Good and Evil: Restricting the Emotional Spectrum 

The point of therapy is not to keep you from feeling sadness or pain. It is to help you feel everything: happy, sad, fear, pain, pleasure, love, anger... The key requirement in our ability to feel the whole emotional spectrum is feeling safe. It is when our bodies feel threatened or hurt that we are tense and anxious, or numb and depressed. It is hard to feel happy or loved when we feel unsafe. 

And where does the danger come from? If your current life circumstances are traumatizing (job, relationship, societal dangers), then your fear or numbness are appropriate. You don’t actually have a “mental illness” if your emotions match the current environment. If you are much more afraid, angry, or numb than seems appropriate, the danger is wired into older neurons--there is trauma in your past. You have unhealed wounds that you have attempted to numb out in dangerous circumstances, so they are coming back to be treated now that the world is a bit safer. Treatment requires that you feel the pain. If you don’t feel the pain, the pleasure of relief cannot come; a sort of  “Garden of Eden” effect. You will be stuck between feeling numbness and fear of pain until you address the wound. 

Understanding vulnerability can help us conceptualize this. In a physical sense, our bodies can experience the greatest pleasure and feelings of safety when our softest, most sensitive parts are exposed and vulnerable (in sexual intimacy). We can experience the most horrific trauma in the same circumstances (in sexual abuse). If you receive an injury to your most intimate parts, you cannot experience pleasure until that injury heals. The same principle applies to emotional injuries. If you have received wounds to your self-worth, you cannot feel love and healing until you treat them. The very act of letting yourself feel the pain of an emotional wound in a safe place with a safe person (even yourself if you can be validating) can allow the wound to heal, and for you to experience greater emotional intimacy, and thus safety and happiness. 

Opening up your emotional spectrum may take lots of work. It might include processing many untreated emotional injuries before you start to feel safe enough to feel pleasure and happiness. If your current environment is actually safe, now is the time to start operating so you can enjoy that safety.  Here’s the visual I sometimes show clients to illustrate these concepts: 

Many people learn to box-off or numb-out the “negative emotions” on their emotional spectrum for various reasons: 

-Certain emotions are unacceptable in their family/culture -Physical or emotional trauma 

-Never learning to express certain emotions 

Unfortunately, boxing-off one side has the side-effect of boxing off the other. We can’t just shut down one half of our emotional physiology. This leaves us without feeling, or only feeling mild emotions. Whether or not we let ourselves feel them, the emotions are still happening, and must come out in some form (anger outbursts, panic attacks, crying spells) or stay inside in some form (stomach problems, joint problems, auto-immune disorders, migraines, fatigue). We open up the spectrum by cracking open the painful side of the spectrum on purpose, rather than having it burst open accidentally. Accepting the pain will open up the pleasurable side. Of course, we should only do this if the world is actually safe to do so, and not the traumatic world that required emotional suppression as an adaptation.