Working with Emotions

Disclaimer: I am only a person feeling things who googled to understand what they meant. Please consult a trained psychologist or mental health professional for information or to discuss any ideas/queries about your emotional state or mental health. This post is a follow-up to my earlier post on therapy

I recently discovered that working with emotions is also a skill, like knowing how to use Excel formulae, make Focaccia bread or pet a cat.

I had previously heard terms like processing or channelising emotions and never fully understood what they meant. Even now, I don’t think I fully understand what these terms mean, but I have some idea about what these practices involve.

Why am I talking about it here? Because no one typically discusses these things. They get buried and hush-hushed, and then you die an old person filled with regrets and anxieties (as one should, I guess if our society is anything to go by).

Earlier, I wrote about my experience taking therapy and something that I know now, in hindsight, is how much time it took to zero in on understanding what I was going through and how to address it.

Over 8-10 months ago, I got feedback that I was always irritated and annoyed. After downplaying it for a long time, I consulted a therapist at the insistence of someone close. For the first six months, we tried attacking the problem from different angles - was it an issue with awareness, alertness or lingering anger? In hindsight, that whole period feels like a drunkard’s walk, wanting to get home but walking in random directions with the hope that you eventually get where you wanted to get.

Things worsened in the last leg of this 8-10 month period. I had somehow lost the will to work. I could not focus. I kept procrastinating and then trying to meet deadlines.

Then, at the end of that leg, after somehow finally hitting a milestone, my journey sort of got reset for some reason (think of something like once you hit the current quarter’s target, your boss calls to tell you next month’s target without any acknowledgement of your earlier work). At this point, I snapped. My brain just gave up.

It was also around this time that I discovered the ADHD meme community on Reddit¹, and after reading a few posts there, this happened:

(This is from a post on r/adhdmeme and this actually happened you know)

So I did the best thing one could do when a deadline was right ahead; I procrastinated into the deep rabbit hole of ADHD, and it’s fascinating! While I did relate with the memes on the subreddit, as much as it seems to be an excellent tool for diagnosis, it turns out it is not. I had a lot of questions. And before talking to a medical professional about it, I googled the shit out of it.

There were many articles from US media on the rise of references to ADHD on TikTok and Pop Culture. I had seen some of it before, like this scene from Silicon Valley referring to Adderall (although this particular clip is from years ago now). Different media portals have covered the rise of ADHD mentioned on TikTok and Twitter, especially in the US.

So, ADHD became a trending topic on social media, which explained why the memes were in my feed. But ADHD was mostly observed in children. This time around, the trends reflected a possible rise in diagnosis of ADHD in adults, or is it?² There are studies on this. Also, all of this happened during peak pandemic season. So maybe the anxiety of a pandemic led to an increased diagnosis of ADHD in adults?

All interesting questions, but I was not in the US and not using TikTok (although it did come to my notice via my Reddit feed). So I decided to talk to a professional and answer a detailed questionnaire about my habits and working style from childhood to the present. Based on my responses, I didn’t clear the cut-off for some sections on the ADHD test, while I had secured top marks in others (Damn it, first the JEE, now this!). So, I probably did not have ADHD, even though the memes were highly relatable!

So coming back to that feeling of discomfort - it persisted. And so, along with my therapist, I started exploring what it could be. That journey is still on; however, I realised that working with emotions is something we are not trained in any way³.

The natural course of things is that we pick up these skills as we grow up. But that learning is coloured by social biases. So when a man throws stuff in a fit of rage, it gets normalised. Women are expected to adjust to behaviours that hurt them. Kids learn that they are not supposed to mention certain things that they have seen in the house to extended family members or visitors.

Emotions and Men

I feel this lack of emotional awareness is exceptionally high in men; at least, that is what I infer from observing the society around me.

Right from the start, I have seen men around me angry many more times than I have seen them cry. Then there are expressions like “Man up and do it!” or “Grow a pair” and “Don’t cry; Be a man!”. Where is the scope to express the range of your emotions if your full-time job is to be this man as society defines it?

I had read somewhere that in Indian families, couples fight in front of their children but never express affection in front of them. So then, what else will the kids learn besides the men being angry and women constantly adjusting and compromising?

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that all men need therapy, and if you tell them this, each one of them will tell you how they are the exception and don’t need it.

In an interview, Jerry Pinto talks about the older editions of children’s books published by Puffin Books, which would, on the inside front cover, recommend the book for “girls of eleven and above, and sensitive boys”⁴. I wonder what happened to those sensitive boys when they grew older? Did they grow up to become sensitive men? If so, where the hell are these sensitive men?

The Role of Friendships

Again, based on a gut feeling: I imagine the most natural way people learn to navigate and express the complexities of emotions is through deep and meaningful friendships.

The person at the other end could be your spouse, sibling, parent, colleague, or well, a friend. But the relationship is what I want to focus on.

One possible placeholder for a good friendship could be that most conversations with such a friend are a pleasurable experience.

Whatever the topic or context for your discussions, you leave it with a sense of satisfaction, like after a hot cup of masala chai during the rain or your first cup of coffee. Not always, perhaps. But on most occasions.

Both you and your friend wouldn’t always agree. You will probably disagree on a few things but will have the same set of first principles and values. But this, I feel, is not enough. Such a conversation can end up being only intellectually stimulating, which I think is an incomplete friendship.

What could be missing are the shared experiences that make the whole thing fun - a common love for books, movies, food, or even sharing the latest gossip.

But even then, I feel such a friendship is incomplete. The secret ingredient is probably empathy. And this is perhaps the rarest of all pieces in this puzzle of platonic friendship.

For a long time, I never understood what empathy meant. Not literally, of course. I looked up the dictionary definitions to understand, let’s say, how empathy was different from sympathy. But what did it mean to be empathetic?

I got some sense of it only when I was at the receiving end of empathy. As I worked on building awareness, I noted how someone responded when I told them I was going through a difficult time. Then I noted how their response made me feel.

Some people start solving your problems for you. Others tell you just to let it go and forget about it. One or two would want only information and updates to pass to someone else.

Then there are people with empathy. They ask about how you feel. They listen. Not listening to respond but listening to understand. If they think you are in a state to answer, they may ask a perceptive question forcing you to think. They know that your sentences may contain long silences, and they don’t try to fill in those silences. Because doing so interrupts the processing of your emotions. They know, that if they wait during that silence, you will continue, and as you do, they are only helping you work through what you feel.

And most importantly, they anticipate what you would need in such a difficult time, and they will gently ask or remind you about it. Or they may just go ahead and do it for you. Because they know you’d appreciate the time and space you need to work through and with your emotions.

Footnotes