I’ve been journaling a lot lately on the way my relationship to my emotions has shifted dramatically during some intense therapy and trauma healing. What’s struck me over and over again is how much of the way I engaged with emotions over the past two decades was deeply harmful and held me back from real healing. My viewpoints and beliefs were very much informed by some of the New Age communities and mentors that I had at the time, especially in my 20s, though I wouldn’t say that these are specifically New Age beliefs – they’re deeply ingrained in popular culture in general. Most of the people who enforced and encouraged these ideas had genuinely loving intentions towards me (though several did not), and I don’t think that bypassing is a horrible thing 100% of the time – there are times when we don’t have enough strength or a solid enough sense of self to truly get deep into the nitty-gritty of trauma, and sometimes we just need to get through the day. This isn’t a great long-term strategy though, and looking back, I do think that much of how I dealt with emotions was essentially trauma responses codified into a belief system. I wanted to share some beliefs about emotions that I’ve given up as I’ve done deeper healing – it might be helpful for you, too.

I’ve been trying for days now to write this all as one post but it just didn’t feel right… I had more to say about each belief than I realized, so I decided to do separate posts to explore each belief in more detail. Here’s the first one!

Belief 1: There are “negative” or “toxic” emotions.
This is such a common and insidious belief that it’s often just taken as fact, and I find it extends way beyond the New Age crowd: popular culture in general holds it as truth that certain emotions are negative or “bad”. This creates a binary of good vs. bad, and reduces the complexity of emotions to something very simple. But “negative emotions” really aren’t that simple – what actually makes an emotion qualify as “negative”? I know this is generally referring to emotions that are uncomfortable or difficult, but there are so many factors that impact how emotions affect us. There are different cultural perceptions of emotions, and different ways of expressing and interpreting them.

In addition to that, what feels comfortable often has more to do with what’s familiar to us personally, rather than being a universal experience. Shame can feel comfortable if it’s all we’ve known, for example, and anger can feel powerful and energizing. On the flip side, emotions that we view as positive can feel deeply uncomfortable. Joy, love, and peacefulness can bring on a sense of dread in trauma survivors, who will constantly be waiting for the other shoe to drop because emotional safety doesn’t truly feel safe. This actually caused a heavy dissonance for me personally, as I’d find myself struggling with emotions that were supposed to make me feel great. Love that wasn’t a struggle or a battle didn’t feel right – it felt too easy, like I was getting away with something. Calm contentment and satisfaction were boring and made me restless, as I had a pretty low tolerance for lower intensity emotions. This left me confused and wondering what was wrong with me: why was I experiencing positive emotions that were supposed to feel good, but not feeling good? The qualifiers of “positive/negative” got in the way of looking more objectively at my experience and unraveling why particular emotions landed the way they did in my body.

The trouble with deeming emotions “negative” goes deeper, too. “Negative” often spins off into all kinds of euphemisms, especially in spiritual communities: “low-vibe”, “low-resonating”, “fear-based”, “unconscious”, “toxic”, etc. Logically we may know we’re not our emotions, but in reality we often blur those boundaries, and it’s not uncommon for these words to jump from describing an emotional state to describing and defining a person themselves: we go from feeling low to being low-vibe, or unevolved, or the infamous “toxic person”. The word “toxic” in particular can be incredibly damaging, and has some very deep roots in puritanical religious beliefs that perpetuate the idea of humans being inherently bad and needing to be cleansed of our sinfulness.

The idea of literally cleansing the body of “toxicity” abounds in many of the conversations about negative emotions, and there are frequently links made with physical health. I can’t be the only one who’s seen countless memes with claims of how “one minute of anger reduces your immunity for x number of hours”, “guilt weakens your heart”, “shame makes your kidneys explode” (I might have exaggerated that one), etc. Emotions certainly do have an impact on our physical health, but repressing them is what tends to have a harmful long-term impact, not editing and censoring them so we only feel good.

This line of thinking only served to make my relationship to my emotions and my health more convoluted and dysfunctional, and it also made it harder to bring things back into balance. The idea that anger, shame, or something else was destroying my physical health made it easy to rationalize not going deeper into the aftereffects of trauma – not only that, it almost made it feel virtuous to not go there. After all, if I stayed above and away from negativity, I was making the right choice for my health and my body! It’s taken me a while to come to terms with not only how harmful this was to my own healing process, but how deeply ableist it is too. The implication that feeling anything negative harms your health carries with it an implication that if you’re sick or in pain, on some level you just didn’t work hard enough to “earn” good health by overcoming your negative emotions. I spent years trapped in this mindset, suffering from mental health issues that I was convinced I could conquer by trying harder to rid myself of emotions that were bad and toxic.

While it’s certainly true that we can make choices that improve our physical and mental health, health is NOT a meritocracy: the playing field is wildly uneven, and we aren’t all equipped equally. I really didn’t have to suffer as long or as much as I did. Acknowledging the limitations I faced was the first step in seeing all of my emotions as logical side effects of certain patterns and conditioning, not defective parts of myself that needed to be eradicated.

Stay tuned for Part 2 coming very soon!