Oh No! A Feeling!

Our bodies are pretty amazing things, shaped over countless years of learning to survive in this world across generations and generations. 

As a result, we actually have a built in threat-response system that has served us well for most of our history as homo sapiens, what’s commonly referred to as the “fight-or-flight” response. 

The idea is that when our brain predicts or perceives a threat, our body’s nervous system activates and prepares our body to move toward the threat and fight it off (fight), or move away from the threat and run from it (flight).

There are actually more responses available to us than just fight or flight, but let’s stick with just these two for now to keep things simple.

Fight-or-flight is a fantastic response for the body to have when confronted by some physical threat like a predator. We can run from the bear as best we can or we can fight it off when running isn’t an option.

What is less helpful, however, is when we’ve learned to activate our fight-or-flight response to things we think are threats but that we can’t fight or run from. 

For example, what if we think that some of our emotions are threats?

Emotions as Threats

As I described above, the fight-or-flight response doesn’t just kick in when there’s an actual threat. It kicks in when we either predict or perceive a threat, whether that prediction or perception is accurate or not.

Unfortunately this means that we might have an overactive nervous system, kicking on its threat-response to things that aren’t actually even threats but that we’ve come to believe are threats.

For example, let’s say that you’ve learned that a feeling like sadness will stick around and eventually grow into depression and overwhelm you and never leave! Or that if you allow yourself to express sadness, this makes you weak, “too much”, or “too sensitive”?

Or let’s say that you have learned, as many men in patriarchal cultures have, that you shouldn’t get emotional except in very specific ways in specific circumstances. Maybe it’s ok to experience anger, and maybe sadness at the loss of a family member, but that’s it.

If you’ve learned and been raised in these kinds of cultural messages, you may then come to see certain emotions as threatening. So when certain emotions come up (and they will - your emotions don’t care what cultural messages you’ve learned), you may recognize them as threats, and your nervous system may kick on.

In other words, you may be reacting to feelings like sadness, disappointment, hurt, or vulnerability as if they are bears, and getting geared up to fight or run away.

Obviously, this is less helpful than if we were facing an actual bear. We can’t fight or run from our emotions, at least not for very long and without some negative consequences.

Fight-or-Flight Coping Strategies

If someone is fighting or running from their emotions, you can see it in the ways that they cope with their emotions.

The fight response involves moving toward the threat. So, a fight response aimed at a threatening emotion will involve doing things that move toward the threatening emotion.

For example, someone might get angry at the threatening emotion, or angry at what they think is causing the emotion, or angry at themselves for having the emotion. They’re ready to fight something to try to feel safer when a threatening emotion is present. Or they might try to dig in and feel the feeling as intensely as possible, like digging in through the pain during a fight.

If someone instead takes the flight response to a threatening emotion, that means they are moving away from the threat. So this kind of coping will involve trying to get away from the threatening emotion somehow.

This could happen through fleeing into the intellect and over-thinking or analyzing things. Or fleeing into activity and staying busy. Or fleeing into distraction through substances, relationships, the internet, fantasy, reading, movies, shows, etc. This is the “I don’t want to think about it” approach, which is really the “I don’t want to feel it” approach.

Alternatives

Taking a fight-or-flight approach to scary emotions is perfectly natural. It’s not wrong, and it doesn’t mean we’re doing something wrong. This is just how our body works. If it feels threatened, it moves either toward or away from the threat in an attempt to feel safe again.

Unfortunately, when aimed at emotions, this response can sometimes stir up unnecessary issues on top of the discomfort of the original emotion. And the original emotion never gets what it really wants, which is simply to have our accepting, compassionate attention for a moment.

Emotions are just sensations of the body in a particular context. They don’t mean anything about us as people.

A painful emotion is just like stubbing your toe. It’s definitely unpleasant, but all that pain needs from us is to notice we stubbed our toe (“Ouch! That hurts!”), and then move on with our day as the pain inevitably fades away. 

A stubbed toe, and likewise a painful emotion, does not require us to make that pain personal and stop our day to focus on it and start telling ourselves endless stories (“Why am I such a toe-stubby person? What’s wrong with me? No one else ever stubs their toe. I must be too ____, or not ____ enough that I stubbed by toe. Etc, etc, etc”).

No emotion is dangerous. No emotion is wrong. No emotion says anything about you as a person.

Let them come, notice them, maybe even name them, and then let them fade away.

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