On emotion anxiety panic and fatherhood

When it comes to emotional fluency, some folks have it easy. In much the same way the Sami people of northern Europe can identify more than 100 different types of snow, they're able to discern and name a wide and nuanced range of their feelings. I and others like me, on the other hand, are less naturally in touch with our emotions. We're like native Floridians, with a vocabulary for frozen precipitation that's limited to "snow," "sleet," and "slush."

Until well into adulthood, my understanding of my emotions was simple and stunted. If you asked me how I was feeling, I'd say "great" or "okay" or "bad." I didn't realize there were gradations of feeling beyond these. This inability to understand what I was feeling extended even to physical ailments. Even when I was under the weather, I didn't trust the feelings telling me that was the case. I'd tell my mom I didn't feel well, that I had a cold or flu and thought I should stay home from school, but deep down inside, despite the physical symptoms -- the sweat-stained sheets, the sore throat and raspy breath -- I'd be wracked by guilt, by the belief that I was trying to pull something over on my parents, on the school, on everyone who was trusting me to do and be my best. Only when my mother showed me the thermometer -- 102 degrees! -- would I begin to believe what my body was telling me.

This went on for years. In graduate school, I missed two weeks of classes because I was unable to do much more than cross the street to go to the grocery store. I believed I was depressed, or agoraphobic, or some equally invalid form of invalidism, that what I needed was not medical attention but sufficient willpower to suck it up and power through. In retrospect, I probably was depressed, but that wasn't all that was going on. Months later, a blood test revealed that, in fact, I'd had mononucleosis during that time. Imagine: I had mono, but was unable to accept that I was sick.

It went on for years, and it still goes on. Maybe it's partly a genetic thing; I don't know. But I do know that it was at least partly learned. I grew up in a time and place that frowned upon any display of vulnerability among boys and men, and in a family where anything less than perfection was considered a disappointment. Fortunately, good grades came easily for me. But sadness, anxiety, fear -- these were for neurotics, for weaklings. A comedian like Woody Allen might get away with expressing these things -- anything for a laugh -- but real men were cut from the same kind of cloth as Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen. And so I spent much conscious effort molding myself in my teens into something more than just an honors student, into a cocksure jock. As a result, I never learned to name my more difficult emotions, much less accept them. I never learned that they could be faced and managed, that they could even be transmuted by artistic endeavor into something universal and sublime. These were lessons I would only learn on my own, as an adult, during the passage through periods of tremendous confusion and pain, periods tainted by the severe cognitive dissonance and shame that accompany having to completely rethink who you are and can be.

As I understand it, some people come to panic by modeling the anxious behaviors, the fears and anxieties and depressiveness, of their loved ones. This was not my experience. I came to panic by having no model for experiencing an entire swath of my more challenging emotions. I was taught to push down those emotions, to disregard them. To disregard my body and a good part of my mind. This had its upsides when it came to performing in the classroom or on the athletic field, but eventually, when panic smashed the dam holding back my darker emotions and my psyche was flooded with knowledge about myself that I was not ready to accept, I was left broken, overwhelmed. Drowning in shame at who I'd become, utterly unable to reach out to others for help, and driven to commit mistake after mistake after mistake as a result, before finally realizing that the ways I knew to make my way in the world were not working and that I'd have to make some major changes if I didn't want to end up slicing my wrists or caked in soot and living under a bridge, a raving lunatic.

So it was with interest that I came across this article, from Psychology Today. Here's a taste:

"I met someone when I was in grad school, and I had butterflies in my stomach," Lisa Barrett, a psychologist at Boston College, says. "I thought this meant that I was in love, but I actually had the flu."

The episode comes up frequently when Barrett describes her conceptual-act model of emotion, an entirely new paradigm that challenges decades of psychological thinking (and won her a $2.5 million NIH grant in 2007).....

Barrett argues that you can learn how to change how you interpret internal states, and even increase your emotional granularity: "If people have 20 words for anger (irritation, fury, rage, hostility), then they will perceive 20 different states and better regulate their emotional states as a result."

It's interesting stuff, stuff that maps to what I've learned doing CBT, psychotherapy, and meditation, and it's absolutely going to inform the way I raise my son. If I have anything to say about it, he will know that all his feelings are valid, and none to be feared; that mistakes are a good thing, a chance to grow and learn; and that he is loved unconditionally, regardless of any stumbles he should make on his path through life.