The second belief that held me back from healing was the belief that emotions exist in a hierarchy. This is a natural offshoot of categorizing emotions as negative and positive: binaries usually set us up for labeling things as good or bad, and of course, the bad is seen as something you have to fix or conquer in order to get to the good stuff.

When we apply this kind of lens to our emotional states, we end up framing the positive emotions as the end goals to strive for, and any negative emotions are just stepping stones on the journey to feeling good: they don’t have any inherent value of their own. I hadn’t even realized that for the majority of my life, I’d seen emotions this way – I’d been trivializing and diminishing anything I felt that had the label of “negative”. Shame was just something to be released on my way to self-love; fear was something to conquer on the path to success and joy; anger was a trigger that I had to untangle from my past so I could receive love in the present. All of these things can sometimes be true…but over-simplifying things that contain some truth to make them applicable to everything creates distortion and dysfunction (and this is how conspiracy theories work too – is it any wonder so much of the New Age crowd is prone to conspiratorial thinking?)

Seeing emotions in a hierarchy like this made healing seem like a fixed destination that I would reach by climbing my way up, rather than an ongoing process. Constantly trying to figure out how to transcend and move past any difficult emotions meant that I was never really listening to what they were telling me. It took years of unraveling for me to see all emotions as a chorus of helpful friends. Fear, for instance, isn’t just a lapse in my resolve that I need to battle and eradicate. It gives me powerful indicators of potential danger and sets all my senses on high alert, making me extremely perceptive when I need to be. It’s often wrapped up with exhilaration and excitement when I’m taking on a challenge, and gives me a boost of energy while sharpening my concentration. Shame can show me where I’m not in integrity with my own values. Grief reflects the depth of love I feel for someone or something, and anger reveals where boundaries are being crossed. There’s a gold mine of information in these emotions that I was missing out on by battling them instead of listening.

But honouring and listening to negative emotions is especially hard if we see emotions as a hierarchy. If positive emotions are an end reward that we work our way up to, feeling a wave of fear or shame is almost like being demoted. It can feel like we’re regressing in our healing, which in turn makes us want to bulldoze through the negative to get back on track. I also know that for me personally, honouring negative emotions felt like a slippery slope to getting stuck in them. I think many people feel this way, and we’re encouraged to: we need to move past the negative quickly so we don’t get sucked in and start wallowing in it. The thing is, I’ve found the opposite is true: battling and bypassing emotions is what actually leads us to get stuck in them. Any time I’ve tried to skip over grief with perpetual busyness, I’ve had to devote tons of energy to avoiding reminders of my loss. When I don’t acknowledge jealousy or disappointment, they don’t disappear – they harden into resentment. When I see anger as a trigger that always needs to be worked through, I can get caught up in finding deeper meaning where there might not be any. Sometimes people act like assholes and cross our boundaries, and we can say “hey, don’t do that” without doing a deep dive into past wounding. Seeing negative emotions as something to be fixed can actually make us pathologize totally normal responses, and this can leave us preoccupied with the past and unable to engage with the present.

Ultimately, shifting my view of emotions from a hierarchy to a group of helpful friends normalized all emotional states. When I started to accept that feeling negative emotions didn’t mean I’d slid backwards from a “healed” state, I felt less of an urgent need to fix them…and as a result, feeling badly wasn’t as big of a deal and these feelings had less of a hold on me, not more. I highly recommend the book The Language of Emotions by Karla McLaren – it was a huge help to me in this process. Stay tuned for Part 3 – the belief that you can substitute one emotion for another (this is a juicy one!)