Emotional Vulnerability Is A Superpower - The Case Against Emotion Shaming
“If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.”
-Daniel Goleman
Society has bullied us into not showing our emotions very early on in our journey. Holding back them tears has become our default mode. Worse is that when we “fail” at keeping perfect composure and we do end up crying, we will apologize for it profusely. What a shame that emotion shaming is so prevalent in our societies. Emotions are too important to be treated with such nonchalance.
Hurt people hurt people because they’ve internalized the false and fucked up notion that their emotional realities don’t matter - and that they ought to suppress any signal coming from their inner emotional world. Romantic relationships fail in part because some of us are so out of touch with our emotional core. Some are incapable of making healthy requests to their partner as to get their emotional needs met.
Emotional shaming and lack of emotional regulation in childhood can explain this. Consequently, they resort to using all kinds of dysfunctional techniques as a way of attempting to get heard by their partner, whether that’d be through sarcasm, attacks, contempt - all immensely damaging to a relationship. Once emotional withdrawal enters the picture, emotional disconnection is shortly on its way - which will ultimately lead to the death of a love that once was.
Eating our emotions. Ah you’ve probably heard of that one before, if not done it yourself! This example illustrates yet again the big disconnect that exists between us and our emotions, as a result of never having been taught their utter importance. Emotional eating is a coping mechanism of choice because learning to process our emotions in a healthy way never made it to the list of our parents' and/or society's priorities.
It is my greatest hope that we change the way we view and talk about emotions in our society. Emotional regulation is such an imperative function, it is so important that it is one of the very first things a baby learns (or lacks to learn) through his mother.
Some of us have never had an outlet to do so inside our own homes. In the absence of a safe place to express our emotions, we end up creating that place for ourselves, one that too often flirts with numbing, ignoring, suppressing or dissociating.
Emotional vulnerability is a superpower as it opens up the door to the foundation of a healthy relationship to self and to others. Emotional vulnerability is self love - it means loving ourselves enough to give ourselves permission to feel. The cost of numbing, suppressing or ignoring our emotional worlds is too great of one. It is a necessity that we spin society's toxic narrative around emotions.
EMOTIONAL VULNERABILITY FOR PRESIDENT!
