I was raised by two people who loved their children deeply but didn’t have a lot of emotional intelligence. For both of my parents, the whole concept of feelings was little more than a nuisance. And certainly there was no consideration for the idea of mental health, or lingering trauma, or anything like that.
For example: I can remember my father making fun of a family friend who was afraid of cats. “She says a cat attacked her once when she was a little kid, so now she’s afraid of all cats. Can you believe that?” he asked, with a headshake of disbelief. It didn’t matter that this was a person both of my parents loved, someone we treated like a member of the extended family; she was still ridiculous for letting her negative feelings about cats shape her life.
But this was the way my father generally dealt with emotions: he wrote them off as ridiculous and ignored them. Until he couldn’t. Until, once in a while, all hell broke loose.
My mother, on the other hand, did believe in feelings–but she believed they properly belonged to only certain people. “You think you have something to cry about?” she’d ask, if I appeared before her upset about something. Then she’d tell the story of a person who’d gone through something really terrible. “When that kind of thing happens to you,” she’d say, “then you can come crying to me.”
As far as she was concerned, her children were leading a charmed life and had nothing to complain about. (And it’s true that our lives were much easier than my parents’ lives had been. They worked really hard to make sure of that.) Only positive emotions were acceptable, and those only in moderation. An excess of joy was likely to be labeled “showing off” your good fortune; an excess of pride in a job well done, conceit; etc., etc..
It’s only been within the last year or so that I’ve really started to understand the legacy of being raised by people who were not emotionally healthy. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that both of my parents were dealing with undiagnosed mental illness. My dad spent his entire life white-knuckling his way through overwhelming anxiety. He did his best to cope with what I now think was untreated PTSD, the result of both his career in the military and a traumatic childhood. My mother went through a serious episode of depression in her 60’s that led to hospitalization; later, when she had a better understanding of her illness, she told me “Looking back now, I can see how I was this way for a long time.”
Looking back, so can I. There are so many things I didn’t understand then that make sense to me now.
The legacy of having grown up with parents who didn’t know how to deal with emotions is that, for a long time, I didn’t either. A good portion of my adult life involved telling myself things like “Just get your work done–you can have a breakdown later.” And sometimes I did. But sometimes that breakdown had to be moved to the back burner again and again, when more important concerns arose.
It’s very clear to me now that I was replicating my dad’s refusal to acknowledge and examine his feelings, to deal with emotions in a healthy way rather than ignoring them. My eventual blowups didn’t look like his, but that didn’t really matter; they had the same effect on the people I cared about.
And I did this, of course, because I’d learned to regard my feelings as insignificant. Was I starving to death? Had my house burned down? Did I lose a loved one to a terrible, unforseeable accident? If the answer to those questions was no, then why, exactly, did I need to be having feelings? How self-indulgent. How ridiculous.
Even when Mike was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, I did my best to avoid any kind of negative emotional response. The neurologist who first diagnosed Mike said “If you have to have a chronic, progressive illness, this is the one you want. It’s not MS or ALS or anything like that.” That was the line I kept repeating to myself, in the early years. This isn’t so bad. It could be a lot worse. When people asked how he was doing, I offered a carefully curated version of the truth.
Perhaps because he’d learned this response from me, Mike himself faced his diagnosis with surprising positivity. He became very serious about taking charge of what he could: exercising more, losing weight. “I’m going to make this diagnosis the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said, and I believed him. Because I wanted to.
Because hopeful was an acceptable emotion, but anxious and angry were not.
Just over a year later, though, when Mike had to take a medical leave from teaching–which ultimately became his retirement due to disability–I started to wonder if, perhaps, I now had enough reason to feel anxious. Or angry. Or even despairing. Our lives had already changed in so many ways, and the changes just kept coming. One month, Mike would be able to hand a particular task; a month later, that same task had become completely impossible.
Parkinson’s is unique in that every case is different–its symptoms don’t follow a particular trajectory, and not every patient has the same constellation of symptoms. For reasons no one can explain to us, Mike’s case is progressing more quickly than any of our doctors believed it would, given his relatively young age and good health. Last fall we learned that, not even four years after his initial diagnosis, he’s already in the early stages of Parkinson’s dementia. No one expected any of this to be happening for at least another ten years, but this is where we are.
If that isn’t reason enough to feel the occasional moment of anger and despair–well, I’m not sure what is.
I didn’t have a big moment of epiphany about any of this. But somehow–after a lot of thinking and reading and hours spent staring into the branches of the big oak tree in our backyard–I’ve finally figured out that negative emotions aren’t problems that have be solved. I do not have to find a way to make myself feel (or at least act) happy when I’m sad that our future will not be the one we’d planned. I can just sit under the oak tree with my sorrow. I can feel angry and worried and whatever else bubbles up. I can acknowledge those feelings without asking myself whether or not they’re justified.
As long as none of these feelings are leading me to harmful behaviors, or preventing me from moving forward with my life, they simply are what they are: evidence of being human. And that’s not something any of us need to be ashamed of.
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I wish I could find a link to an early episode of Invisibilia in which one of the hosts, child of a Holocaust survivor, interviewed a comedian whose parents had survived the partition of India and Pakistan. Both remembered their parents belittling their “negative” emotions about an upsetting event in their lives by comparing them to the stoicism of their older relatives who had suffered “real” trauma. The host remembered telling her mother about an upsetting event at school and her mother saying “Are you a lampshade? Then you’re all right.” I know that many members of our parents’ generation were themselves taught to push “negative” emotions down, and that acknowledging their children’s emotional lives would also have meant acknowledging their own. It’s hard for me to retrain myself to feel the shit. When I need to, I’ll imagine myself under your oak tree.
As another friend said to me, it’s no surprise that people of our parents’ generation minimized their negative emotions when didn’t really have many others options that allowed them to move forward with their lives; the whole idea of mental health wasn’t even a thing for many of them. I also understand that, for many people, the depth of negative feelings is such that any attempt to explore them feels potentially life-threatening. What if you can’t resurface? But I think we all have to figure out how to navigate the deep end of the emotional pool. I keep relying on the branches of that oak tree to pull myself up.
Thanks for sharing this perspective. I similarly find myself putting unnervingly positive spins on things and not letting myself experience the bad feelings until I feel safe or until they surface with some other catalyst. I spent time this weekend with extended family and thought a lot about the ways different generations talk to their children about feelings, obligations, and roles.
As I noted in another comment here, it’s interesting that I’ve been able to validate my kids’ emotions in a way I’ve struggled to validate my own. Perhaps that’s just evidence that we are always many people at once–always a kid who was taught to behave in certain ways, even while being a parent who teaches kids to behave in different ways.
4 years after you are no longer my professor I am still learning from you. I feel like I am at the opposite end of this spectrum because instead of being able to talk myself out of my emotions through positivity I find that I feel so much and I fail miserably to hold it in. I remember crying in basic training after a TI yelled at me. Probably more from humiliation because now everyone knew I had made a mistake rather than actually being upset that he was yelling. I cry about loss and suffering that isn’t even my own and is sometimes even fictional. I have been called sensitive and overly emotional. But you know what, my tears are evidence that I have a heart and I care and I love more deeply than most people I know. It doesn’t make me a bad person or flawed/broken; it’s simply human. Thank you for your repeated lessons and wisdom that you still impart on the world.
Teaching us to think of ourselves as overly sensitive is one of the many ways people avoid their own negative emotions. I can’t tell you how many times, as a kid, my mother said something like “If you’re going to get this upset over a movie, I’m not going to let you watch TV anymore.” So I learned pretty quickly that the problem was not that life is often sad, and we have to learn how to deal with our sorrow; the problem was my inability to control my emotions. I
I also have a very clear memory of my daughter coming home from school absolutely heartbroken over a book her teacher had been reading to their class that day. She had managed not to cry at school, but the minute she walked through the door at home, she fell apart. So we sat down and talked about what had been upsetting her, and how books can be as powerful as “real life.” Both of my kids are extremely sensitive, and I’ve always refused to treat that as a weakness. But I’ve had a hard time doing the same thing for myself.
Interesting that you should post this piece today. Earlier I reminded myself of the same conclusion — I feel because I am human — not because I haven’t acknowledged my feelings, but because people always told me my feelings meant I was broken. I looked at my passion flowers this morning while putting out hay for my mule and realized that my feelings and how I experience them don’t make me broken. They never did.
Even when we have the awful loss (as I did) that entitles us to feel sad or angry or downhearted in some way, the majority of people still don’t give us the grace to feel and experience our feelings in our own way. I didn’t lose everything. The loss was my fault. I should get on with rebuilding my life and stop talking about the loss.
Today, 30-some years after the big loss, I still woke up feeling like the life I built was based on being broken. Until I fed hay to my mule amid the passionflowers. Not broken. Informed by grief and filled with joy.
Thank you for that beautiful reply. You are living a life that’s filled with so much love and compassion for others–and those are almost always emotions we’ve learned through difficult experience.