Learning to feel the feeling

I, like a lot of people, have been struggling to regulate my emotions lately. Perhaps it’s the constant influx of COVID-19 updates, or perhaps it’s just the disquiet in the air, as across the world, we’re faced with uncertainty. 

Some days, I’ll vacillate between sadness, anger, and fear. I’m sad, because everything has changed (even if just temporarily). I’m angry, because people were still gathering closely in public, despite Government regulations. And I’m fearful. Fearful of losing my world and the people in it. Fearful that, when this is all over, I won’t recognise my surroundings, that it’ll all get lost in the chaos. 

Reckoning with these thoughts is certainly difficult, but it also feels necessary, because, as Scott Berinato explains in his piece for the Harvard Business Review, if we can name our emotions, perhaps we can manage them. 

Berinato surmises that, in fact, what we’re feeling isn’t just sadness, or anger or fear, it’s grief: a complex, muddled, overwhelming grief. We’re grieving because we’ve been hit with a collective sense of loss – of normalcy, economic stability, and human connection. The loss is palpable; we’re surrounded by it, and that terrifies us. 

In order to unpack this further, Berinato turns to David Kessler, a renowned expert on grief, who explains that most of what we’re experiencing actually lies in the anticipation of grief. Instead, says Kessler, you want to stay in the present and remind yourself that none of what you’ve imagined might happen has happened. In this moment, you are okay. 

Kessler also explains something crucial about emotions: they require motion. In other words, it’s important for us to feel our emotions, but it’s also important that we let them move through us. Integrating this concept into my own life has been profoundly impactful. It’s enabled me to recognise my feelings while realising that they will pass, that I don’t have to live there. I’ve found that registering emotions in this way creates order where there is otherwise chaos; it empowers you and enables you to take control. “Then,” says Kessler, “we’re not victims.”