The Courage to Feel

How I learned to feel my feelings and why you should, too

‘I miss grandpa’

‘What the FUCK do you want me to do about it?’

That’s the earliest memory I have where I felt like: oh, okay, so my feelings don’t mean shit.

I recently learned about this ‘third culture kid’ term. My parents’ culture was Syrian/Arab/Muslim. My environment’s culture was good old fashion upper middle-class Americana. We lived in the poor part of a wildly rich town. MY culture was whatever the combination of those two are. That’s where things get interesting. Why? Well, those two cultures do not mesh very well and as a sensitive, intuitive kid, the signals I received were always contradictory.

My journey of masculinity is one of my favorite ways to explain it. From what I saw from my Dad and his brothers, masculinity was about being loud, being the breadwinner, never showing unmanly emotions (whatever that means), and being quick to anger.

Perfect, I was already angry all the time. What I found in school and living in my quaint Massachusetts town, however, was that a big part of masculinity seemed to be the ability to remain calm. Two very, very conflicting signals. Me being quick to anger was something I expected to be seen as a virtue but instead I was alienating people. I had all this anger that I thought to be a good thing but all the direct feedback I’d received from my environment was that it was wrong.

So, now, I have all this anger with nowhere to go so, I shoved it deep down. The problem with shoving anger deep down is that our emotions need somewhere to go. It isn’t just going to disappear. In the case of anger, I’ve always felt that shoving it down just converted it into anxiety and muscle tension.

Uh oh, anxiety? Men aren’t supposed to be nervous or anxious.

The number of things I was told to be ‘haram’ (sinful) was absurd. There was a time where my cousins from Saudi were visiting, and we took them to Atlantic City. Gambling in Islam is famously sinful. What was the first thing the person who told me that gambling is sinful did? Grabbed my cousin and ran straight to the slot machines. Before they went into the casino, I vividly remember saying ‘but it’s haram' and being waved off and silenced, as per usual.

The difference this time, however, was that I remember having such a stark moment of ‘oh, so nothing actually matters. All this guilt I’ve felt over having certain desires, desires that I stuffed down, was just all for nothing. It was all just bullshit’. I felt incredibly betrayed. There was clearly no point in communicating that, though, so once again, I shoved it all down.

I was a kid who at twelve or thirteen years old was being indirectly taught that

• Rules are bullshit, clearly.

• My feelings and emotional responses were always ‘wrong’.

• Voicing my opinions was a total waste of time

All I felt at this point was anger and anxiety and even then, I thought I had to repress them to put on an image of strength and positivity. To an extent, at least. It wasn’t just negative emotions that I had learned to repress, either.

If I felt happy, I had to hide it to make sure people knew I wasn’t too happy. If I thought something was hilarious, I’d repress my laughter to not laugh too hard. I was sacrificing everything I could at every turn. Anything to not feel vulnerable. Anything to put on this false image of masculine stoicism.

The only times I ever felt comfort were through over-exercising or playing World of Warcraft (WoW). WoW had just come out as I was entering my freshman year of high school. At this point, I had completely given up having a social life with anyone at my high school. I just walked the halls like a knight in rusted armor, waiting to get home and hop online.

In WoW, I got to be a different version of myself. Millions of other players were playing in the same world as me and I made SO many friends. I was finally well liked. I was finally having all these experiences I’d dreamt of, albeit online. I finally felt like I was worth something.

I met my first girlfriend on there. I made friends who I’m still friends with to this day, 20 years later, I met people I looked up to on there. I was finding something close to happiness in this alternate reality we were all indulging in.

It turns out that some people don’t particularly like it when you’re happy. At this point, I am a sixteen-year-old who has been repressing anxiety and anger for years. I found a place that finally made me feel happy. A place where I fit in. So, what is my father’s solution to this situation? It’s to take away the last remaining thing this kid was holding onto.

I’d always heard of these tribal ‘coming of age’ rituals. One would go in as a boy and come out as a man. That’s how they went. I never asked to be given a very tribal coming of age moment.

God, do I mourn for that kid and what he had to go through. I write different childhood struggles in different letters because they’d be too long to list in a single one, and it keeps things from being redundant, but I mourn the loss of what could have been.

You know how people say, ‘I’d rather my parents be mad at me than have them be disappointed’? That’s total bullshit to me. I’d rather face disappointment over the rage face that I still get flashbacks over, any day.

Returning to the story, my father decided to take away my router. I was playing too much and blah blah blah. I dissented and it looked like I was about to pay the price for that. Rage face approaching me, hands up, from my room’s door to my desk on the opposing side. This is what I call the ‘you’re about to get your ass beat, again, signal’. That’s where everything just came to a head for me. I was tired of all the contradictions. I was tired of the abuse. I was fucking tired of not feeling safe in my own home.

It felt like every ounce of anger I’d ever shoved down just erupted to the surface. I stood up and hit this man harder than I’ve probably ever hit anything, to this day. He quite cartoonishly went flying backwards and slammed into the wall, looked at me in total shock, and left my room without a word. I was done with him, but I wasn’t done with the emotions. They were still there. They had come out to play. I had no clue what to do with them because my emotions had never been taken seriously, so emotional regulation was a foreign skill to me.

I remember going down to my kitchen, grabbing the largest knife I could find, and running back upstairs to my room. I then proceeded to just destroy. I was slashing up my furniture, punching the shit out of the floors and the walls, and ultimately just falling to my knees and crying profusely for what felt like hours.

I didn’t need this archetypal, father vs son, bullshit. I just wanted to play my game.

After that intense saga, I just did not want to feel anything. My twenties were characterized by numbing anything that I could have used for significant personal growth. Breakups? Drink excessively. Anxiety? Drink excessively. Stress? Smoke a cigarette. Feel bad about myself? Go pick up women.

I felt like a baby. The alcohol was my bottle and the cigarette my pacifier and I relied on women to soothe me instead of self-soothing.

Food became a problem, too. Binge to feel something and then fast in regret for days. Anything to not feel. It was way too painful and overwhelming.

Eventually, these things all stopped working, so I started adding benzodiazepines to my drinking to REALLY not feel a goddamn thing.

I remember the pandemic had just started and I was laid off, as so many people were at the time. I was in my childhood room at my parent’s house, drinking, taking benzos, and watching T.V. I remember getting up to go to the bathroom and then next thing I knew, I was in a room and some guy was sitting in a chair just watching me. I, being the pleasant drunk I was, shouted ‘why the FUCK are you just staring at me’. He laughed at me and said, ‘because I have to’. That’s when I really took a good look around. ‘Oh…I get it now. I’m sorry, man’. Not really in a position to shout at anyone when I walked to the bathroom in my house and teleported to being handcuffed to a hospital bed.

My parents found an empty benzo bottle next to an empty whiskey pint and assumed this was a suicide attempt. It was not, but none the less, there I was. It was covid so there were no visitors allowed in the hospital. It was covid so no one was allowed to bring you anything. No phone, no books, and apparently no drugs from the nurses to help my withdrawals, either, because of some new protocol.

For four days straight, I sat in a room alone doing absolutely nothing besides watching King of Queens reruns while going through the absolute depths of internal hell. I never want to see Kevin James’ face again, and I’m in the movie ‘Paul Blart: Mall Cop’! (Clarification after getting asked: yes, I’m actually in that movie. I wasn’t referring to a delusional moment)

“Daring greatly means the courage to be vulnerable. It means to show up and be seen. To ask for what you need. To Talk about how you're feeling. To have the hard conversations.” - Brene Brown

I didn’t have a choice besides to sit there and let the torrent of emotions wash over me. I felt every anxiety attack, every shame attack, every flashback, everything, and I couldn’t run away. By day four, was I a sack of flesh whose bones had been consumed by his repressed emotions? Nope, still the same goon. I was still alive and that gave me hope! It was time to recruit every research loving ounce of myself and utilize it to understand why I should care more about my feelings. Particularly, methods on how to do so, and why I should care enough in the first place.

1. Mindfulness, Self-Understanding, and Emotional Release

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It’s one hell of a complicated beastie when we feel something, and our first reaction is ‘this isn’t the right thing to feel’. Honestly, what an absolute shame. How much time have we wasted because we had ourselves convinced that certain emotions and certain reactions were for some reason inappropriate. Inappropriate or not, what we’re feeling is what we’re feeling. If we repress it, it’s not only not going to go anywhere but it’s just going to grow stronger.

My favorite example of this is how my good friend Nur Nadar used to take longer to get over break ups than most people he knew (longer than what most people claimed to take, I should say). Why? Well, he’s a man. He wasn’t going to let people see how crushed he was. Rejection? So what? Hit the gym and get in some one-night stands.

Seriously, though. I didn’t feel like it was okay to cry. I didn’t feel like I could sit in my room and mourn the loss of the person and the future we’d planned. Instead, it was an active competition with myself to see how quickly I could get over it. Which, paradoxically, just made it take way longer.

Repeat after me: We cannot repress emotions and expect them to go away for good. We cannot understand who we are as people if we consider our emotions to be incorrect or inappropriate for a falsely idealized version of ourselves to feel.

The only way out is through. Take my word for it when I say that denying who we are has done nothing but take years of joy and freedom away from us. Stopping ourselves from laughing or enjoying things because it’s not ‘manly’, or whatever the justification might be, is such a horrendous shame. Stopping ourselves from grieving because ‘a strong person wouldn’t do that’ is an absolute tragedy.

That’s the beauty of mindfulness and particularly mindfulness meditation. You’re making an active effort to pause and reflect on what a feeling is telling you. It can either be a practice of sitting down with your eyes shut or something you do as you’re going about your day. Either way, what you want to focus on is:

• Identifying where in your body this feeling is. Is it in your gut? Is it a tension in your neck muscles? Tensing of your jaw? Try to gently notice how your body is reacting to these feelings.

• What is this feeling trying to tell you? How many times have we pushed away a feeling in a situation where we would have benefited tremendously had we only listened to it instead?

• Make sure we’re not adding value judgements to any of our feelings during this process. There’s no reason to identify our feelings as good or bad. Just notice them.

• Focus on a particular sensation in the body and breathe in gratitude for that feeling. Even if it is something we can identify as being an anxiety response that may not necessarily serve us, we must still focus on the feeling, take a deep breath in, thank that feeling for how it is trying to help and protect us, and then take a longer exhale to let go.

2. Journaling and Creative Expression

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Once we learn how to identify our feelings and lean into them in a curious, non-value judgmental (good or bad) fashion, we can move one step further and try our best to begin to understand them.

Journaling is by far one of the most effective tools to understand our feelings. It’s also incredibly beneficial to just get these feelings outside of us. Getting them out can feel like decongesting a stuffy head. Having our thoughts and feelings written in front of us also gives shape to our internal world. It’s far easier to make sense of what we’re thinking and what we’re feeling if it is right there in front of our eyes.

There’s also a plethora of written exercises we can do to help ourselves get to the root of our feelings. What I call feeling chain exercises are by far my favorite. I’ve written out instructions on how to do them at the bottom of my previous ‘Am I really the one I’ve been looking for’ newsletter. It’s an absolutely fantastic exercise and really helps us peel back further layers of the proverbial onion.

Creative expression is by far one of the most helpful ways I’ve found to feel our emotions. I’m going to use myself as an example. I write personal essays where my intent is to share things I do not want people to know. These experiences are usually ones that have brought me shame and that I still struggle to let go of. However, something truly beautiful happens when I write these and put them out into the world.

The writing process alone is absolutely draining. I’ve had to push through so much stress and anxiety to put my past on paper. I’ve been brought to tears while writing the past three or four of these newsletters. The thing is, though, as painful as it may be in the moment, once I put it out there, I feel the weight of a million suns lifted off of me. It’s out there. I don’t have to hide anymore. It’s out there and I’m still okay. It’s out there and the less I have to hide, the more I get to enjoy just being myself.

3. Therapy and Self-Compassion

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Sometimes feeling our feelings can be too overwhelming for us to do alone. That’s when a therapist or a counselor can be of immense help to us. As we express what we’re going through, it can be one of the first times not only that we get it out there, but also the first time that someone, the therapist, provides different feedback than what we’ve been telling ourselves the whole time.

Admitting that we’re sad to a therapist isn’t going to get us the reaction we’ve been giving ourselves, particularly if the reaction was that sadness is bad and a weak emotion. We’re likely to be met with empathy and compassion over those emotions for the first time.

As our emotional responses are more often met with compassion, we begin to internalize this and develop a stronger sense of self-compassion. If we have an emotional reaction, instead of running away or reaching for our phone to distract us, we can take a breath, locate the emotion, honor its intention, and let it go. That’s an immense act of self-compassion in and of itself. The decision to feel our feelings instead of scrolling through every single app we have repeatedly, in hopes that a notification marker will make us feel better, is a massive act of self-compassion. We’re showing ourselves that we’re worth taking the time, facing the resistance, and honoring our pain so we can integrate it and move forward with our lives.

There’s a few choices we have ahead of us. We can embrace feeling our feelings and develop:

• Better emotional regulation skills

• Better relationships

• A more free, authentic, fulfilling version of our lives

We can also choose to keep repressing and judging them. Besides, in our last days, we’re not going to regret living a stressed, inauthentic, and regret littered life, right? ……Right?

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I’d love to hear how you process your feelings and the strategies that you’ve found to help. Please list any and all in the comments and I can’t wait to read them!

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