Part 5 - Emotional-self help

Part 5 - Emotional-self help

Recap:  Pics & video of me posted.  I was humiliated.  It was awful.  I wanted to die.  Didn't want to get revenge.  True friends & community saved me.

Emotions are hard.  They are not logical, do not follow natural laws, they get in the way of clear thinking.

Yet emotions are the things that are truly yours.  Your body is made up of the combined DNA of your parents.  Your ideas, all of them, are portmanteaus of things you hear from others.  Your emotions come from you.  You are the only one who has those particular ones.  They are your singularity.  

No child is ever taught emotions.  They don't learn them from the environment.  Happiness, anger, sadness, joy, fury, all of these are spontaneous and individual.  And though emotions are hard, they are beautiful, amazing, and perfect.  They are the essential you.  More than your accomplishments or thoughts or relationships, your emotions are pure you, and for that, every one of them, is awesome.

Gnosticism is a tempting idea.  The concept that the mind and body are separate identities.  That your spirit is not bound to your flesh.  It is also bulls**t.  Ask anyone who loses an arm if that did not affect their emotional state.  Ask anyone who loses a child if it doesn't physically hurt.

That said I will edge close to this idea.  I want to explain emotions and with such a abstract concept the best way is to project it onto something.  Anthropomorphizing it onto myself is a metaphor that makes the most sense to me.

Imagine your emotional state as your physical.  Arms, legs, skin, organs, the whole bit.  Your physical body can take damage.  Some damages are minor: bruises, cuts, small breaks.  Some are major:  Organ damage, severe bleeding, major bone trauma.  Some are fatal.  All injuries have a range of damage and healing.  An amount of time that it takes to succumb to or recover from.  A level of facility that is regained.  An amount of help to heal properly.

If your emotional self takes damage IT HURTS.  A missed bus might be a stubbed toe.  An insult might be a Charlie-horse.  Depression may be a blood anaemia.  Anxiety like migraines.  A loss of a loved one might be a broken limb, something that will hurt for a long time, require special attention to heal, and if not done right will limit you permanently.  

Using this metaphor, last week I was mugged.  I didn't hand over my wallet so I was stabbed, somewhere in the stomach region.  I started bleeding out.  If I didn't seek help I might go into shock, then die.

This is where I did something brave.  I cried for help.  It was vague, but specific enough to alert those who wanted to hear.  A simple facebook post for help.

Within minutes the first responders arrived.  Some chased away the mugger.  Some put their hands on my wound, stemming the flow of blood.  Others arrived with bandages that kept the infection at bay.  Still others rushed in to suture me.  People I never expected showed up with blankets to keep me warm and safe.

Of course that's metaphorical.  So my point is clear let me unpack it:
Everyone who reported/blocked that ugly posting chased away the mugger.  They kept me safe.
Everyone who posted on my wall, those were blankets.
Every phone call was someone putting their hand on that wound, holding me together.
The concerned texts and emails were bandages.
The wonderful facebook messages were sutures that stitched me together again.

I don't know if I would have survived the damage.  I now have a scar from it, but nothing long term.  My help came because I let people know that my emotional body was weak.  

I have been blogging about this incident not for my own good, but for anyone who goes through emotional pain.  To help you with a playbook of how Ken managed to survive a humiliating, awful incident so  you can have an edge up on your next crap awful day.  

The takeaway I want to leave is that don't hide your emotional body.  Let people know it's there.  It is as real as your physical, with real abilities and limits.  Some may have had emotional abuse as children, the effect of daily cutting by a parent.  This would make you hide for fear of more pain.  The problem with hiding your pain is that no one can come help, and in that you do your loved ones a disservice because the thing they want most is to help you.

It's ok.  We hurt.  We all do.  Everyone breaks a bone.  Some have blood diseases.  Others are without legs.  Some even have what amounts to emotional cancer.  We all survive something.  And I for one am more than ready with a blanket, just say when and where and you'll be safe and warm.