Feelings and Emotions: The Essay, Part Three, Energetics, The Flow of Feelings & Depression
Part 3: Energetics
© Al Turtle 2000
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I am now going to shift directions. The following essay arises out of years of studying Wilhelm Reich,MD and his followers, the general field of body therapy and the specifics of what is often called Energetics. To me, this is the study of energy – human energy. As I refer to energy, I am talking about that which makes us go and that which we lose when we die. It is very much a body-thing.
Background
This is part three of my four part essay about feelings. I have taught all four parts as a class many hundreds of times. I am taking my time in putting down my words along with charts to be helpful to people in understanding my thoughts. These papers should probably be read sequentially. Part 1 covers my general understandings and definitions of feelings/ emotions and how they are inextricably tied or linked to thoughts. I think that if a person is talking about thoughts without including reporting on the accompanying feelings, then they tend to mislead or mid-direct their audience. Understanding and thus Validation becomes very difficult. Part 2 is a review of the four central emotions that influence our lives. In this I attempt to clarify what I see is the cultural confusion around the emotion of Anger. Part 4, (yet to be written), is a review of how to express emotions appropriately with the goal of reducing conflict and improving health.
Energy
I just want be clear about what I am talking. When I think of low energy, I am thinking of people sleeping, being tired, lassitude, going slow. When I think of high energy I am thinking of people running around, being very active or very tense, going quickly. When I think of relaxing, I think of a time while we are rebuilding our energy. When I think of satisfaction, I often think of people who have discharged their energy – move from higher to lower levels of energy.
I think that energy can either be expressed or contained. A person full of high energy may be physically active or not moving, but very tense. High energy moves or tenses muscles. Low energy has relaxed muscles.
Energy displays a kind of economy – input and output. We build it. We take it in – eating, etc. We let it out – exercise, etc. Life to me is a kind of cycle building and discharging energy. When the cycle stops, I call it death. I think this cycle is designed to be smooth, as in the following figure.
We wake up in the morning with energy. Eat breakfast and gather some more energy. Work hard and then get tired. Sit down and rest or siesta. Our energy starts to rise again and we go back to work. This all seems normal to me.
Anything that blocks input, keeps us tired. Do not eat and go around all day feeling low energy. You can see this in a person’s breathing. If they don’t take in a deep breath, but let out a lot of air, their lungs are consistently under inflated. When they sigh, they have to first take a breath in. Not very healthy way to go.
Anything that blocks output, keeps us tense. Do not discharge or let out your energy and you go around all day tense. You can see this in breathing. These people take in a lot of air and don’t let much out. Their lungs are consistently over inflated and they sigh a lot. Also not a very healthy way to go.
But amazingly worse than this is the problem of limiting how much energy is permitted. I think in general our society teaches people to not get “too” excited or not get “too” quiet. The result is that most people get anxious when their energy gets high. As their energy rises they get more and more tense. So they smoke cigarettes or use other means to limit their excitement.
Or they are anxious when their energy gets low. As they start to get lower in energy, they get tense and so they drink alcohol or use some other means to keep from getting too low.
This may be interesting and useful, but I only share it here to set up the issue of emotions and the flow of energy.
INPUT and OUTPUT
Now that I’ve talked about energy I want you to look a piece of common experience. Let’s focus on Anger for a moment. Does it make sense to you that a small input may lead to a small amount of anger and a large input may lead to a large amount of anger? Can you “get it” that input is related to output. Take a look at the chart below. (I think this is easier to see in a small child who has not had the complicated training of an adult.) A small provoking thing will lead to a small expression of anger. The larger the input, the larger the output. A child will explode as much as it needs, and then stop. It’s all over. I think this is pretty normal – except in adults.
Now, once you have this concept of energy in, and energy out. I want you to think about what happens when a person has been taught to not express their anger, to hold it in, to fear expressing anger, to contain it. Where does that energy go? 5 or 50 or 500 units input and nothing expressed. And recall that fear is, from the point of view of energy, a constrictive or contracting emotion. Fear makes a person hold in. Anger is an expansive or expressive emotion, all about noise and action. So, again, where does the energy go? Here’s the chart showing an input of 5 units of provocation and an output of 5 units. All balanced.
THE POT
The answer is, that the energy goes into something I call The Pot. Here’s the picture. I’ve made the chart bigger to prepare for more detail.
The Pot is real, not imaginary. You have one. I have one. It is where a person stores all the unexpressed feelings or emotions. Physically the Pot is the muscular structure of your body. The way I see it, everytime you do not express an appropriate emotion or an appropriate level of energy, your muscles bunch up and get tense somewhere in your body. You have to. These muscles stay tense for a long time. They may stay that way for the rest of your life.
It is relatively easy to see or touch your Pot. Look at a person’s jaw muscles. When you have to keep your mouth shut, you have to bunch up those muscles. The bigger the muscles now, probably the more you had to “shut up” as a kid. Look at sore backs. Many people have to hold back from expressing anger with their fists and arms, and thus their back muscles become bunched up – from holding back. This may seem silly, but there it is. All body therapies are about teaching people to relax, let the bunched up energy out of their chronically contracted muscles – their tight spots.
It gets a bit worse. The only emotion that is permitted in our society to all people is Fear. Generally the other three major emotions (Anger, Grief, Joy) are forbidden and thus all of those emotion energies end up in your pot. Here’s the expanded chart.
Thus, if you come from a family like mine, which discouraged all expression of feelings, all your Anger, Sadness and Joy may have found its way into your POT, and still be sitting there. This is why people sometimes burst into tears when someone gives them a massage. The POT was opened for a moment.
Lots of people are walking around with an enormously overfilled POT. I like to think that most people around 20 years old or older have about 35000 units of unexpressed emotional energy in their bodies. And I think it takes between 20% and 80% of our calorie intake, our food every day to maintain this Pot. No wonder we are tired. Letting go of the Pot actually gives a person more energy. Have you ever cried hard and felt more energized afterwards? Have you ever let out some anger and felt more alive afterward? Here’s the reason. You aren’t spending so much energy holding back any more.
Why are you not aware of this? Well, consistently tight muscles become numb after a while. The only time many people thoroughly relax their muscles in during deep sleep maybe, during full anaesthesia for surgery or at death. Wow! Just poke those Pot muscles and see how sore they are.
FIRST TRY – Things that Work
Most people want to know how to reduce the size of their Pots. And so let me give you the options. First, you can express Anger, Sadness, Joy appropriately. That does the job. I will talk more about this in the next essay. But that is not all.
MOVE
You can MOVE your body. Wow. Yup, all expressive emotions involve muscles and so if you exercise you can express some of the bunched up energy before it gets into your Pot. Or you can, over time start removing some of the energy from your Pot. That is why we all tell people who are angry to go for a walk or to hit the punching bag, etc. It works – a little. I like to think that if you are angry 50 units worth and immediately exercise, perhaps you can MOVE out about 10 units, and only 40 will go into your POT. Heck that’s better than all of it.
By the way, an another form of MOVING is to move your body away from the input – move to Florida. That also helps some.
Express
Talking also helps. That is often what counseling is about – letting people talk out some of their energy. Most of us have experienced this. Have you ever seen some awful site (car crash) and then you just seem to need to tell someone. If the first person doesn’t listen well, you keep looking for another person to hear you. When the right person listens well, you stop needing to tell. You got RELIEF. Again, talking isn’t very good for large amounts of energy, but is useful for small amounts.
RELIEF
In a real way what we are looking for is a sense of relief – a sense of completion. I was taught, years ago, that this was completing the emotion. It is as if an emotion provoking experience winds us up, and we need to unwind to feel better.
And so let me be kind of harsh. The only things that remove the energy of emotions are appropriate expressions of a) anger, b) sadness, c) joy, d) movement, e) talking. That is it. Nothing else works. Relief is spelt ROLAIDS.
Things That Don’t Work
This is not the end of the story, for there are several things a person can do about this situation that do not work.
NUMB OUT
This a tried and true method that doesn’t work at all. Yet we see people trying this all over the place. Numbing out means finding something to do so that we will not feel our feelings. These are all the addictions: alcohol, drugs, religion, chocolate, french fries, sex, TV, etc. etc. These are all based on the idea that “if I do this thing I won’t feel my feelings.”
I believe that the biggest addiction in the United States for men is “work.” Work-aholism helps men have no feelings. And they get paid for it. The crisis for men so addicted occurs when they lose their job or when they retire. Kind of like “the liquor store closing.”
I believe that the biggest addiction in the United States for women is “children.” Taking care of those little ones leaves no time for personal feelings. To a woman so addicted, the crisis occurs when their youngest child reaches 10–14 years of age and they realize that “the liquor store is leaving town.”
I believe that the biggest, most pervasive addiction in the United States is “being in a rush.” Having no time for feelings, numbs one out. Being in a rush does it.
A friend of mine from Africa once told me the following story. He went back to his village in Western Africa and told the elders about the great United States. They asked him, “what do people do in the morning?” He told them that they rushed through getting dressed, they rushed thru breakfast, they rushed to work. One old man stopped him and said, “Now, I know what getting dressed is. And I know what breakfast is. But this work thing that they are rushing to, I don’t know what that is. Is this work thing running away from them?” And my friend said, “No. It is not rushing away.” The elder paused and said, “We must think on this. Why would a person run toward something that is not running away?” And there was silence. After what seemed like hours, another elder spoke. “I think I have it. It is not that they are running toward something that is not running a way. That is the wrong question. The right question is what are they running away from that they would face if they did not run.” I believe, with awe, that in a couple of hours of silence they put their finger on the biggest addiction in our country.
The problem with Numbing out is that all the energy goes into The Pot. That’s why when a person give up and addiction they may switch to another. They still need another way of numbing out. Numbing out never works.
DEPRESSION
Another tactic is to get depressed. Here is how this seems to work. At some point a person’s POT gets so big that it can be sensed. The Pot becomes an INPUT on its own! Now the person cannot get away from the provocation, for the energy input. And so they freeze up, get stuck, in an kind of continuous numbness. Input from their Pot triggers depression, and the energy just goes back into the Pot again. This seems so hopeless.
I know that if I can trigger a depressed person into anger or sadness or joy (God help me!) or get them to exercise or get them to deeply express, then for a short while they will feel better. But usually, depressed people are deeply committed to not expressing any emotion or anything else. They are stuck.
Here’s the whole chart with the choices.
The Problem: Too much
For me the central problem is that all emotions and strategies for reducing the level of energy in a body, all the output methods, are limited or restricted. Thus over time people in our culture get more and more tense, over-charged. They seek relief but almost all ways of getting it are forbidden. At the same time, the ways of holding in the tension, building up the charge, are encouraged. No wonder we have so much trouble with violent outbursts. The Pot is running over. This tendency to explode becomes particularly true in an intimate relationship.
Letting it Out: Three Ways
For years I have been aware of the common ways that people have used to try to reduce the size of their Pots. Remember that a person is a much healthier and nicer soul when they have relaxed.
Method #1 The Add-On
A person waits until they have a small input and then they add-on a whole pile of energy from their Pot and try to express it all at once. This looks like what we call “over-reacting.” A person experiences a small, 5 unit, provocation, they add 500 units from their Pot, and they get angry 505 units worth. Or a person has a small sad thing happen, they add 500 units of grief from their Pot, and they cry for a long time. We say they are getting angry over nothing, they are crying over nothing. But in another reality, they are taking advantage of the situation to unload some of the emotional burden they are carrying. And recall that expressing anger is permissable if the anger is “justified.” No one says anything about the amount of anger permissable. Thus a little thing that “justifies” a little anger often results in a huge amount of expressed rage.
Method #2: Walking on Eggshells
This one is very common. You come home and your partner has 500 units of rage ready to go. And you haven’t done anything. Your body can sense this situation. And so you start “walking on eggshells,” trying not to set off your partner. You are good. You do everything right and then slip and whammy, they blow. Now remember, they are trying to get some relief from the held energy in their Pot. And you are not helping them. You are giving them no “excuse.” The situation looks like this.
And, if you are good long enough you will be rewarded by they adding another 500 units. Like this.
Being “good” does not help. Helping them release safely works.
Method #3: Provocation – Masochism
For a person who really needs to release their pent up emotions, and who cannot do it themselves, there is always the method of the Masochist. It your partner wont do something “wrong”, something that justifies your letting go, well just go and provoke them. You take a tiny bit of energy from your Pot, do something that pushes your partner to act, and then blow up at their action. It looks like this.
And in over thirty years I have never met a person who was aware at the time that they were doing the provoking behavior. It can be something so simple as forgetting a birthday, an appointment, or just being late.
The Solution
The next section of this paper will round out about the solution, but I can give it to you now. Your job is to take all the NOK emotions and make them OK, encouraged, supported, appropriate and safe. Your job is to increase your use of Movement and Expression. Your job is to consciously move held back emotions out of your Pot. Your job is to Exorcise the Pot. Like this.
Dear Al,
What are your thoughts on meditation and it's effectiveness?
I see your theory that for a person to receive proper validation, it usually has to come from interaction with another human, or interaction with something a human made i.e. movies, music.
How do you weigh the worth of validation that you give yourself,during a meditative session? What if you're unsure of how to quantify the validation you get from others?
And If I am able to recognize the validation for what it's worth, how do I store it or apply it? (I've had trouble with confidence) Do you think it should be fed into what you call ' Purpose', or rather my own personal genius?
I think my obstacle is that I received a ton of empty, redundant validation from my mother while growing up, or rather she always celebrated actions that were quite often mundane, Now I am highly suspicious of any praise I get, and I find it difficult to apply to my sense of self worth. I think part of this difficulty is to due to the fact that I think my genius is artistic and therefore it's worth is very subjective.
Any thoughts of yours on these ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
J
Good to hear from you, J.
I have the impression that you and I have very different definitions of "Validation." That may cause you some confusion in understanding me. I will use my definition.
I really like meditation as a wonderful practice to slowing you down and a great practice that can be used for Validation, but usually I think a more "empty mind" is useful.
I think that the habit of validation begins with someone outside of you doing the work and then migrates into a personal habit. It sounds a bit like this to a kid, "Oh, I see why you did that, J. You were trying to get some food."
I think "Validation" is not any kind of approval nor agreement.
The core in validating someone else is in "making em feel understood" by "bearing witness to their sense (as different from yours)." The core of validating yourself is in fulling understanding yourself.
My guess is that you received a bunch of redundant, empty and shallow, approval from your mom, but not Validation.
My full paper on Validation.
Dear Anditiswhatitis,
Thanks for the great increase of the size and detailedness of your story. It really helps me look more acutely at what is going on and what are the more critical areas to address. Even though what I said to you before is ok, I do have some more thoughts. Two areas surface as critical for me.
The prime issue for everyone is around the dynamic of panic vs relaxation. This is what my paper on the Lizard is all about. My goal is to help couples become team partners in helping each other relax. Job is tough! then the partnership helps both relax while developing better solutions. Partner-communication is tough! then both work on developing relaxing ways of supporting each other sharing. To ignore signs of panic in yourself or your partner seems dysfunctional – leads to more trouble. To ignore signs of relaxing seems equally foolish.
In your story I saw several signs of panic and relaxation that you might not have taken advantage of. E.g. “My opinion was discounted” Talking to your ex-mom was a “huge release.”
I wrote the Lizard paper to prioritize the Panic reactions in ourselves and to express the fundamentals of dealing with these reactions. They are quick, immediate, and relatively not open to logic or words. They seem mostly instinctual, automatic and unconscious. I will never “argue” about a Lizard reaction. I think the reactions occur way before the words of any argument.
Sure, you can use Lexapro to deal with the activity of your Lizard, but Lexapro will not get rid of the valid reasons for your Lizard to be active. I think of this as lying on a battle field, watching the enemy approaching, and taking some meds so that you won't be to anxious. OH well.
So the second thing I see is possibly a contributor to your Lizard's valid panic reactions. The key phrases in your letter were many. I believe you probably are beginning to leave a lifestyle and perhaps a community that is based on conformity and obedience. Your husband may not be there yet. Such an event is normal in a couple's relationship as its basic structure is not “conformist” but is instead “democratic”. In a conformist, anyone who rebels may feel pretty threatened.
I have written extensively about this in all the Master/Slave papers on Autonomy. “My utter inability to defer. I do not make a quiet slave.” This is a huge issue and will scare the heck out of your Lizard until it is resolved. Besides we live in a country (I am assuming you are in the U.S.) which is base on revolution, the “loud resistence to tyrants.”
I suggest that while you are looking at emotions and understanding them better, that you will want to get familiar with my work on Safety (the Lizard) and on Master/Slave (Autonomy).
Good luck.
Hi, Al.
Thank you for the response.
I probably should have given you at the very least a smidgen of back story to help you help me. I did not as I did not wish to color your reply in anyway.
Here's the issue:
My partner and I have been incapable of having a decent, let alone “conscious” relationship for years. In trying to seek some new tools, we have seen a counselor on and off who had prescribed lexapro for my partner a ways back. In my partner's view, the meds helped him immensely.
Well, shocker of all shockers, we are back to being strife-ridden. Also, shocking, we are enmeshed in the same dysfunction, same arguments, same nonproductive, threatening, berating, et al mode of communication. In going back to the counselor, the counselor strongly suggested I now go on lexapro based on what my partner gave as observations and reports of my emotional state, and anxiety causing life events. In my opinion, my opinion was discounted or dismissed during the decision to recommend the meds.
The two of them concluded that I was suffering from General Anxiety Disorder (GAD) based on the following (not in any particular order of importance or weight as I recall):
a) I run a very small struggling business. Struggling to the point that I am contemplating closing my doors. Yes, stressfull and anxiety producing.
b) I am tired. Yes, I am exhausted. I am dealing with “a” listed above, AND have 2 small children. So, yes, I am tired.
c) An x-boyfriend/x-business partner took his own life earlier this year and the counselor is of the mind that I could not possibly cope without professional help to deal with it. And my not discussing in great detail with nor looking for comfort from my partner about the matter is indicative of an issue in me.
(As I relayed to the counselor, I did, however; for some then unknown reason become the point person for my deceased x's mother. I know now that me chatting with her every couple of days and listening to her release her grief and sorrow was a HUGE release for me also. Just in being there for her and trying to console her, I also found consolation and helped my own heart and head to process the shattering decision he made.)
d) My partner was (and perhaps still is) convinced that if I would “just go on lexpro, none of this would be going on.” I would not be angry, hurt, or feel the need to express it to him.
(Please keep in mind that a chief complaint of my partner's is in his words my utter inability to defer. I do not make a quiet slave. Or perhaps I am a master with quite the decibel level. My fight or flight instinct is geared more towards fight, though I am working on that.)
Anyhoo, in session with the counselor both with my partner and then alone, I also expressed the following:
I do not want to take a medication to eliminate or diminish my feelings. I do not want to be a poster child for the saying “I used to care, but now I take a pill for that.” For me, I believe that feeling pain, hurt, anger is okay. It just depends on what I do with it. Again, it's just me, but I need to feel, then hopefully, look at the feeling, determine what it causing the feeling, and then see if the two jive. Is it reasonable to the present situation or is the present situation just conjuring up old things? Anyways, it's just my process. Do I always get it right? No.
Am I sleeping? Yes. I am able to focus? Yes. Am I able to be productive? Yes.
Am I furious that my taking a medication has been deemed the cure for what ails our relationship and react poorly to the continued assertation by my partner? Yup.
Is my anxiety order “general” in nature. Not in my mind. My anxiety is specific and targeted. Typically kicks in right as I hit my front door.
Oh! And another thing! “Rumination” has been besmirched by our counselor. It has become a dirty word in my house, which makes me crazy. When did introspection and analysis of one's self and situation outside of a counselor's office become a symptom of a mental impairment?
This comes off as angry, rambling, and defensive!
So maybe I do need medication!
On a lighter note:
I have been rummaging around your site for months. I find your writings ring true. Thank you for all of the time and energy you have put into amassing this information for all of us relationship-impaired people out here.
Cheers!
Dear And, I'm not sure what your situation is behind your question. I can share a couple of thoughts. I am very conscious of depression as being a normal experience when a) your emotional life is pretty constricted and/or b) when your future seems bleak. I think the function of the depression is a kind of wake-up call to broaden your emotional skills (empty that Pot of yours) and/or the make some changes in your life, to get unstuck, to make your future better. Generally people who have constricted emotions were trained that way as a kid (like me) and will need assistance at recovering the safe and comfortable expression of all emotions. Lots of therapies out there. I chose Orgone Therapy. If your future is bleak, particularly your relationship future, then I recommend looking my articles on Passivity and getting help with it. You will probably need to empower yourself. Lots of choices there. In the meantime, if depression is just "too deep" you may need the assistance of anti-depressants in order to move forward, to get to do the work. That means finding a cooperative MD. But I would really see medication as most often just an assistant for a while – 1-6 months. Longer probably means you aren't doing the work. I don't like the idea of long-term anti-depressants. Though I imagine "drug companies" might like it. Hope this helps.
Hi, and thank you for providing all of your insights and views up here on the net openly.
I am wondering what your views on the prescription of and use of anti-depressants and serotonin blockers to help people in their relationships are.
Thank you in advance for any musings you may impart on this subject.