Stop Telling Me I'm Too Emotional

Stop telling me I am too emotional!! I am emotional because I am human, I feel life. I will not suppress my feelings because you are uncomfortable with them and are now trying to control me, or worse yet, dismiss me as too emotional or irrational.

I am sick and pissed off at the manner in which our society is blocking us from feeling our feelings because we are afraid to feel. There is nothing more maddening than watching a parent who lost their child interviewed on TV apologize for tearing-up, or a person who has just lost his house in a fire hold back and/or hide his tears. What are we, machines? Are we made of steel? We are flesh and blood and were born with these feelings inside us.

Who on earth do you think you are to tell me what I should feel and how I should express it? I am not here to abide by your irrational fears and comfort-seeking rules; I am here to express my innate nature.

I imagine that you may be having a reaction to my aggressive introduction. Check with yourself and see if right now you are judging me for expressing my anger. What are you feeling right now? Are you feeling contracted and dismissive? How convenient! This is a wonderful way to avoid seeing me as a human being who may be feeling hurt, scared, or violated on some deep level.

As long as you can justify judging me because I don’t conform to some “proper behavior,” I can be dismissed as irrational or out of control. I am no longer a human being, and I don’t deserve to be heard or understood. How is it that we don’t experience people in pain or fear as worthy of attention and care unless they express it in, frankly, unnatural calm and rational ways?

Can’t you see that we are stifling our voices and thereby our true experiences? It’s time for us to confront this issue head on and begin to embrace all our feelings, “the good” (happy), “the bad” (sad), and “the ugly” (angry). Every feeling has a reason. We may not understand the reason, but it’s there, and if we allow ourselves to pay attention to the feeling and inquire what’s behind it, we will discover its rationale.

But we are so programmed to avoid feeling anything uncomfortable that we would rather pretend that it doesn’t exist, or paint it with shame, than embrace it as part of our natural condition. No wonder our society is addicted to food, drugs, sex, work—you name it! We are terrified of our feelings!

We are constantly running away from our painful feelings by numbing, distracting, or denying them. We have developed countless ways to defend ourselves from experiencing our pain and discomfort, and why? The story is that to show emotions is to be weak because it somehow renders one irrational and out of control. Tsk, tsk, tsk, shame on you!

Well, science is showing us that the opposite is true—staying with your feelings, examining them, and sharing them with others is courageous and smart. The misguided notion that we must suppress our feelings or apologize for them has got to go! It’s time we catch up with the latest research and get on board with the totality of our human condition, which includes learning about and understanding how our feelings impact our lives, whether we embrace them or not.

Enough with walling off parts of ourselves that we are uncomfortable with or don’t like. We are emotional animals! As neuroscience and psychology have been showing us for decades, emotion is not the opposite of reason, it is inseparable from it. Our feelings are not interruptions of our thinking; they are the substrate of it, whether we like it or not!

How else can you explain the irrational behavior we are surrounded by, treating each other as enemies online, in media, politics, and culture? All this finger-pointing and blaming comes from our suppressed emotions of feeling scared, alone, and helpless. We repeatedly act out against each other and ourselves without any awareness or accountability. We believe the problem is out there, when in reality it is inside us. Is this the behavior of rational humans?

If we recognized the feelings that are driving us, we would focus our attention on addressing them. That would be rational.

It’s time for us to lean in with curiosity and recognize that paying attention to our feelings is just as important as paying attention to our physical discomfort. Pain, emotional or physical, is an indicator that something is off and needs our attention, not something to be ignored or covered up with addictions and denial.

Our world looks the way it does because we have been denying our feelings rather than screaming from the top of our lungs that something is terribly wrong here. Instead, we get on our personal soapboxes—our stages—and talk, talk, talk.

Just look at how many conversations are going on online—all the YouTubes, podcasts, Reddit, etc. Do we really need more talking, more separate minds, more words that seem to go nowhere and make little or no impact?

What we need right now is real life, face-to-face, heart-to-heart connections and discussions that would lead to tangible and meaningful actions. But we are too afraid of each other. It is safer to watch conflicts on screens and comment freely—it gives a sense of power and freedom.

How delusional of us to think that we are actually serving something meaningful when what we are really doing is avoiding being with each other, learning from each other, understanding each other, and finding ways to get along and work together for the benefit of all.

When are we going to pause and see that as long as we continue to hide from our feelings of rejection, unworthiness and being alone, until we acknowledge our feelings of insecurity and address them, we will continue to spiral and loop with words and reactions to those words.

Are online conversations completely useless? Of course not. They undoubtedly inform and help many people in various ways. But ultimately, they continue to engage the mind and perpetuate separation from our bodies, our emotions, and each other. And when they do engage our emotions, more often than not it is in the service of divisiveness rather than helping us connect to our humanity.

They disengage us from the only information that can actually help us see ourselves and give us tangible direction toward a way out of the mess we have created.

As a woman, this issue has been particularly challenging for me, both in my personal and professional life. There is nothing more disturbing than being treated like an irrational woman because I don’t suppress my feelings.

Throughout my life, I have been at the mercy of the “men in the room,” as I was unable to, nor did I want to, suppress or hide my feelings. The taste of disdain, disrespect, or pity is still in my mouth as I recall them, self-righteously sitting on their high horse, dismissing my thoughts and ideas because I expressed them in a shaky voice or with tears in my eyes.

While I was feeling deeply and advocating for the needs of others, whether patients in the hospital or emotionally needy children in school, they were only concerned with research funding and protocols. Who is the rational one here?

We have taught our society that we must suppress feelings and overcome them with intellectual reasoning. The result is a whole bunch of people who are feeling a lot but are not connected to their feelings, foolishly believing they are rational, strong, and in control, while acting irrational and out of control.

I never once doubted who was the rational one.

I was born incredibly sensitive, especially when exposed to another’s pain or injustice. My feelings helped me connect to people around me, deepening my understanding of them and our relationship. My openness to feel whatever arose in me helped me discover what I like, don’t like, what feels true, what I care about, and who to trust. My feelings were my informants to who I am.

I was not about to let individuals who consider themselves intellectually rational define reality for me. I was clear that their reasoning did not reflect truth or wisdom, but rather the worst kind of rationalization, one that arises from disconnection from their hearts and humanity.

The sad truth is that they were the ones who were irrational, driven by unconscious feelings that led them to pursue money and power, while deep down longing for peace, respect, and fulfillment.

The disconnection from their feelings rendered them out of control and prevented them from serving their deepest needs.

Fortunately, I learned early on that our society was conflating two different emotional situations:

1. When people are emotional and irrational due to deep unconscious fears.

2. When people are emotional in response to loss, trauma, or injury.

In the former, the reaction may seem irrational, but with inquiry it reveals its logic. In the latter, people are given more leeway, but even then, expression is often limited, for fear of appearing out of control.

When we are not intimate with our feelings, we cannot distinguish them, understand their source, or discern their meaning.

In order to find a solution to any issue we need to thoroughly research its cause and only then can we have the potential to address it successfully. We seem to lack the curiosity and inclination to understand what truly makes us irrational when we are in the heat of an intense emotion.

Given the extensive cost of our irrationality in our personal lives and our collective lives, I can think of no greater issue to learn about and address than understanding our emotions.

I discovered this through examining my own reactions. When I was swept up in strong emotions, I would see things in black and white—not objectively. Realizing this, I chose to explore the source of my feelings. I learned to be more objective while still feeling deeply. Whether hurt, sadness, or fear, I could stay connected to the bigger picture.

My feelings became information.

I came to understand that our fear of emotions is not because they are weak or irrational, but because we are terrified of feeling them in our bodies. So we escape into our heads.

And as long as we do that, we will continue to behave irrationally.

It’s true that they can be incredibly uncomfortable, painful and out of control, and it’s true that, in some ways, we are conditioned to avoid feeling them, but that’s no longer a valid excuse. At this point, avoiding them is costing us far more than dealing with them directly and learning how to respond rationally.

It’s time to step up and tell the truth. Who is the weak one? Who is the coward? Who is the irrational one?

It is those of us who refuse to face what is right in front of us.

Courage is doing the rational thing and facing the pain and discomfort. Taking the “comfortable” path in the moment only perpetuates the chaos, corruption and destruction we see all around us, not only in the challenges facing our countries and our planet, but in our personal day to day lives.

Pause for a moment. Look at your life, your relationships, your work, your feelings about yourself and your community. Are you peaceful? Are you content?

It’s time we grew up and took responsibility for our lives.

You want to be rational? Then learn to become rational. And the only way that can happen is if you understand what is blocking your rationality, your unexamined feelings.

Hey men, you pride yourselves on taking risks, climbing mountains, building businesses and bridges. You face external fears. Now, how about facing internal ones?

I invite you to go into a space in your home or wherever you feel comfortable and sit quietly for an hour or two without distractions. I would love to hear what shows up for you. Or maybe better still, I invite you to connect to the feelings that arose in you when someone you care about rejected you.

Deep down, most of us feel alone, not good enough, not lovable, scared, and confused.

We can no longer pretend these feelings are not there.

For our sake, and for the sake of those we love, we need to see and accept how afraid we are of them, stop belittling people who express themselves fully and begin telling the truth.

We need to demand that feelings receive the attention they deserve so we can become comfortable with them and begin developing ways to harness their wisdom in service of our humanity and the continuation of life on Earth.

P.S. I wrote this as a stream of consciousness several years ago, after I was belittled again in a meeting at an institution.

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