Lauren was in her late thirties and appeared to have an enviable life. Her home was a beautiful cottage in an idyllic village on the outskirts of London, and a Porsche, her pride and joy, sat in the driveway. She’d built a successful career which saw her travelling the world, and she was hoping to start a family with her boyfriend, adding to their already busy household of dogs and cats.
Only, things weren’t quite as they seemed. Throughout her adult life, Lauren had struggled with depression, anxiety, and eating disorders. More recently, she’d also been experiencing crippling fatigue. The polished veneer she’d carefully constructed was starting to crack and, as is the case for most of us, the roots to it all lay in her childhood.
Lauren’s mother had given birth to her in South Africa, but she’d quickly decided she couldn’t cope, and put her up for adoption. At the last minute, Lauren’s father decided he didn’t want to lose his baby and brought her back to his home in England. For the first eight years of her life, Lauren was close to her father and stepmother, but then they had their own child together and suddenly, she was no longer made to feel welcome.
At the age of 10, Lauren was sent to live with her mother, who put constant pressure on her around how she looked, telling her to diet and lose weight. Before long, Lauren was passed on again, this time sent to live with her aunt and uncle. This didn’t last long, either, and in time Lauren’s father and stepmother reluctantly took her back.
Lauren was constantly moving around; at one point she attended four schools in six months. Never staying in one location for more than a few years made it impossible to build sustainable friendships with other children. At the earliest opportunity, aged 16, Lauren left home, but her life didn’t get any easier.
She self-funded her way through university, working three jobs while studying for her degree. Not surprisingly, she had a breakdown in her final year. As soon as she’d recovered some sense of normality, she threw herself headlong into her career. She believed that the more self-sufficient she was, the less dependent she’d be on others, and the safer she’d be in the world.
Lauren and I first started working together on my YouTube series In Therapy with Alex Howard, and I was struck immediately by the contrast between the self she showed to the world and how she felt on the inside. It reminded me that often, the more perfect our presented self-image, the greater the suffering and the more we’re feeling the need to hide.
It was clear to me that for Lauren to heal the traumas of her past, she first had to be in contact with her emotional truth. The problem was that much of her adult life had been built around her strategies to not feel her emotions. Be it avoiding heartbreak at the end of a relationship by partying day and night or having breast implants and Botox injections to deal with her self-esteem issues, Lauren’s solution to painful feelings was to do whatever she could to change them or avoid feeling them.
When the ultimate longing of our heart is for the love, safety, and boundaries we so desperately need, to spend our life constantly running from listening to these impulses is, in a sense, a form of self-harm. Although there are of course the obvious examples of self-harm, such as cutting and inflicting deliberate injury on the body, in my experience many of us unknowingly use much subtler forms. Anytime we reject the longing of our heart and ignore our core emotional needs, we’re harming ourselves.
In many ways, Lauren’s story is the story of all of us. As we’ve been exploring, when we don’t digest and process our emotions, they don’t just disappear. Indeed, the more intensely we suppress our emotions, the harder we must work to get away from them.
Ultimately, to heal our emotional trauma, we must be able to feel it. Put another way, you can’t heal what you don’t feel. By learning to turn toward and open to our emotions, we’re taking an important step in not just healing the past but moving into a future free of our past sufferings.
Several years ago, as part of the Therapeutic Coaching® model, my colleague Anna Duschinsky and I mapped the different strategies we’d observed our patients (and ourselves!) using to avoid connecting with themselves emotionally. We call these ‘the six emotional defenses,’ as effectively they’re six different ways we can defend against feeling our emotions. Put another way, they’re six forms of self-harm, because they’re ways of rejecting ourselves and our emotional experience.
By putting a spotlight on our emotional defenses and understanding them more deeply, we can begin to open up choices in our habits and behavior. Remember, if you can see it, you don’t have to be it, and the more awareness we have, the more choices we give ourselves. It’s worth noting that we can use one or all of the emotional defenses listed below at different points in our lives.
Let’s now look at these emotional defenses in some detail. As we do so, once again I’d like to encourage you to be gentle with yourself. This is delicate material and using it as ammunition to beat up on yourself isn’t only unkind, it also adds more blocks to your healing.
There are numerous different avoidance and distraction defenses we can use. From the subtle, such as always having the radio or TV on in the background, to the more blatant, such as working every minute of every day, so we don’t have time to think, let alone feel. The core principle of this defense is that by filling our senses with noise in its many forms, we’re able to keep our mind occupied and our attention away from our emotions.
The more intense the feelings we’re trying to avoid and distract ourselves from, the more dramatic the strategies we might find ourselves using. For Lauren, the strategy was always being on the go, whether at work or play. In fact, she took pride in this, and her friends knew her for it. When she felt anxious, she’d busy herself more, and when her heart was telling her she needed time to feel, she’d push herself harder to get a promotion.
Do any of the following statements sound familiar to you?
At its heart, state changing is using any kind of external ‘tool’ to change how we feel. Some of these tools may, on the surface, appear healthy and appropriate, while others might be much more harmful. The more obvious state-changing tools include sex, drugs, alcohol, and food. Some less obvious examples are exercise, seeking constant highs at work, and obsessive dating.
It’s not that all these things are inherently wrong; the issue here is the way we obsessively use these tools to change how we feel. For example, going to the gym to blow off steam after a long day at work is entirely appropriate, and indeed it helps to shift our state in a positive way; however, being so obsessed with exercise that we use it to constantly get rid of our feelings is a form of self-rejection.
State changing is often used when someone has a lot of trauma or emotions that are simply too strong to avoid and distract from, and in a sense, it can be a form of self-medication. It can also play out in people who feel emotionally numb as a shutdown response to emotional, physical, or intellectual neglect, and want to just feel something.
Do any of the following statements sound familiar?
Overanalyzing and intellectualizing our feelings, rather than feeling them, is a way to believe that we’re in touch with our emotions without actually being so. Often, there’s a lot of mental activity, and when we’re asked how we feel, we tend to instinctively reply with a response beginning, ‘I think…’.
Analysis can be particularly tricky to spot, sometimes. On the surface, it can appear that we’re in touch with our feelings because we may be able to describe them in surprisingly articulate ways. However, there’s a big difference between being able to describe our feelings by thinking about them and actually feeling and surrendering to them.
Analysis is a common defense if we grew up in an environment that valued intellect over feelings. It’s also often the result of there simply not being enough emotional safety to leave the apparent security of our mind in order to feel the movements of our heart.
As a result, we find ourselves constantly trying to think our way to a feeling of security. The belief is, If I can just understand everything that’s going on and have an answer to everything that might come up, I’ll feel safe. The problem is that the more we do this, the more we disconnect from our emotions. As I explained earlier, the sense of safety that we seek is a feeling not a thought, so no amount of thinking will ever get us there.
Part of the problem with analysis is that it drives a constant state of anxiety, and the more intense our emotions become, the faster our mind must go to escape them. It can also be a driver behind patterns such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), where we believe that our safety is the result of certain thoughts or actions.
Do any of the following statements sound familiar?
This is where we’re somewhat in touch with our feelings, but rather than actually feeling them, we instead get caught up in the story of why they’re other people’s fault and place the blame on them. We can end up feeling a lot without ever fully being in touch with it or processing our emotions.
Perhaps you’re constantly angry at your parents, who you feel failed you as a child; or maybe you’re easily triggered by others’ behavior and are quick to blame them for how you feel. Or maybe you feel a constant sense of righteousness about world events and those greedy and dishonest people you believe are the cause of everyone else’s misery.
Of course, what’s rather interesting is that those same instincts of greed and dishonesty exist in us all. And, although I’m not here to defend the actions of many of those in power, and it’s certainly true that privilege exists and the world isn’t an even playing field, if a primary force in our psyche is a constant blaming of others, the danger is that we become trapped in a cycle of reactivity, which robs us of the opportunity to go deeper into our own heart.
Do any of the following statements sound familiar?
Empaths, sometimes known as ‘highly sensitive people,’ take on the feelings of others and experience them as their own. They can be highly sensitive to the environment they’re in and the people they’re around. Being an empath can be exhausting and further add to our seemingly never-ending emotional load.
With the other emotional defenses, the issue can be that we’re not feeling much at all, but empaths have the opposite problem – they’re feeling so much that they’re overwhelmed. And because much of what they’re feeling isn’t even their ‘stuff,’ it’s hard for them to separate their emotions from those of others, or to even get through others’ ‘stuff’ in order to process their own.
Indeed, part of the challenge for empaths is that although they feel as if they’re in touch with their emotions because of all that they’re feeling, often what they’re doing is carrying others’ emotions for them, creating even more distance from their own. And, although in that moment it can seem that they’re gifting someone a huge emotional service by holding their emotions for them, in truth no one can metabolize another person’s emotions. So, it’s a fruitless pursuit, even if the empath’s intentions are good.
To be clear, I’m not saying we shouldn’t hold space for other people or open our heart to their pain and suffering. My point is that by actually feeling and taking on others’ emotions, we don’t serve them, and ultimately, we may be falling under the spell of a familiar pattern for ourselves.
Being an empath can be a product of growing up in an environment that felt unsafe, and in which we learned to navigate by merging with and feeling other people’s emotions in a bid to predict or control their behavior to keep them safe. It can also be the result of growing up in an environment where there wasn’t a lot of space for your feelings, such as being a second or third child with emotionally dominating siblings.
Do any of the following statements sound familiar?
Somatizing is where we experience our emotions as physical symptoms. Put simply, our unprocessed emotional pain becomes physical pain. The energy of our emotions must go somewhere in our body, and physical symptoms are a way of expressing it. The problem is, this doesn’t help us to process the emotional pain, and it causes more suffering along the way.
Physical symptoms can be almost anything, but particularly common are digestive issues, back pain, and headaches. Over the years, there have been various models that track emotional issues to physical symptoms, and although I think these can sometimes be a useful source of reflection, I’ve never found them particularly accurate, as in my experience everyone’s unique in the way they store and hold their emotions.
It’s also important to note that somatizing alone may not be the only cause of a symptom. For example, there may also be a physical issue; however, somatizing emotions either adds to this load or inhibits the body’s natural healing capacity.
Do any of the following statements sound familiar?
As you reflect on these six emotional defenses, which of them feel the most familiar to you? As I said earlier, you may well experience several or indeed all of them. And remember, it isn’t that they’re all necessarily wrong. The problems come when we use them as ongoing ways of disconnecting from, defending against, and ultimately not feeling and healing our emotions.
The more awareness we have of these emotional defenses, the more we’re able to make different and healthier choices. Often, awareness of them alone will be a helpful step toward changing them. It’s worth noting that awareness of our defenses tends to evolve in three stages:
As we move to seeing these emotional defenses in real time, we’re empowered to change them. So, the purpose of these three stages is to become better at recognizing the defenses, with specific examples of them in hindsight, and then ultimately to see them as they happen.
This exercise is designed to help you uncover the emotional defenses you use in your life. I encourage you to do it daily for a week or two, ideally at the end of the day, to enable you to identify examples. The steps are very simple, but also very powerful. You can download a worksheet to help you complete the exercise at www.alexhoward.com/trauma.
Here’s an example:
By doing this exercise regularly, you’ll likely notice which emotional defenses you consistently use. Remember, this knowledge is power. And once we’ve looked at how you can actually feel your feelings in the next few chapters, you’ll have a whole set of powerful new choices.
Returning to Lauren once last time, as she and I worked through her emotional defenses, she had several significant insights, and she also found the process liberating. Although it was hard to acknowledge to herself just how much she’d been escaping her feelings over the years, it was a huge relief to realize that there was another way to behave.
Over several months, she made much more space in her life for herself, which included ending her toxic relationship, temporarily reducing her hours at work, and committing to her own healing. In time, she fundamentally changed her way of relating to herself and others and her health issues also started to transform.
Lauren also discovered that ultimately, feeling our emotions hurts so much less than rejecting them and constantly running away from them. Indeed, this is our next point of reflection together.