Do we have to talk about my mom?
Why your shrink keeps asking you about your childhood.
Richard Rohr is a pretty cool priest because he explains things in ways that are less likely to turn people off to how emotions and spirituality and relationships all work together. I have seen so many people who have been abused by religious institutions. Usually, these people have, out of protection, closed themselves off to new understandings when something starts to smell like the ‘C’ word (not the four-letter one). Richard Rohr has tons of great books explaining how spirituality matters to you (and to everyone) and may be a good starting point for someone who thinks they aren’t a spiritual being like everyone else is.
Rohr explains emotions and their purpose so thoroughly that I wish I could impress this understanding on everyone who is struggling to accept themselves:
Emotions in and of themselves have no moral value; they are neither good nor bad. They are just sirens alerting us of something we should pay attention to. If we learn to listen to them instead of always obeying them, they can be very good teachers. We need to be aware that our emotions can mislead us because we often misread the situation.
If I had known, earlier in life, how OKAY it was that I had every feeling that I had… Not only that being mad wasn’t something only bad people do, for example. But also that emotions aren’t rules to follow or guidelines to direct my choices and behaviors. It is okay to feel every feeling. And also to not let feeling a certain way dictate The Way Things Are. They are just feelings. Important, but not to the exclusion of all other information.
Richard goes on to explain
Emotions are far too self-referential and based in our early practiced neural responses, or what some call our defense mechanisms. Our basic “programs for survival,” which are the source of most emotions, are largely in place by the age of four or five. The three most common programs involve the needs for 1) survival and security, 2) affection and esteem, and 3) power and control.
Some people get really waded-up panties when it comes to talking about their childhood. “Why does that matter?! I want to talk about what is happening right now!”
Cool. But if you were in Japan until you were four or five, you would approach almost everything- let’s just start with a dinner table- differently than you would approach a dinner table TODAY if you had been in Topeka, Kansas until you were four or five. How you expect to sit and what you expect to see in front of you. The way you will consume food and how you will behave once you have finished eating- all different if the way you learned to eat dinner happened in a different culture than the one in which you currently live. Sure- you have changed since you were a kid. But the way you show up to dinner nowadays has come about based upon that starting point.
Setting aside a basic cultural example, let’s look at the concepts that Richard Rohr refers to: survival, security, affection, esteem, power, and control. A person who is pretty new to this world and trying to figure things out, under 5 years of age, will have their first experiences of all of these things. In the first years of your life you are having your first experiences of
what do I have to do in order to have a safe place to sleep?
what do I have to do in order to get a hug?
what do I have to do in order to understand where I am and what is going on around me?
Ideally, children don’t have to consciously consider any of these. And yet, some children do have security, affection, and power compromised. Without intentionally navigating it, some kids figure out how to do what they need to do just to feel okay. To feel loved. To feel a grasp on what is happening to them.
These things are all taught to us by our early life experiences. We learn “I am safe and I have people around me to help with what I need” or “I am on my own and I have to figure it all out” and everywhere in between when we are children. These beliefs are instilled and they create the emotions that we have. Today. As adults. Years and years later. Even if we aren’t still interacting with the people who were present at that time.
How have your “programs for survival” as Rohr calls them, been sourcing your current emotions?
One way of exploring this idea is by choosing a big, difficult feeling you have in your life right now. Many times, it will be something that a partner triggers. When this is true, it can be enticing to become very focused on the partner, certain that it is THEIR responsibility to change, so that you don’t feel that way anymore.
If you will take that feeling and sit quietly for a moment to let the feeling be inside of you, open up to: when was the first time you ever felt that way?
Don’t get hung up on the situation or what was happening just now when you felt that feeling- that is irrelevant. We are using the emotion as a siren here: when did you FEEL that emotion for the very first time. If the emotion we are working with is intense enough to cause a problem that lasts longer than a day, the first time you ever felt it was probably not recently. Go way back.
The very first time you ever felt that emotion is a key to why it is such an intense emotion now. You learned so much from that pain at that time that it is bringing up those same beliefs now.
What can you learn from that first experience? It is likely that you didn’t have the intellect and maturity to understand it then the way you can understand it now.
It can be helpful to talk through these explorations with someone else- if not with a therapist or in a therapy group, write it out so that you have space to explore it, rather than it just bouncing around in your head.