SELF - AWARENE SS
How do you go expressing your ‘unpopular’ feelings?
If you want integrity and wholeness in your life, you must embrace all of your feelings, not just the popular ones.
by Barry Vissell T
here are ‘popular’ feelings: joy, happiness, love, and affection, to name a few. And then there
are ‘unpopular’ feelings: anger, sadness, grief, hurt, and fear, among others. Most of us tend to hide the unpopular feelings and, instead, only feel and show the popular ones. If we want integrity and wholeness
in our lives, we must embrace all our feelings. Picking and choosing simply won’t work. Believe me, I’ve tried it plenty, and in a bit I’ll tell you what happened to me. Remember, there are no good or
bad feelings. There are just feelings. They make us divinely human and humanly divine. It may not be necessary to express them all with others, but we need to be aware of them within ourselves. Feelings are part of our experience here on earth. Our feelings don’t define us. As souls in these bodies, we are always more than our feelings. Still, they are vital. My wife Joyce and I recently
remembered a powerful experience I had 14 APRIL 2017
starting out as a resident in psychiatry. I was especially fixated on only feeling, and showing, the above-mentioned popular emotions. I was able to fool a lot of people by my appearance of unswerving peace and happiness. I was not able to fool two persons in particular, however. One was Joyce. She always saw what I really felt. She saw right through my false pretence, even when I didn’t. She knew when I was angry, even though I was smiling. She knew when I was sad, even when I had no clue. The other person I could never fool
was Leo Buscaglia, the author of many books on love, and our friend while we lived in Los Angeles during my final two years of medical school. He was not polite with me. If I wasn’t being genuine, he’d get right in my face and say, “Barry, you’re being phoney right now!” I actually appreciated his candour, and felt the ‘tough love’ in his honesty. Unfortunately, when we moved up to Portland for my residency training, I hadn’t yet learned how to be genuine with my feelings.
That was about to change. Early on in my psychiatry training, eleven of us first- year residents and our spouses were required to attend a five-day intensive led by Lee Fine, a master-teacher of psychodrama. I should add that the year was 1973, and a significant part of the five days would be better termed ‘encounter group’. All of the participants became
vulnerable, showed their fears, their sadness, and their grief over losses in their lives. One resident went over the top in the expression of his vulnerability and described, through his tears, coming home from school as a child and discovering his father hanging in the garage. I showed no vulnerability, no fear, no
pain. Instead, I presented myself with a smile on my face and peace in my life. Some of the residents were gentle and compassionate in their probing for my depth. Yet my smiling mask never faltered. Looking back at my level of emotional immaturity, it’s embarrassing to me now.
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