Written by: Marcella Friel, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
"All of humanity’s problems stem from [our] inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — Blaise Pascal
Today I received a newsletter from a Canadian colleague who mentioned that four people in her broader social circle recently took their lives—two of them with young children.
I also got a catch-up email today from an old friend whose home incinerated in a California wildfire several years ago. While he’s since moved on, the emotional burn scars remain.
As for me, I’m reading these messages (and writing to you) from my sick bed. Having enjoyed robust health throughout the past two years, last month I was suddenly flatlined with a constellation of maladies that are hanging around like guests who won’t leave after the party’s over. Thankfully, my health is improving every day, but I do confess to despairing, in light of this lingering fatigue and congestion, of ever fully feeling that vitality again.
For reasons difficult to fathom — be they political, epidemiological, sociological, or astrological— life has taken a much harder turn for so many of us. The “new normal” of being unable to visit ailing loved ones, having our mobility curbed to 5-kilometer radii around our homes, figuring out what to do with kids in school one day and out the next, and launching new online ventures after years of office work have presented new challenges and devastating losses.
Relationships we thought would last a lifetime have shattered like windshield glass hit by a rock. Our mandatory isolation has become tantamount to solitary confinement, with all its attendant loneliness and despair. And whether we believe that masks a salvation or a scourage, we’ve all felt the longing to once again see full faces and hear clear voices.
This is a warfare our ancestors would not recognize. A blitz not of the city but of the soul. And those of us who were raised in the late 20th-century world of pampered consumerism and historical oblivion find ourselves emotionally shell-shocked as never before.
How Do We Cope? Head for the Fridge
The sum total of these stressors has left us exhausted, anxious, deeply depressed and turning to our addictions to soothe ourselves.
Compulsive overeating, in particular, already sharply on the rise since the 1980s, is now a full-scale, five-alarm epidemic of its own.
Two years without social support, without reasonable predictability, and often without emotional safety has caused 1 out of 3 adults in the United States to report a sharp escalation in their already — frequent binge episodes. And while we might joke about gaining “the COVID-19,” for some of us our relationship with food has become so dysfunctional as to be life threatening.
But what if it’s not the overeating that’s killing us, but rather our inability to metabolize those painful emotions that drive us to the fridge every two minutes?
In the work that I’ve done with thousands of women seeking to recover from binge eating, yo-yo dieting, sugar addiction, and chronic body shaming, what I know for sure is that those behaviors are the by-products of a pernicious, decades-long inability to feel painful feelings as they arise.
As a client of mine once said, “I’m afraid to feel anything. Because if I feel anything, I’ll feel everything.”
Binge foods are a perfect accomplice to emotional self-abandonment. Laden with sugar, salt, and fat, those processed food-like products that we hate to love to eat are engineered to light up the reward center of our brain like a pinball machine, triggering the happy-happy dopamine high that in the first few bites can skyrocket us into oblivion.
But alas, what goes up must come down. The toll must be taken, the bill must be paid. When bingeing is deployed as a subterfuge for emotional sobriety, there inevitably comes a crash that carries with it blistering feelings of guilt, shame, and self-recrimination, along with a spreading waistline.
In order to avoid feeling bad, we do the things that make us feel worse. If we dip our toes into the shallow edges of our grief or rage, we instinctively recoil for fear of drowning.
But here’s the truth: those dreaded feelings carry within them the DNA of emotional liberation. When we actually face the big feelings we habitually avoid, they cease being the closet monsters that we stuff away at all costs and reveal themselves as the healing allies they really are.
We just need to learn what nobody ever taught us.
Building a Muscle for Tolerating Feelings
In a society where everyone reflexively says, “I’m fine, how are you?” learning to touch and tolerate painful emotions can feel like an overwhelming task.
Building your feeling tolerance is a practice much like building any other muscle. You start slowly and build incrementally, in a spirit of progress not perfection.
Here’s a seven-fold path I’ve developed from working with my own emotional distresses that in turn has proven very helpful to my clients:
1. Stop yourself from taking the action that you know is not good for you. This first step is the hardest but by far the most powerful. Stopping yourself before you reach for the ice cream initially requires Herculean will-power but does get easier the more you practice it. So start by stopping.
2. Place your hands on your heart, close your eyes, and take three conscious breaths. I practiced this tool for years with my clients before I realized that placing our hands on our hearts for about 30 seconds (or three breaths’ time) activates the love-bonding hormone oxytocin. Taking this additional pause disrupts the momentum of avoidance and brings us back into connection with ourselves.
3. Go into the epicenter of the feeling, with the intention to witness rather than judge. Having stopped and gathered yourself inward, see if you can bring your awareness to rest in the center of the emotion, with an attitude of simply witnessing your breath, your body sensations, and what unnamed, unnamable feelings might bubble to the surface. Take these feelings as a kind of meditation. Mix the space within you with the space around you, without labeling any of it as good or bad.
4. Tap. If the feelings become particularly strong, use EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) to throw a circuit breaker on the energetic intensity of the struggle. If, for example, world events have been particularly distressing for you lately, let’s you and I do some Tapping together to move the heaviness of the feelings into a clearer and more liberated space.
5. Become curious. After the emotional storm begins to subside, you could try journaling on questions that will shift your perspective, such as,
“What is the most loving thing I can do for myself right now?”
“What is the kindest thought I can think about this right now?”
“What might be the message or wisdom inside this emotion?”
6. Reach out for support. Painful feelings feed on isolation like yeast feeds on sugar. When you’re ready (or even when you’re not ready), pick up that 500-pound phone and share your experience with someone who understands.
7. Appreciate the process. This is not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. All of the steps above are simple, and they take courage and strength to carry out. Give yourself credit even if you do them perfectly imperfectly.
The Hidden Gifts
Learning to surf the waves of turbulent emotions is the key to a serene and happy life, no matter what the rest of the world is doing. The many, many benefits to building your feeling tolerance are well worth the effort and include the following:
You are freed from the compulsion to harm yourself.
You become more skilled in soothing yourself when you feel bad.
You learn what is truly good for you.
You have more power over your negative thoughts and feelings.
You get into the right relationship with your life circumstances.
You feel better about yourself.
You allow more pleasure and joy into your life.
You become more emotionally available to yourself, your loved ones, and the “God of your understanding,” however you choose to define that force.
You know how to de-escalate the monstrous, future-tripping “what-if”s and come back into the present.
You become your own best friend that you can rely on.
You make choices that align with where you truly want to go.
All of this comes from developing the skills to feel your feelings.
A wise friend once said to me, “Trauma is a catalyst of evolution.” No matter how dark the times are getting, no matter how challenging our personal circumstances, opportunities lie within the wreckage to help us transform sickness into healing, addiction into sanity, and loneliness into community, if we are brave enough to simply sit still and allow the natural wisdom of our emotions to arise, dwell, and subside into the space that birthed them in the first place.
Marcella Friel, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine MARCELLA FRIEL is a mindful eating mentor who helps health-conscious women love and forgive themselves, their food, and their figure. Marcella is author of "Tap, Taste, Heal: Use Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) to Eat Joyfully and Love Your Body." In 2018 Marcella founded the Women, Food & Forgiveness Academy, an online transformational mentorship program to help health-conscious women heal the emotional and metabolic roots of yo-yo dieting, binge eating, sugar addiction, and chronic body shaming. Marcella draws on nearly 3 decades of 12-step recovery and 35 years’ practice of Tibetan Buddhism to help women heal the self-hatred traumas that lie at the very root of their nervous system. She passionately holds an unflinching faith in trauma as the catalyst of evolution and guides others in dowsing their life experiences to find the gold amidst the dross. Learn more about Marcella by visiting marcellafriel.com
