Story Feelings

Emotional processing is the key to healing. Even when we're consciously willing to feel our feelings, however, long-standing, subconscious defenses can get in the way. Then, instead of "feeling to heal," we engage in something I refer to as story feelings.

Story feelings are not authentic emotions, although they may feel like they are. They're actually a byproduct of a clever defensive maneuver we all employ to keep ourselves from feeling deeper, more authentic, more uncomfortable emotions. With story feelings, we spin up emotional energy, oftentimes by telling ourselves a familiar story. This emotional cycloning may mimic an emotional process, but it never actually completes or resolves. With story feelings, we fool ourselves into thinking we're doing emotional process work, when in fact we're simply running emotional energy in a familiar but unhelpful way.

Real Feelings and Healthy Pain

True emotions follow a grow-peak-fade pattern (see Emotion? Or Emotional Reaction). An emotion arises, sometimes triggered by an external experience or in response to something you're thinking or doing. You feel a pang of grief that a loved one isn't there to share a special moment. Or a rush of anger over an injustice you're powerless to change. With real feelings, you feel something intensely for a short period of time, and then it’s over. There’s a sense of inner quiet on the other side. Oftentimes, you'll understand something differently once the experience is complete. It's like you've received a message from your soul. Even if you don't like it, you feel a sense of inner peacefulness or completion.

Allowing a real feeling to process requires a willingness to feel healthy pain. Healthy pain is the pain you feel when you accept what is or what was. You accept that your partner isn't able to meet a need and feel the real grief over that loss. Or you feel real anger over not being protected in your vulnerability, or real fear over facing something you don't want to face. We must be willing to release blame and stop trying to make the situation be different than what it is in order to feel our real feelings. It takes courage to feel our authentic feelings and accept what they're showing us.

When you’re willing to face this pain and these difficult truths, you free yourself. Feeling this healthy pain is how you "feel to heal." We oftentimes feel extremely vulnerable in our true feelings, because we’re finally feeling the pain the inner child has been holding onto for many years. When you feel your healthy pain, you finally release an unrealized childhood expectation. Feeling this healthy pain clears the emotional blocks you've been holding around your earliest experiences. There’s usually a sense of lightness on the other side of this emotional process. You may also feel tired, as energy has been released and needs to be integrated into your system in a new way.

Story Feelings and Unhealthy Pain

Story feelings, on the other hand, don't follow the grow-peak-fade pattern of an authentic emotional process. Instead, emotional energy is spun up, like a storm over the water, where it can cyclone indefinitely, oftentimes fed by the familiar stories you've been telling yourself. This spinning of emotional energy can feel quite real but is actually a defensive maneuver that keeps you too emotionally occupied to sink into the deeper, more authentic, feelings below the blustery storm.

Story feelings usually keep us in familiar territory. We run emotional energy through familiar channels. Perhaps, it's easier for you to feel anger than grief, for example, or easier to feel grief than fear. In this way, you keep yourself trapped in the movement of angry energy to avoid feeling a deeper, more authentic grief. Or you remain mired in story grief to avoid feeling the more authentic, paralyzing fear that lies beneath it.

Story feelings can indicate an attachment to unhealthy pain. Unhealthy pain is the ongoing pain we create in a misguided attempt to right a historical wrong. Perhaps you keep entering into relationships with people who treat you in the same abusive way you were treated as a child, and then use those experiences to fuel story feelings of anger or grief. Unhealthy pain is ongoing. We can remain stuck in this kind of pain for years.

Story feelings, like unhealthy pain, tend to repeat, and can go on for long periods of time. They are the familiar emotional territory we explore again and again. We typically feel worse rather than better after engaging in a story feeling process. We feel depleted by our grief or agitated by our anger, without making any progress towards healing or releasing anything.

How to Tell the Difference Between Real and Story Feelings

One easy way to know if you’re in story feelings or a real process is to check whether the emotion is something you’re feeling in the current moment in response to something happening in the current moment. Story feelings are oftentimes projected feelings. That is, you think about something that might happen in the future, and you spin emotional energy around how you think you’re going to feel in that future moment. Are you feeling angry right now, or are you thinking about something that might happen in the future and getting angry at the possibility of it happening? Are you thinking about an upcoming holiday and how certain loved ones won’t be there, creating story grief in the here and now? Or spinning into fear over some future event that you expect will be difficult, even though you're not experiencing any such difficulty right now?

Story feelings can also be used to avoid feeling the true feelings of a difficult history. Are you telling yourself your own tragic tale, and growing sadder or more outraged the more you think of it? Rather than clearing emotional blocks, these story feelings actually strengthen them, as we never sink into the level of feeling the authentic grief beneath the story. Oftentimes, that's because we strongly identify with these stories. The more you identify with your story, the more it becomes part of your sense of self. To feel what’s underneath the story, you then have to dismantle an ego construct. To step out of these historical story feelings, we must step out of blame. We have to stop telling ourselves the "tragic tale" and be brave enough to feel what we weren’t able to feel back then.

Whether projected into the future or spun up around historical challenges, story feelings aren’t real, as they aren’t tied to the current moment. With story feelings, you activate your emotional body in an unhealthy way. These are not messages from your soul bubbling to the surface to be acknowledged. They are distractions you're creating to avoid something uncomfortable.

Dropping Out of Story Feelings

Sinking beneath our story feelings requires a degree of courage and an exertion of emotional will. We must stop the emotional spinning and become still enough to feel what's really there. We oftentimes must face a feeling that's more authentic, but rather inconvenient or uncomfortable. Usually, it doesn't match our story or our ego constructs. We must let go of something we identify with. We must stop blaming others and simply feel our own present-moment emotions.

To illustrate, I'd like to share an experience I had in the early days after my father had passed away. I loved my father dearly and was authentically sad over his passing. But one day, when I was sitting outside in the early fall, I began thinking about how I wouldn't have a father when Father's Day rolled around next spring. It felt so tragic, I started to cry. I was moving emotional energy in a story feeling process, though I didn't know it at the time. In the moment, I thought I was feeling my real grief over the loss of my father.

But then I felt a sharp, warning pain in my chest that was so startling, it gave me pause. I was hurting myself, and the realization made it easy to simply stop crying. What I discovered, when I stepped out of the tragic tale, was that my authentic feeling was actually quite different. Father's Day, in fact, had always felt like a burden. My father was difficult to buy for, and trying to find a gift that expressed how I felt was a challenge. When I paused my story grief long enough to feel what was actually there, I was surprised to find a sense of relief. Although I was sad my father had passed, I actually was relieved to know I no longer had to run the Father's Day gift-buying gauntlet. I knew when Father's Day actually rolled around, I might have other feelings, too, but in the present moment, what I was feeling was not grief, but relief!

Real feelings are oftentimes inconvenient because they don't match the stories we've been telling ourselves. Relief seemed like an inappropriate feeling after the loss of my father, but it was more authentic than the story grief I was spinning. When we're willing to feel what's actually there, it's oftentimes different than what we've been telling ourselves or what we think we should feel. To access your real feelings, you must be willing to meet the present moment as it is, regardless of historical data or future imaginings, and humbly listen to whatever your soul is telling you.

If you'd like a simple process for identifying story feelings, here it is:

1. Notice You're Running a Story Emotion. The most obvious sign that you're in a story feeling is that it feels quite familiar. Have you been crying over the same thing for weeks or months? Does it feel like it's getting any better? Or does each repeated bout of emotion make you feel more depleted or alone? Have you been feeling angry for years over the same injustice? Do you feel more at peace after expressing your anger, or do you only feel more agitated? "Story grief" and "story anger" are easy story emotions to get stuck in. Although a real grieving process does take time, we oftentimes prolong the emotional morass by spinning sad stories around our real loss. Although anger can be a wonderful indicator of where our boundaries are being crossed, it's easy to take pleasure in the charge itself, without actually making any changes in our lives to address the causes. Both story grief and story anger can become addictive. Emotions, even difficult ones, make us feel alive. Running story emotions is a cheap and fast way to move energy. It's easy to get addicted to the emotional charge.

2. Identify the Story. Once you suspect you might be running a story emotion, it can be helpful to actually name the story for yourself. In my earlier example, the story I was telling myself was, "I'm going to be so sad when Father's Day comes around." If your particular story takes place in the future or the past, there's likely a more authentic, perhaps less convenient, emotion hiding underneath the story. Consider if you're willing to let go of the story, so you can find something more authentic.

3. Drop the Story and Be Curious. If you're willing to explore what's underneath the story, see if you can put the story aside for a moment. If you weren't telling yourself this story, how would you actually feel right now? If you weren't blaming someone or wishing something was different, how would you actually feel right now? Part of why we engage in story feelings is because they give us a sense of control over something that's uncontrollable. Stories are predictable. They're a mental activity. Emotions are not. They can come on suddenly, at unfortunate times or in inconvenient places. But there's a wisdom to emotions that we cannot access through the mind. We must not only be willing to embrace the natural movement of emotional energy, but to be curious about what it's telling us, in order to benefit from the deep wisdom of our emotions.

4. Feel your Authentic Feeling. You'll likely be a little surprised by your authentic feeling. As it was in my experience, story grief may actually be masking real relief. Anger may actually be masking a longing to connect or a sadness over an unacknowledged loss. Fear may actually be masking a primal rage. Whatever you discover beneath the story, let yourself feel it. That's all you need to do. Feel the grief or the anger or the fear. Let it move through your body as it's designed to. Don't try to make it be different or go away, and it will naturally complete and recede all on its own, usually in fairly short order.

5. Gather Your Wisdom. Once your emotional process is complete, allow your mind to gather and organize the wisdom revealed by your process. For me, the relief I felt helped me understand that, although there were things I would miss about my father, there were also things I wouldn't. This was what my tragic story was preventing me from seeing. Curiously, this bit of wisdom helped me let go a little more, and in the end, I actually felt more at peace with the loss and even more connected to my father.

6. Be Patient with Yourself. To some degree, we've all been taught to fear our real emotions. Story emotions are so prevalent because they're a "safer," more controlled way for us to play with emotional energy. Even if you think you're having a story emotion process, you may not be able to simply drop out of it. There may be years of conditioning preventing such an easy pivot. That's OK. Keep being curious. Keep identifying your stories and questioning whether you want to keep telling yourself them. Keep inviting this wise, feminine part of you to speak. Keep listening for the wisdom that can set you free.