Brutal Honesty

In a world where we can edit, filter, and delete so much of who we are in our online presence, I think we tend to carry that same expectation into our everyday realities.

When we feel something like jealousy come up, we quickly tuck it away and try to shift to a different emotion or adjust to an entirely different experience. Or we feel discomfort when anger starts to simmer, and we try to ignore it.

A variety of things can contribute to why we may do this, but they generally revolve around some form of “I shouldn’t feel these emotions – it’s not good to feel these emotions – I’m not good to feel these emotions.” We come to think of a variety of emotions as “bad” for various reasons, and we try to stay within the realm of the “good emotions.”

Which is all well and good until our inevitable humanity comes up and we experience the full spectrum of emotions.

I’ve been reading through mother, poet, and author Jessica Ulrich’s poetry books, and in her poem “Two Things Can Be True” from her book They Bloom Because of You, she writes:

And thought it can be loud

and I have to squint to think,

I know that I will miss this

when it’s over in a blink.

But it’s not about the future

for that we cannot see

it’s about the highs and lows of now,

the brutal honesty.

This poem speaks specifically to motherhood, which resonated deeply with me. I try so hard to preemptively avoid grief that will likely come my way as my boys grow older and continually seek more and more independence in life. So when I start to feel frustrated with motherhood and my boys, I’ll feel a little tap on my shoulder and question, “When I’m 60, will I regret feeling frustrated?”

But how fair is that to my humanity in this present moment? Now, if I’m noticing extended periods of being stuck in frustration, that could certainly benefit from an examination of possible shifts in my life. But feeling a wave of frustration and immediately feeling guilty and shameful about it is not helpful. I’m asking myself to be superhuman.

But Jessica’s words are applicable even outside of motherhood. Maybe the weight we feel towards certain emotions isn’t from fear of how our future selves will feel, but from the weight we carry of what we “should and shouldn’t” feel.

What would it look like to set that aside, and instead lean towards brutal honesty of the present moment?

What if, when frustration arose, we let it take a seat at our emotional table and tell us why? What if when overwhelm surged through us, we listened patiently to it and heard it out?

Quite shockingly, I’d likely feel frustration but not yell (at least not nearly as much). I’d feel overwhelm, but then the next best step would come into focus. It goes against so much of our natural instinct to let uncomfortable emotions be, but often, by doing just that and listening to them, we avoid the effects of undesirable actions.

So next time an emotion you don’t enjoy feeling arises, try to let it sit a little bit longer. Embrace the brutal honesty of what you are experiencing. And my hope is that you’ll then get to experience that emotion having its say, then getting up from your emotional table, and leaving space for the next emotion to come along.

Warmly,

Kylie Larson, MA, LPC

www.illuminate-counseling.com