reality for most people who" want a better life.”  We have to present ourselves in a way that pleases the people we associate with, and if we’re moving up, that means repression our emotions, creating a “mask” that suits those people, so that we will “fit in” and be successful.

So while we are “refining” ourselves, we are really stuffing emotions.  After a while, they are so buried beneath a pile of rationalizations, justifications, explanations and “yes but” s we have consciously disconnected from about 80% of our humanity, until someone comes along and reminds us of those buried fears.  Then we retaliate and get rid of them because we can’t abide any reminders of what happened, or look at who and what we have become.

The problem is that now that we have “sold our soul” we wonder why we feel so empty inside, why we are not happy, why we get depressed, sometimes get cancer, fight with the people who love us, etc, etc.

In my work with clients, I try to have them focus on their responses below the neck to whatever is going on.  This is often difficult at first.  They are much more comfortable telling the content of their week.  Often it is all they know.  They are skilled at reporting, their “chatter.”  

I work with them to listen to themselves by forcing them to use “I” when describing any situation that relates to them.  The other tool I use it not accepting pronouns (“It” mostly) when they are describing an issue in their life.  

So their conversation might start out like, “Well, you know, when your’e dealing with it and it’s frustrating, and you don’t know what to do, and it’s just one more thing that you can’t complete or win at.”

I look at them and say things like “It WHAT?” and “WHO is this happening to, you or me?”

With some cajoling and persuasion, the conversation (hopefully) becomes something more like this, “Well, you know, my car wouldn’t start, and I let my road service expire because I forgot to pay it, and I didn’t know how to get the car started, or get it towed to my mechanic, and I felt like an idiot for letting myself get into that situation.”

At that point I can ask, “So what does that feel like, hearing yourself say this?”  And usually the answer is “Mad” or “Angry” though sometimes it takes a few warm ups to finally acknowledge the angry rock inside of their gut.

We store all sorts of things in our body.  Most of us store tension somewhere.  When I was in school, I shared with an instructor, Pincus Gross, that before I had realized and accepted that I was Gay, I had constant back aches.  After I accepted my “deviant” (and shame filled) sexual self, my pains left my back and moved to my neck and shoulders.  He quipped, “So, you’re no longer a pain in the ass, but now you’re a pain in the neck?”  We laughed, and then went on explore the “stories” held in each location.  

I had “frozen” hips for years, could not move them much.  Doing so might awaken all of the desire associated with a person’s “nether parts” (genitals) which were strictly my very private secret for years.  Once I liberated my sexuality and my hips, my new fear was being hit from the back, “Cuffed” my brother would tell me years later, which was one of my father’s favorite ways of dumping his own frustrations on me.  So I walked around with my upper back and shoulders pushed forward, doing the “turtle neck” ready to pull in if attacked.  An example of this in in this photo, and since we never see ourselves in profile, or from the back, most of us are oblivious to our own bodies and what we are displaying.

I personally also looked down a lot because of my extreme myopia and with glasses, I had no field of vision directly in front of myself, so I had to watch my path in front of me.  Once I got contact lenses, that need evaporated.   And slowly, my head came up some.  I still have some of the “turtle neck” thing, and I am very conscious of it in others.

My own journey of liberating my body of all my “stuffed” emotions has given me a lot of insight into how others do the same thing.  In therapy sessions, I often invite clients to feel what they are doing with their bodies when they are expressing certain emotions.  A person will play with their eyes as their tear glands are swelling with tears, yet they deny they are about to cry, and then when they realize the emotion they are feeling but ignoring, let the tears gush.  

I have seen people turn beet red as an emotion wells up in them, and they are usually unaware, and then trying to suppress, because letting his/her self display the emotion is laden with shame.  Their head is screaming “NO” while their body is saying “yes.”  

So I encourage people to listen to their bodies more and their heads less.  This process is essential to any meaningful work in therapy, yet many therapists who have not worked on their own issues with their own emotions, flee from anything that is “hard.”  They want to reframe the emotion into something intellectual, sanitized and “safe.”   It is often why clients tell me their previous therapists were not very helpful.  They never let them, or in some cases “encouraged” them (a nice way of saying provoke) to push through their intellect and actually let the feeling out.  This is usually centered in fear of expression of anger.  

We often have enormous shame attached to any expression of anger unless we can completely justify our anger intellectually.  Then our anger gets processed in the “yes but” machine in our heads, we talk ourselves out of it, because we cannot validate why we are angry.  So our anger gets stuffed, and we get depressed.

This scene from “Six Feet Under” is a marvelous example of how David Fisher begins to learn to process his anger in an appropriate manner.  A large funeral home chain is trying to force the Fishers to sell out to the chain.  The chain has become very threatening and relentless in their pursuit.  David is visited by the spirit of a young “gang banger” he has just buried.  He asks him what would you do?  Not all of us have to do it the way Paco does, but David does find a way to use his anger to protect himself in a manner that works for himself.  

In my early 20s, I was so disconnected from my body, after numbing myself with food to not feel years of physical abuse, I drove a nail an inch into my thigh and didn’t feel it.  I was “starting” a nail into a piece of wood.  Not having a workbench handy, I used my leg as one.  The nail went through, came out the back side of the wood into my leg, and I felt no pain.  I pulled the wood up, saw the nail, looked at my leg and saw a hole oozing blood.

This is the power of our mind to ignore our body.  It is a basic survival skill, often helpful in emergency situations, but it goes to “auto pilot” when we are living in an ongoing state of trauma, misery. or other forms of emotional repression.

If we don’t acknowledge our full emotional “history” that is buried in our bodies, we will get sick because it is the body’s way of getting our attention and forcing us to deal with ourselves.  My aunt Louise told me this decades ago, how in the late 1940s she was so unhappy, filled with pain and resentments, she gave herself cancer.  She became a Christian Scientist, and used her new found spirituality to clean out the caverns of her pain and the ,deep shame and self judgement that accompanied it.

Louise Brackett Beasley’s, story, along with many others, including the healing practitioner Louise Hay, are why I also believe that unresolved emotions are a significant co-factor in disease.  If one spends any time in 12 Step meetings, one often hears stories of how people lost in addiction, also became very sick, often for no identifiable reason, just chronic misery.  Gert Behannah talks about this in her talk “The Late Liz.”  She had a plethora of psychosomatic illnesses.  She went to an expensive clinic and at the end of all the tests, the head doctor said, “Ms. Behannah, you’re a very sick woman and there’s nothing the matter with you.”

Within a year of developing a spiritual core in her life, all the symptoms were gone.

Ms. Behannah's experience was centered in the Christian Healing perspective, that healing and forgiveness are connected, and both occur best when we offer our pain and ourselves to God, and ask for his Grace in our lives.  This is usually manifested in the Sacrament of Unction or Healing in orthodox/sacramental Christian churches.  No matter what one's spiritual practice is, sharing our emotions with our understanding of God is essential to healing emotionally.

Shame is lethal.  Clearing out our dark and hidden recesses of emotion, is simply the act of bringing those hidden and shameful emotions into the light of God, which dis-empowers them, because they are no longer cloaked in shame.  

I want to be very clear that I am not suggesting that illness and disease are solely based in spiritual and mental issues.  All disease has a multitude of co-factors.  But I have observed over the years that people who are chronically unfulfilled, miserable, “long suffering” unable to forgive, hanging onto resentments, or otherwise unhappy, tend to get sick a lot more and a lot more severely than people who listen to their inner “spirit voice” and then act upon it’s guidance.

More will be revealed.