DON’T LET YOUR EMOTIONS DRIVE THE CAR!!!!!

My patients have heard me, ad infinitum (I can be annoyingly repetitive) caution to not let their emotions “drive the car.” Meaning, your emotions should not be making any major decisions, handling complex problems, or determining what direction your life should take without letting your intellect navigate.  Remember emotions can be “emotional,” can fluctuate depending on the circumstances (day, time since your last cookie, phase of the moon,…), and are often driven by buried memories, wounds, and other unresolved childhood issues.

Powerful emotions tend to be immediately compelling, the need to “act” pushing away other, more long-term considerations. Decisions made in the whirlwinds of strong emotions are often ill-considered and sometimes disastrous.  “What was I thinking?!” should be replaced by “What was I feeling?” when you look back at impromptu actions that backfired badly.

Don’t get me wrong, I love emotions!  They are the heart and soul of therapy and of humanity.  But when emotions erupt with the energy of a long-brewing volcano, they are more about unresolved, unprocessed childhood feelings than anything to do with the here and now.  These explosions often confuse both yourself and whomever is lucky enough to be around for the pyrotechnics! 

Why are child-based emotions so urgent, so overwhelming, so disturbing? Children don’t have the psychic ability to process complex emotions. These feelings (and scenes that trigger them) can be terrifying, overwhelming, paralyzing to a child.  A child can’t fight, or flee, from the stress caused by these “large” threatening emotions. To survive, they often “freeze” and/or space out (fancy word is “dissociate”). These feelings tend to get stored somatically (frozen somewhere in the child’s body) . Normally, our memories tend to be “processed” and move to our long-term memory store to be “recalled” when needed.  But “frozen” memories are “unmetabolized.”  And when something in an adult’s “here and now” experience “triggers” (taps into) an unmetabolized child feeling, the emotional response is usually BIG!  That’s the key to recognizing these feelings.

OK…so what does that have to do with you and your ability to develop long-term relationships?

Let’s set up an example. Annie is a lovely 26-year-old single woman who came to therapy to resolve her “relationship” issues.  It seems that she has difficulty tolerating the normal, but uncomfortable, ambiguity and anxiety that happens at the beginning of dating…between the first date and the solidifying of a relationship. Though a common, if miserable, phase of most relationships, Annie CAN’T STAND the discomfort of not knowing when, how, or if the relationship will blossom.  If her new beau doesn’t call, set up a new date, respond within two minutes to every text she sends, she panics and demands they do so, immediately!

Turns out, though Annie remembers a loving family, her biological father abandoned them when she was six years old, just when she was developing a strong attachment to him. The unspoken anxiety, confusion, and sadness that haunted the young family at her father’s abrupt leaving (her mother, her older brother, and Annie) seeped into her, body and soul.  As children often do, she blamed herself for her father’s abandonment. She just wasn’t loveable enough for him to stay.     

Now, Annie obsessively scans every communication, or lack thereof, for potential rejection.  Dating has become a painful, anxiety-filled, experience for her, trying to ward off the inevitable rejection that “always seems to happen.”   As you can imagine, being pressured too early and too much has the opposite effect that Annie longs for and most potential mates leave under the chronic scrutiny and pressure.   Her worst fears come true. She is “ghosted” and haunted by the unresolved, unacknowledged pain of her father’s long-ago abandonment.

Her uncomfortable emotions  impel her to Do Something,  and she pushes too hard, too early for reassurance.  She gives her emotions the keys to the car, and they crash.

In therapy, Annie had to l) recognize the emotions that get triggered at her perceived impending abandonment…  self-loathing, anxiety, fear, 2) be able to place these feelings in the past where they belong, 3) begin to have compassion for that little girl who was abandoned and confused, and 4) NOT give her emotions the keys to the car.

So how does poor Annie deal with these huge, uncomfortable pressing emotions? You probably won’t like this answer…she learns to sit with them. To tolerate them. Bringing us to another major topic to be explored, developing AFFECT TOLERANCE. Simply put, the ability to tolerate strong, uncomfortable feelings without acting on them.  We achieve this mysterious state by: 1) recognizing and labeling the feeling (helps to locate it in your body too…where the little kid originally stored the memory), 2) put the feeling back in time where it belongs, 3) sit and visit with the feeling. Actually sitting with the little girl who was painfully abandoned to begin with. Just be with her. And, miraculously, the feeling lifts! Feelings only have so much shelf-life before they start to fade…like the Cheshire Cat in Alice In Wonderland. The drive to DO SOMETHING lessens and sanity, yet again, reigns in the land!

So, Annie came to therapy highly triggered because her newest love interest hadn’t called her for two days. She felt out of control, scared, angry, and wanted to Do Something! To discharge these uncomfortable emotions. The “do something,” for Annie, classically meant calling the SOB to find out why he hadn’t called her! I asked her to locate the anger and fear in her body. She closed her eyes, and touched her heart area.  So, I invited her to just keep her hand gently resting there. Then we went back in time to when Dad ‘disappeared” and, still touching her heart, Annie started to quietly cry. I invited her to hug herself and reassure herself that it would be OK, that she would never leave her little girl…who was loveable and worth cherishing. Annie hugged herself and began rocking herself back and forth.

 She began to accept it wasn’t the awful men “doing this to her” it was her descending into her own, unexplored and unresolved issues.

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Michael is a charming young man who has come to therapy to deal with issues in his long-term relationship.  Nancy, his girlfriend, is concerned that he withdraws from any difficult discussions, particularly those that might be tinged with anger.  She doesn’t know how a viable relationship can be sustained if one partner always shies away from uncomfortable issue. 

I asked Michael about childhood memories, particularly any events that he might have remembered that felt scary and/or angry?   Michael, try as he might, couldn’t recall too much of his childhood.  This is not unusual at the beginning of therapy.  Eventually, Michael was able to remember times when his dad would start screaming at him and his little sister. They never knew when their father would blow or what would trigger him so they tried to keep “small” and quiet.   Asked how he might have felt when his father would start to yell, Michael looked at me blankly. He couldn’t “remember.”  I invited him to imagine a little boy in this situation. How would he imagine the little boy might be feeling?  Distanced from his own immediate experience, he was able to acknowledge the little boy would be terrified!  Similarly, when he senses Nancy is annoyed with him, he automatically freezes and avoids or changes the topic.

With time, Michael was able to locate his frozen feelings in his stomach…which became tight and painful in these fraught situations. Not surprisingly, he had lots of ‘stomach” issues growing up.   I invited him to think about, and have compassion for, that “poor little guy” who was stuck in that frightening situation.  He was eventually able to accept how scared he was of his father, and how powerless he felt as a child to protect himself and his little sister.  But then is not now, and Nancy is not his father! Michael now knows how to recognize his “feelings” and to sit with them, to sit with that part of him which is still a little boy terrified of an out-of-control father.

In sum, you don’t have to spend years in analysis to be ready for a relationship.  You just need to tune into how you deal when uncomfortable feelings arise in your interpersonal relationships.  Do you tend to act out, avoid, freeze, etc.?  What do you need, in that moment, to be able to stay present and tolerate those feelings until they start to lessen in intensity?

 It does help to have a psychotherapist assist you in this process, to coach you through the memories, feelings, and triggers, and help you discover techniques to aid you in tolerating the strong, left-over emotions from childhood.  It’s OK to get help particularly if the child part of you never could.  You don’t have to do this alone…anymore.