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Magic is less unusual than we think. Illustration: Placidplace

Content

Magic ‘r Us
Importance of a Healthy Expression of Emotional Pain
On How To Use Intellect In Processing Emotional Pain

Magic ‘r Us

Let’s begin by taking a moment to appreciate how amazing we are. I mean, look at all the miraculous things we do every day. We use muscle power to draw in air. Yet air consists for only 20% of oxygen. Still, we, with our lungs, distil precisely, and without fail, the oxygen molecules from the air, and pass them on to the bloodstream.

When our eyes open for the very first time, we can see. After birth, we can hear, feel, smell, and drink. We beat our heart. We maintain our pH, body temperature, blood sugar and hydration levels. When we eat, we digest our food and convert it into forms that nourish and energize our body and growth. Excess fluids that remain in the matrix outside of our blood vessels during metabolism, we absorb with our lymphatic vessels so that they can later return to the bloodstream. And when we sustain a wound, we heal it ourselves.

We do all these and many more amazing things every day, without thinking about it. What unimaginable things are we capable of when we do deploy thought?

Oh…

Upon witnessing the very broad spectrum of horrific acts that we are capable of thinking and doing, either to ourselves, others, or the planet, how in God’s name (or Allah’s, YHWH’s, Brahman’s, The Flying Spaghetti Monster’s, [Your Deity’s Name Here]) how can I state, with dry eyes, that everyone is a magician? Aha, well, let me to paint you a picture.

Phenomena, events, or processes that we cannot explain by logic, many of us call magic.

Now, let us take a closer look at all the physiological processes we carry out with our body. Despite most of us being unable to explain how we carry them out, we all do them. So unless you are a physiologist (and often even when you are), you are willy-nilly a magician, because you do all your physiological processes with your body without knowing how you do them – at least most of them.

The same argument can be made for the mind. According to the Buddha’s findings, most of the thoughts entering our mind arise in reaction to physical sensations (that we have labeled pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral) which in turn are triggered by stimuli from either inside or outside our body. But since that process usually goes way too fast for us to consciously detect, our thoughts often catch us off guard, and it’s obvious that most of us have no control over them. Yet we think them incessantly, nobody does that for us. Therefore we can also be said to be magicians when it comes to our minds.

But here is where it gets interesting to be a human being. Because contrary to animals, who mostly live in what the French philosopher Lévy-Bruhl called the Participation Mystique, the evolution of particularly the human frontal lobe offers ways to transcend our entrapment from the mystical realm of knowing what we do, without knowing why we do it; a state of being that a vast majority of us are very familiar with.

In 1904, the author G.K. Chesterton wrote in his novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill:

“The human race … has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it to the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grew up.”

Both Lévy-Bruhl and Chesterton point to the phenomenon of said majority of adult human beings who might have developed intellectually, but who have yet to mature emotionally. They identify themselves with, or attach themselves to, an object (e.g. an idea, money, power, etc.) or person (e.g. a spouse, manager, demagogue, etc.), who then fully controls their behaviour, whether they are aware of it or not. Instead of learning to think and decide for themselves, they depend on their pedestalized object or person to decide what is good for them. In that way they are like children who fully depend on others for their needs and feelings of safety and well-being.

Especially when we’re unaware of being driven by some object or person outside of ourselves, we will most likely also be unaware of the motivations for many of our actions. That can become particularly frustrating if we feel bad or guilty about them, for instance if we keep on behaving in ways we’d promised ourselves to never do again.[1] We’re being ruled by our ‘irrational emotions’ and like the proverbial ball in a mountain stream, we’re being tossed about with no apparent will of our own. What we’re talking about here is a form of co-dependency that is usually the result of a distorted emotional development in our formative years.

Importance of a Healthy Expression of Emotional Pain

One sure way of distorted emotional development arises from suppression or unchecked expression of emotions. When something happens that affects us and triggers feelings of frustration, anxiety, anger, or grief for instance, and we either pretend it didn’t happen (suppression) or we hit someone in the face (unchecked expression), than the actual emotion has not been processed.

As a matter of fact, with suppression and unchecked expression we ‘tell’ the emotion that it’s not allowed to exist, that it should stop making us feel bad and leave us alone. Subsequently the emotion goes in hiding in the deep recesses of our subconscious, until it is triggered again, when it resurfaces with a vengeance.

However, in my experience, the emotion represents younger versions of ourselves whose emotional pain has not yet been processed when bad things happened.

So when we tell certain emotions that they’re not allowed to exist, we literally tell a part of ourselves that it is not allowed to exist. We are at war with ourselves and at some point the painful past events that evoked the emotions in the first place begin to haunt our thoughts and dreams.

For example, when in high school (I was 17), a rather promiscuous 18 year old girl was suggested by a friend to consider me for a sexual escapade. As I walked past, the 18-year old girl looked me straight in the eyes and said:

“With him? I’m not that desperate.”

At that moment I fully suppressed my emotional pain and anger, because, hey, boys don’t cry. At least that was the story I had bought into at the time. The truth was, of course, that I had no idea how to effectively process and deal with the emotional pain that, in fact, hit me like a brick when she said that.

Not until much later, when these and other painful ghosts from the past began to resurface more and more and keeping me in loops of recurring destructive thought and behavioural patterns, did it become obvious that I was stuck and miserable. I was unable to receive compliments and making a mess of my relationship at the time. Out of sheer despair I began to write down all those painful events, big and small, I had hitherto dismissed as unimportant or not having affected me.

Writing itself was already difficult, but especially the reading back process evoked all the unpleasant sensations belonging to emotional pain, anger, anxiety, and grief. These varied, in various states of intensity, from nausea to muscle pains, from headaches to near fainting, from upside-down stomachs to dry vomiting, and from my heart trying to beat through my sternum to my throat being squeezed shut.

Yet, as unpleasant and uncomfortable as this made me feel, I quickly arranged for myself a safe space where I could cry, scream, hit, shout, and do anything that my body felt it needed to do, without actually hurting myself or others in the process.

And lo and behold, by taking this course of action I noticed that over time the painful past events that were processed in this way, haunted my mind less and less. I became calmer as they were literally losing their power over me; that is to say over my thinking, feeling, and acting.

Here’s how I make sense of this process: by writing the event down, I acknowledged the pain that my 17-year old experienced, but was not allowed to express at that moment (suppression). Subsequently, by allowing the full and uncomfortable extend of my 17-year old’s emotional pain to find expression in the here-and-now through my current adult body and mind (through writing the story and reading it back), it is as if I embrace my younger self and tell him:

“I’m sorry it took a while for me to allow you to express your pain, but I’m here for you now. Let us both feel the pain and unease I did not allow you to feel back then, so that we can heal together and become whole in compassion and love.”

By creating a safe space, there is no need for suppression of any urge that comes up. Moreover, the safe space ensures that I am unable to hurt myself or others, however my body needs to express itself at that moment. A safe space is therefore an important condition for healthy processing of past emotional pain, which can result in behaviour that’s necessary for healing, but might seem rather inappropriate in public.[2]

On How To Use Intellect In Processing Emotional Pain

Finally, suppression and unchecked expression of emotions are intellectual ways to avoid emotional pain. Thus we use our ability to think in the wrong way because both methods only increase it, and immediately we discover that our intellect is incapable of directly solving our emotional problems.

Yet we do need our thinking faculty, because what else but our intellect can make us write down the past painful events that we need as vehicles for the processing of unprocessed emotional pain? What else but our intellect can create the safe space we need? These are obviously very important conditions in the whole process of healthy emotional pain processing. But that is where the thinking stops.

For the actual processing work needs to be done in the realm of our emotions, which is the realm of feelings that manifests itself in the body. Emotions are felt in and through our body, and the longer they have been festering, the more intense or violent their physical reaction can be – hence the necessity of a safe space.

However, if we have the courage to deliberately embrace our younger selves who were hitherto depraved of healthy expression of their (our) emotional pain, by admitting that certain past events hurt us deeply, we give ourselves a chance to heal emotionally – just like we are capable of healing a physical wound by ourselves.

Then, inevitably, we begin to notice that the irresistible power of our seemingly invincible thought patterns slowly diminishes. We become aware that our ability to stay calm when our buttons are pushed increases. We begin to feel the initial contraction and subsequent relaxation of our muscles when we allow frustration, anger, anxiety, or grief, to run their course without suppressing them or expressing them unchecked. And at some point we even begin to lovingly smile when we observe ourselves ‘doing it again’ instead of blaming ourselves for being stupid, ignorant, or weak.

This is what it means to face our demons. Nobody wants to go through the nausea, dizziness, headaches, or any other physical unpleasantness that is related to emotional pain, which is why we so often use suppression or unchecked expression to deal with it. Yet allowing those uncomfortable feelings to run their course through our adult body in the here and now, actually makes them disappear.

If that ain’t magic, I don’t know what is.

Jolly greetings,
Erik

[1] Here we see the difference between intentions and motivations: intentions arise from our intellect (conscious awareness) and are based on rationality and reason, while motivations arise from our instincts (subconscious) and are based on our emotionally learned patterns (emotional memory). Motivations are most of the time the driving factors for our behaviour, and when there is a difference between our intentions and our motivations, we experience what is popularly called inner conflict.

[2] Having a silent and non-judgemental observer can be a valuable addition to your safe space.

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Everyone Is A Magician