Facing My Emotions

In late 2019 I began reading about a phenomenon called Childhood Emotional Neglect and thinking about its effects on my personality and my life. As is obvious from the name, it’s when a person grows up without validation of their emotions, causing it to be difficult to access, describe, and understand their feelings as an adult. 

More recently I have also been looking into and thinking about the ways my childhood experience was not just neglectful, but actively abusive. Not in big, loud ways: there was rarely any screaming or physical violence, but in small, insidious ways: dismissing of my interests and aspirations, and a general lack of acknowledging me as a whole person with her own feelings and needs. 

I have been trying to address the effects this has had on me for… well, really since I started going to therapy as a teenager, but for a long time therapy was just looking at the symptoms and not helping me elucidate or analyze the underlying traumatic experiences. It’s been about a year since I’ve realize the impact childhood trauma has had on me and started trying to unpack and understand it. 

And it’s been a difficult year. I’ve stopped being suicidal (which was both great and jarring, since it was a part of my identity for such a long time), but I’ve also had two periods of needing to stop work because my mental health was so bad I couldn’t function. (Once I went to a hospital outpatient program for it — online, though, because Covid — and the other time I couldn’t get into a hospital program and so I organized intensive therapy with three different practitioners a week and did a C-PTSD workbook on my own.) I am both proud of all the progress I’ve made and terrified at how much longer this road might be. 

For example, this afternoon I was just daydreaming in the car on my way to the gym after work, and I’m not even sure how but I got to the place of realizing how much I hate myself and how much it’s going to impede my job search, whenever I try to find a job next. (I’ve resigned both my current positions as of July 1, which is a ways off, but I have a feeling it will come quickly.)

And I thought, crying on the highway, hoping the contacts I just put in to be able to see while I worked out wouldn’t slide out of my eyes, “How does anyone just feel their emotions? Like all the time? How could you function in the world and be an emotional being at the same time?”

It’s so hard not to self-medicate every day as a shield against those emotions. I don’t know how to have a full time job and to face them at the same time, but I’m learning that everything I do will suffer until I stop. And turn. And face them. 

I’m dreading it but it’s the only way.