electric shocks

so my new therapist gave me homework, learning to pay attention and to identify my emotions.

turns out that after years of trying to fake being happy, parenting my parents and my siblings, always trying to be brave for everyone- all that is not so great for being able to  identifying emotions. i know that i avoid the word "angry" because of its negative connotations. i will say im frustrated but never angry. because angry to me is out of control, red, steam coming out of your ears, evil. i will rarely say i am overwhelmed, because i am the strong one that can handle anything. worried- sometimes, happy ...well i was happy but that has not yet made an appearance in a while. she was saying that the anger was a secondary emotion and that i need to identify the primary emotion. i find that i have a harder time with crying. like a baby- when he/she does not know how to express his or herself , the result is tears. and i feel that i do the same thing.

anytime i get overwhelmed, or things get difficult i try to just move past it, just push through. but eventually it breaks through the surface and im ugly crying on the highway going 60 mph.
so when this happened on sunday, i started to sit down and try to figure out what my primary emotion was...and then i got distracted by online shopping and netflix.  of all my mental health issues, it never occured to me that I didn't know how to identify emotions.

i have been reading this book The Anatomy  of Loneliness, and the author talks about as well how when we have parts in ourselves that are disconnected, we have the internal break  in ourselves..that leads to loneliness. we all have parts of ourselves that we rejected or were told to reject while growing up. Don't get angry. Don't be lazy. Don't ...the list goes on and on and is different for everyone. however, we all know at this point that suppression does not work. I just heard this line " men have sides women have secrets." We all have facets. Not one individual is as two dimensional as they appear. Yet, yet, for some reason we have been trained, encouraged and celebrated the more we flatten ourselves, the tidier we appear, the more simple we present. The fact that people apologize for crying! The horror, fear and shame when we make a mistake. 

There is an old quote that I love; Life is not about finding yourself its about creating yourself. But before we can do that we have to really break ourselves down to our roots. Bring ourselves to bare bones basics. How much of who we are is defined by what other people have told us we shouldn't be.  We have limited ourselves by the invisible walls, electric fences that shock us when we try to break free of what is comfortable and laid out for us. and like the good boys and girls we are- the shock often teaches us to stay put and not venture forth. but, what if, as Teal Swan posits, we pay closer attention to those shocks. It is those moments that we are building ourselves.  Finding the truth. Learning who we are.