The Truth Behind the Emotions:
A couple I worked with always brought their infant to sessions, and she proved very useful in demonstrating what I was trying to teach her parents: vulnerability, authenticity, and effective emotional expression. We are the most vulnerable as babies–the most honest, and in most cases, the clearest about what we want and need. When babies are happy, they show it. When they are sad or angry, you know it. If you can’t immediately tell why they are distressed, you can usually figure it out by screening for the basics: food, sleep, love, physical pain, etc. They express their emotions in terms of how they feel, not in terms of what YOU are doing wrong. Babies never make passive aggressive remarks. They never criticize. They never defensively justify their behavior. And they never suppress their feelings.
Until they are taught to do so.
It is much more difficult to meet the needs of older people. They express feelings in terms of arguments, criticisms, complaints, damaging coping behaviors, logical reasoning, or just try to pretend feelings don’t exist. Your teenager, spouse, or parent’s needs are way more cryptic than your baby’s. Baby might say, “WAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!,” to say, “I’m feeling scared and alone. Please hold me!”. The common adult equivalents of this bid for love and safety might look like:
“You’re as frigid as an iceberg!”
“You only care about sex!”
“You’re working more hours to avoid me!”
“Why don’t you cry to your friends about it, since they’d understand better than me anyway.”
-Bingeing TikTok for hours on end.
-Spending time with drug or drinking buddies who will never judge you.
-Getting more cats than one can safely care for.
And so on. Unfortunately, these indirect ways of expressing and meeting needs are much less effective than the direct route that babies take. Baby’s get held and fed; but partners get sexually or emotionally rejected, college students have unstable relationships, and high achievers are left without close friends. Why did we learn to hide the feelings?
Basically, it’s because we felt punished for having certain emotions. Whiners, cry-babies, weaklings, and softies are shamed, discouraging the expression of fear and sadness. Anger is often met with attacks or other shaming. Even happiness and excitement can be invalidated (“You think that’s impressive? What do you want, a gold star?”). Most people won’t invalidate the baby’s feelings, but most of us will invalidate some of our toddler’s feelings, and it just gets worse from there. And as we get older, the less likely our feelings are safe to share, the more indirect we have to be, and the less tolerable our “feelings” become. They are no longer recognizable as feelings, but as threats:
“All you care about is SEX!” is a vulnerable emotion (sadness/loneliness)… disguised as an attack.
So how do we show our true colors? How do we get back to how we were as babies, where it was so easy to receive validation?
–First, notice the ways you are hiding your emotions. Are you stuffing them, or putting them in cheap Halloween costumes that get poor feedback?
–Next, explore why you feel the need to hide the feelings. What experiences in the past or present sent the message that certain feelings are not tolerated? Identifying and processing the past and intervening in the present can decrease the threat to your soft emotions.
–Then, practice being vulnerable. If you go about expressing your feelings as feelings (not logic, coping, or accusations), you will prompt others to do the same; vulnerability breeds vulnerability. You may get hurt as you live more vulnerably, but it is worth the risk to discover where you are actually safe, and where you need to set boundaries.
