THE SCHOOL OF LIFE: How to Process Your Emotions

In order to be calm and at ease with ourselves, we need regular periods where
we do something rather strange-sounding: process our emotions. 

It is a quirk of our minds that not every emotion we carry is fully acknowledged, understood or even truly felt.

There are feelings that exist in an ‘unprocessed’ form within us. A great many worries may, for example, remain disavowed and uninterpreted and manifest themselves as powerful directionless anxiety. Under their sway, we may feel a compulsive need to remain busy, fear spending any time on our own or cling to activities that ensure we don’t meet what scares us head on (these might include internet pornography, tracking the news or exercising compulsively).

A similar kind of disavowal can go on around hurt. Someone may have abused our trust, made us doubt their kindness or violated our self-esteem but we are driven to flee a frank recognition of an appalling degree of exposure and vulnerability.

The hurt is somewhere inside, but on the surface, we adopt a brittle good cheer (jolliness being sadness that doesn’t know itself), we numb ourselves chemically or else adopt a carefully non-specific tone of cynicism, which masks the specific wound that has been inflicted on us…MORE