Your Emotions & Feelings

In this conversation, Jennifer Griggs discusses the significance of naming emotions in the healing process, emphasizing how it aids in emotional recovery and allows individuals to explore deeper feelings that may have been suppressed.

Takeaways

• The literature on forgiveness highlights the importance of naming emotions.
• Naming emotions with precision is crucial for healing.
• Alexithymia, a common condition, can make naming and processing emotions more difficult.
• Understanding our emotional experience can lead to better mental health.
• Digging deeper into our feelings can reveal suppressed emotions.
• The process of forgiveness is intertwined with emotional awareness.
• Emotional healing requires a comprehensive understanding of our feelings.
• The journey of healing often involves confronting uncomfortable emotions.

Exploring what it means to live and lead with dignity at work, in our families, in our communities, and in the world. What is dignity? How can we honor the dignity of others? And how can we repair and reclaim our dignity after harm? Tune in to hear stories about violations of dignity and ways in which we heal, forgive, and make choices about how we show up in a chaotic and fractured world. Hosted by physician and coach Jennifer Griggs.

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Transcript

This is The Dignity Lab, a podcast that seeks to define dignity, its violations, and its reclamation. No matter who you are, no matter what you’ve done, no matter what’s happened to you, you can reclaim your dignity.

Hosted by physician, narrative medicine practitioner, and leadership coach, Dr. Jennifer Griggs.

This season focuses on healing from past hurts through forgiveness and its alternatives.

Today’s episode is a dose of dignity, a solo, bite-sized episode that focuses on living and leading with dignity.

Hello and welcome to the Dignity Lab in this special season on healing after a dignity violation through forgiveness and its alternatives.

In this episode, I'll address the emotions we may have after we've been hurt and the importance of exploring and naming the corresponding feelings. To begin with and in service of clarity, the main difference between emotions and feelings is that emotions are automatic body reactions to things that happen and feelings are how you become aware of and make sense of those reactions. Emotions are the instant signal your body sends when something happens, such as fear when you hear a loud noise or joy when you see a friend. They happen automatically and are felt in the body. Your heart might pound, you might blush, or your muscle or your muscles might tense up. If you see a dear friend you may not be able to help but keep from smiling. Emotions come from ancient parts of the brain that handle survival and can thus sneak up on us in their intensity and character.

If you bring to mind a story of being hurt by someone, what do you feel in your body? Where do you feel this hurt? What is the nature of those sensations? Do you feel heaviness, burning, a choking sensation, perhaps it's hard to swallow? These sensations equate to emotions.

Feelings, on the other hand, are what you experience once you notice and then process those body reactions. Feelings are conscious. You're aware of your feelings and can name them, like feeling disappointed, hopeful, or annoyed. They involve your thoughts, beliefs, memories, and personal history.

For example, two people may both feel the emotion of fear in their bodies when a big dog runs at them, but one person might ultimately interpret those sensations as excitement and happiness if they love dogs, and the other as dread if they were bitten by a dog and are thus afraid of dogs.

You may already have named many of your feelings in response to a dignity violation such as sadness, anger, disgust, or fear. But it's unlikely you've fully explored your entire experience through the lens of emotions and feelings. This episode is an invitation to do so.

Some people find it extremely difficult to name their feelings. If this is not you, you probably know somebody who is. In a moment, I'll talk about a condition that can make it particularly challenging to do the type of work we're talking about in this episode. So returning s-

So returning to feelings and healing from past hurt through forgiveness or its alternatives, the literature on forgiveness demonstrates the power of naming our entire emotional experience by naming the corresponding feelings and moreover naming them with some precision. When we've been hurt, naming our emotions and then our feelings is an essential part of the healing process, even without forgiveness.

Peeling back and digging deeper into the layers of what's going on in our body and mind can help us make room to feel other feelings that perhaps we haven't allowed to come forward. So for example, after a dignity violation, you may be able to name sadness, but not anger. Or perhaps you've been so angry, you haven't been able to grieve what you've lost.

Perhaps your emotions and feelings are locked in the body by trauma as yet unprocessed. Perhaps the emotions are locked in the body by trauma as yet unprocessed. It's also worth noting that many of us have had our dignity further violated by people who invalidate our very real feelings.

This is common with anger. Many of us have been taught that we should not feel anger, that anger isn't safe, that nice people don't get angry. We might be afraid of our anger, wondering what we might be capable of if we truly let ourselves feel and express the anger simmering beneath our hurt. (Cue images of Bruce Banner turning into the Incredible Hulk, where at first he appears really fearsome.)

For women, anger is particularly discouraged, and in some cultures as well, regardless of our gender. We're taught to stuff it down, to soften it into something like disappointment or frustration. But anger left unspoken can turn against us, transforming and then being experienced as depression or shame that can eat away at us bit by bit. Anger can actually help us recognize that a boundary has been crossed. It can motivate us to action, it can be as purifying as fire. 

And a note on grief. We may have avoided naming and expressing grief wondering what might happen if the grief never stops. We might believe that grief is a bottomless pit of despair.

In the work that I've done myself and in the people that I work with, I've heard these fears. And I can promise you that naming your anger does not mean you will act on your anger. I can promise you that grief for what you've lost will soften, that the tears will stop, that you will catch your breath while you will never get over a loss, you will and can grow around it.

When we've been hurt or traumatized, it's also pretty common to feel shame. Less an emotion than a psychological experience, shame is a common response to a violation of our dignity. Recall that dignity is your inherent worth. When your dignity is violated to the point of trauma, whether lowercase t trauma or capital T trauma, your sense of worth is reduced to rubble. You may forget that you have worth and value exactly as you are, no matter what has happened to you. Shame drives much of our pain and sometimes our own behavior, some of which may not align with who we want to be. The irony is, as author and researcher Brene Brown has said, shame thrives in darkness. Only when we can name it can we become resilient to shame. 

I'd like to turn now to talk more about emotional fluency. Emotional fluency refers to the ability to name your emotions and then your feelings with precision. Being able to do so helps us respond to and regulate our emotions. In addition, practicing naming feelings using more precise words can help us grow empathy for others as well as ourselves. You may be wondering, Wait! are you inviting me into just a vocabulary exercise, English major that I am? Absolutely, this is an exercise and as with most exercise it makes us stronger, even powerful. And as with most exercise, it's also hard, especially when it's new. It does become more natural the more we do it.

If you're interested in growing your emotional fluency, I'd invite you to pause this episode and hop over to the resources tab on our website, www.thedignitylab.com. There you can download the feelings wheel. Once you do that, you'll see that the feelings happy, sad, surprised, bad, fearful, angry, and disgusted are all at the center ring. These are the basic feelings we learned when we were young. Look to the next ring and notice that sadness can mean more precisely that we're lonely, vulnerable, experiencing despair, feeling guilty, depressed, or hurt. And then even further out, lonely can mean we're isolated or abandoned, vulnerable can mean we feel victimized or fragile, etc. Expanding your fluency around your feelings can help you understand your experience in greater depth. And as I mentioned a moment ago,

And as I mentioned a moment ago, naming our emotions and feelings gives us the ability to regulate them rather than the other way around where we're driven by our emotions and feelings. As I described at the top of the episode, emotions live in our body. It's likely that as you think about and write about your stories of hurt, you notice tightness or burning in your throat. Check. It's likely that as you think about and write about your stories of hurt, you notice tightness or burning in your throat, neck, chest or abdomen. This is a natural way our emotions are sensed and ultimately being able to recognize them in the moment allows us to honor our experience and then to decide how to respond. 

As promised, I'm going to take an aside and talk about a condition called alexithymia. Alexithymia is a neuropsychological trait where people have really severe difficulty recognizing, understanding, describing and expressing emotions. People with alexithymia can struggle to differentiate between physical sensation, physical discomfort and between their emotions, and also find it hard to identify or name their own feelings and to recognize and name the feelings of others.

Alexithymia is not a mental health disorder. It doesn't mean you're broken. But it obviously can have substantial impacts on relationships and quality of life. And it commonly appears with conditions like autism, depression, PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and after certain brain injuries.

Known mechanisms in the brain involve both structural and functional differences in the parts of the brain that process emotional signals, especially the insula and anterior cingulate cortex. Neuroimaging studies have found that people with alexithymia have reduced gray matter volume and connectivity in these areas. These areas are crucial for integrating bodily feelings with emotional awareness. So it's harder for people with alexithymia to link physical sensations like a racing heart or tense muscles to specific emotions and can affect how emotional cues are picked up from others. 

Alexithymia is not rare. It's estimated to affect about one in 10 people in the general population and can affect as many as one in 10 men. The differences by gender may be due in part to the fact that boys are less often encouraged to identify and articulate their emotions compared to girls due to social norms around masculinity and emotional expression. In younger people, in adolescence, one in 14 to one in three adolescents can have alexithymia.

And in adulthood…this is interesting… after we reach adulthood, the prevalence increases with age. So that older adults can have, so that older adults can be affected at a rate of more than one in five or even one in three in the oldest groups. This increase in alexithymia with time is attributable both to biologic aging and possibly to the traumatic experiences, such as wartime experiences of older cohorts. Just imagine what we might see in traumas and war around the world.

In some clinical groups, the proportion of people with alexithymia is much higher as I mentioned earlier. Among people with autism spectrum conditions, 50% or more can experience alexithymia. And for those with depression, nearly one in two have alexithymia. You can see this also in people with substance abuse.

In terms of healing, research has shown that healing with or without forgiveness becomes more difficult in people with alexithymia, most likely because they lack awareness of their own emotions and they're less able to reflect on the emotional impacts of a...This may be because, let me start that over. In people with alexithymia, research has shown that healing with or without forgiveness is more difficult because people with alexithymia lack awareness of their own emotions and it's harder for them to reflect and do this work on reflecting on the emotional impact of events. They can also have a hard time understanding their reactions and empathizing with other people, though this is not always the case. People with alexithymia often struggle to build emotional clarity or express their inner states, which can make it challenging to work through the layers of both hurt and responsibility that are involved in achieving forgiveness.

While emotional healing and forgiveness are possible for people with alexithymia, they may require more support, patience and external structure to build the emotional vocabulary and processing skills. The process can be longer and more effortful, but it's still so worthwhile.

So if you find yourself having difficulty naming your emotions, give yourself time and grace. And if you're able to, but find yourself resisting naming your emotions and your feelings, especially hot emotions like anger, I invite you to get curious about why that might be. Have you been told your feelings don't matter? Or even told things like don't feel that way?

The truth is that no one can tell you how to feel or how you should feel. You just feel. Our task is to develop the ability to be aware of our emotions, to express the corresponding feelings and then to regulate, not suppress them so we can understand them in service of our own healing. Processing our emotions by naming them fully is an important part of healing from past hurts.

I hope this episode has been helpful and that you will take this invitation to explore all your feelings and emotions and how you feel in your body as you progress along your path towards healing. Hey, if this has been helpful to you, please rate, subscribe, and share this episode. 

Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.

This has been The Dignity Lab with Dr. Jennifer Griggs.

If you have experienced a dignity violation or have a dignity dilemma and want to be a guest on our show, contact us through our website, www.thedignitylab.com. Guests may remain anonymous. 

And If you’re a leader wanting to up level your leadership with a small community of like-minded people, visit our website thedignitylab.com to learn more about the Dignity Lab (yes, the same name), our group program for leaders.

Our website and the show notes have downloadable resources that you can access from anywhere.

More information about any of our guests can be found in show notes for that episode. 

This season of The Dignity Lab is produced by me, Vanessa Aron. Pete Carty is our audio engineer and sound designer. Chase Miller composed our theme music.

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The content discussed is intended to explore and raise awareness about dignity. Sensitive topics may be discussed that could evoke strong emotions; discretion is advised, and listeners are encouraged to engage with the material with empathy."

Remember, “...be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the Universe, no less than the trees and the stars.”