Week 03 Learning Objectives
Identify the relationship between cognitions, emotions, and behaviors
Define and identify common cognitive distortions
Describe Buddhism's Three Marks of Existence
Explore relating to thoughts and feelings differently
Observe attachments and reactivity in own life
1.4. Emotional Growth and a Mindset
Identify three emotions you feel comfortable experiencing and three emotions that are challenging for you. How might your discomfort with certain emotions be limiting to you?
This sounds stupid, but I honestly find this question really difficult to process. I feel this way because I often find it difficult experiencing emotions because I fear I need to keep them bottled up inside, less I offend anyone. What’s even weirder is I feel like I’m going to break down crying as I write this. My chest feels tight, and I can feel a pressure building up in my throat, and around my eyes. This discomfort with this question is likely a strong candidate for one emotion I find challenging (Challenging - 1).
As I write this, I’m sitting in the waiting room of the local emergency department at my local hospital, waiting for a friend who is finally being seen for an issue she’s been having. I’m grateful she trusts me enough to bring her here. She tried going to a clinic that we went to earlier today, but they referred her to the emergency department where we’ve been now for several hours. Last week, she was hospitalized for a few days and I actually picked her up and brought her back to her home.
But in thinking back to different times in my life, I find there are many instances where I’ve kept emotions to myself. I was bullied a lot in high school, and as a response there were times I took to egging it on by acting silly, and engaging in humour that was both provocative and shocking. So being a class clown was a kind of emotion I felt comfortable experiencing. I did this because if I didn’t, there were too many times where I found I would just be ignored by my peers, and it got to a point where receiving negative attention was better than receiving no attention at all. The loneliness of being isolated due to the bullying was something I was forced to embrace, less I lose my mind, but it also meant that I wasn’t being bullied in those moments. So this is 50/50 for me as the loneliness was something I could find comfortable (Comfortable- 1) and challenging (Challenging - 2). Ultimately, though, it was probably more challenging, as we all crave connection.
I also remember how my first romantic relationship didn’t happen while I was in high school, but in the first year after I had graduated. I knew she had been hurt in past relationships and I let her take the lead. But this was another example of me keeping my own emotions bottled up to a degree, as I know there were many times when I kept my wants and desires almost covered up completely. Just telling her I loved her was maybe the most difficult thing I’d ever done in my life, but also the most easiest thing I’d ever done. Expressing how I feel to those I care for is definitely challenging for me (Challenging - 3). I found it difficult with my first girlfriend, and I find it difficult with the girl I’m waiting for right now.
In thinking more about my first girlfriend, I remember how each week we’d spend Friday nights watching a movie and an episode of Star Trek Voyager in my room, laying together in my bed. By the end of the film, we’d end up snuggling close. She set ground rules for intimacy: no kissing, and no touching private areas such as her breasts, vulva or ass. But each week we were so close to each other. I can remember our bodies pressed close together, arms wrapped around each other, hands slowly caressing each other’s backs and the napes of our necks. Our breath would grow deeper and more intense as the night moved on. Our legs would intertwine sometimes, each leg slowly edging along the other’s legs. I didn’t know it at the time, but today I know what we experienced was tantric. Not in a complete sexual sense, as is commonly associated with the term, but in a manner that emphasized the feeling of the moment across the entire being of each other’s bodies. This was a second thing I was very comfortable (Comfortable - 2) with. In those moments I felt safe and at home in her embrace.
At some point though, we ended up going our separate ways. And there did come a time when she wrote me a long letter which I remember reading in the parking lot of a local gas station. In fact, every time I pass by that station almost twenty years later I can still see where I parked and I can still remember the deep sobbing I went through as the tears rolled down my face. And I can still remember the pain that was in my chest as I read her words about how she loved me, but wasn’t in love with me. And I remember her declaration of how I simply didn’t know what love is. And god, how it cut like a knife to my soul. Like the feelings of loneliness, the gloomy feelings of deep sadness associated with being rejected as an individual is something that falls into being 50/50 in terms of being both something I’ve become comfortable (Comfortable - 3) with, while at the same time, oh so challenging too (Challenging - 4).
For most of my life I’ve wrestled with the impacts of major depressive disorder. When I was younger, I was a high functioning depressive, but in recent years I’ve found my life is like the line from the Lady Gaga song, 1,000 Doves, where she sings about how: “I cry more than I ever say.” That line resonates so much for me as I approach middle age. At times the depression hangs over me like a wet, weighted blanket, making it difficult to breathe, difficult to feel. It creates an emptiness inside where I’m often not sure of who I really am. But in my deepest moments of reflection I can’t say I really feel anything. And it’s neither challenging or comforting. It just is. It’s a blankness, a fog, that makes it difficult to do anything, so you just sleep. Or, at night, under the veil of insomnia, staring mindlessly up at the ceiling, or scrolling mindlessly through Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube on my iPhone. It’s a negative intrusion into my life though. One that I’d rather do without, so this definitely would fall into an emotion I find challenging (Challenging - 5).