This numb feeling…

Do you ever go into that space where your mind feels like it’s spinning its wheels and going nowhere fast? Where you seem to be going around in circles in the middle of thick fog? Where the feeling is more like a non-feeling, a numbness?

I used to go into that space when faced with certain situations. It was rather a long time ago, and looking back, I don’t clearly remember when I would go there, but just that I would go there at times. The important part of this story is not what triggered my numbness, but the awareness that I would “blank out” when faced with certain issues and then not be able to deal with them.

To share something I don’t really wish to advertise loudly, but it does have its place here - my first two husbands were very angry men. After I got divorced the second time, I did ask myself - how could I marry men who got so angry, not once, but twice? Especially as I just didn’t understand why or how they could work themselves up to that level? This is not a story to badmouth my exes, please don’t get me wrong. They were obviously wonderful people, or I wouldn’t have married them. This is just to illustrate what I learnt from these two relationships. 

At one stage, I was struggling to move forward professionally, so I went to one of my coaches for help. I believe in being coached, we all need an external and neutral perspective to have more clarity in our lives. Someone who sees our blindspot clearly.

Well, this wonderful lady told me that I also had an anger issue. Let me tell you, I laughed at her! I told her oh, so self-confidently, that I had absolutely no anger issue. I explained clearly that I didn’t get angry like these two men, that I found it rather ridiculous how livid they would get about small unimportant things. And then came the shocker that finally hit home. I heard what I hadn’t been able to hear before. My problem was that I was totally out of touch with anger. To the point that I had numbed it out. Blind to it, blind to its positive message too. 

You see, I firmly believe that all emotions are useful and have a positive intention, if we’re open to understanding their message. That includes so called “negative emotions.” If you have the perspective that emotions are messengers, then you don’t shoot the messenger, you just listen to the message, you then let the messenger leave, and you deal with the real situation the message is all about.

Fighting against the messenger is pointless, it doesn’t alter the situation. Refusing to hear the message is also counter-productive. Yet that is what we so often do with our emotions. We fight them, resist them, ignore them, stuff them out of our awareness, then wonder why we have so many unresolved issues.

In hindsight, it made sense that I had an “anger issue” - or rather - an unhealthy relationship with anger. The way I explain it to myself is that I grew up in a family that disapproved highly of anger. We just didn’t “do” anger. Anger was a “bad” thing. My parents may disagree with my story, but somehow that is how I perceived their message about anger. I will go out on a limb and just mention that if you believe in past lives - I also seemed to have some old baggage about anger from there. 

But it’s not important where the emotional issue comes from really. What’s more useful, is that we realise that we do have a challenge, then decide what we wish to do about it. What I learned was that when I would go into that numb feeling, it was basically my mind doing the “politically correct” thing of avoiding feeling angry about a situation. Just blank it out. This, however, stopped me from being able to address any circumstance that made me angry. Now that I had become conscious of this pattern of dealing with anger, thanks to this my coach, I could put a different story to my numbness. 

Basically what happened was that the next time I went into that numb fog, I remembered that I was simply feeling anger. Which then allowed me to ask myself - what am I really angry about? Just asking the right questions can unlock so many stuck doors in our lives. Having asked that, I would usually get clear answers. The next step for me was to tell myself - well, if I’m angry about a situation, that just means that I wish to change it. This little distinction, the awareness of my true emotion, allowed me to change many aspects of my life positively.

There’s no point in just being angry, if you’re not going to do anything about it. Once you’re aware that something makes you angry, then you can also find ways to change some aspect about the issue. If you can’t change the actual situation yourself, then at the very least, you can change your attitude towards it.

This reminds me of the well known Serenity Prayer. I am not a religious person, although with time I have become deeply spiritual, and find that poems have the power to bring inner peace if we allow them to: 

God grant me the serenity

to accept the things I cannot change; 

courage to change the things I can; 

and wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time; 

enjoying one moment at a time; 

accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; 

taking, as He did, this sinful world

as it is, not as I would have it; 

trusting that He will make all things right

if I surrender to His Will; 

that I may be reasonably happy in this life

and supremely happy with Him

forever in the next. 

Amen.

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)