Finding the Emotions You’ve Stored in Your Body
[This post was written in August, 2020, before a COVID vaccine was available.]
A few days ago, I was feeling off in a way that I could not quite pin down. As an Enneagram NINE, this is not too unusual for me. I often feel out of touch with myself — asleep at the switch. For once, I tried to do something about it, using an art practice to locate emotions in my body. It turns out I was being emotionally affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in ways I had not acknowledged to myself.
Locating Emotions through an Art Practice
Unprocessed emotion shows up in the body as tension, discomfort, or even pain. Since these sensations are not inherently visual, an art practice can help by using your visual sense as a placeholder for physical sensation. It allows you to step back and see your emotions from a new perspective.
Art practice is not about being artistic or having great art technique. Anybody, artist or not, can benefit from using even rudimentary drawing techniques. I used the Procreate drawing app on my iPad to draw a crude outline of a human body. As you can see, it doesn’t need to be perfect. (After a while, I started thinking of him as Mr. Blobby.)
Layering
Procreate allows you to add layers to a drawing and work with them independently. The changes you make to one layer do not interfere with any other layers. You could probably achieve a similar effect with a layer of tracing paper over a base-level drawing, but Procreate allows flexibility in layer placement and opacity, as we shall see. I found this helped me to separately examine the components of a complex emotional response.
I brought my attention to the base layer of my drawing. At the same time, I observed what I was feeling in my body and where that feeling was located. I noticed a number of bodily areas that were in physical discomfort. I created a new layer in Procreate and marked those zones in purple.
Physical Discomfort
I am very susceptible to head colds. I’d had one from January to March, mostly manifesting as sinus congestion, a slight earache, a stuffy nose, and a scratchy throat. Sometimes, there was tightness in my chest. These symptoms went away in March, then came back in June and, as of August, they were still with me. They were low-grade but persistent. The initial timing of these symptoms and the fact no one else got them led me (and my doctor) to believe that they were not COVID-19. (I tested negative for COVID.) Still, you don’t know. I drew them on my diagram.
I habitually carry tension in my back and neck, so there was tightness and discomfort in my neck, shoulders, and lower back. My right ankle, broken over 40 years ago, was bugging me. I added these areas of discomfort to the drawing.
One of Mr. Blobby’s limitations is that he doesn’t have much in the way of shoulders, so it’s not easy to indicate a zone of discomfort there. Also there is no way to indicate whether a zone of discomfort is in front or behind. Since this was initially just for my own use, it seemed fine to live with this.
Layers of Emotion
The physical discomfort did not account for the “off” feeling I was experiencing. Even with discomfort drawn over the base level, you could still recognize Mr. Blobby, smiling wanly beneath his load of pain. There had to be something more.
Anger
A couple of days prior to this, my wife (who knows a thing or two) asked if all that time I was spending on Twitter was really feeding me. She observed that I had been carrying stealth anger over the last few days. “You’re mad and you have been for a while.”
Huh! I thought about this and realized she had a point. I use Twitter as one of a suite of numbing-out tools, but I wasn’t feeling mad. Grumpy, maybe? So often, my anger is more visible to others than it is to myself. With so little practice of working with anger, I don’t notice it right away. It seems more dangerous than it actually is and I avoid working with it as long as I can.
It didn’t take much examination to find a layer of anger over the physical discomfort.
Red slashes blot out my mouth and eyes. Speech and sight are filtered through my anger. There is a centre of intense power in my chest and another deep in my gut. A boundary surrounds my head and heart like a force field, extending beyond the outlines of my body. I repel anything trying to attack me. I am obliterated — covered — by my anger.
Why haven’t I seen this before? Surely anger this big would have called for a response. Well, it’s because I habitually dial it back. How much can I damp it down before I become visible again?
Modeling Emotional Intensity in Procreate
In Procreate, I decreased the opacity of the Anger layer. My base layer became visible when I dialed back my anger to 75% of the original. Or looking at it another way, I became visible again after ignoring 25% of my anger.
Interrogating Anger
Of course, my anger was not gone. I was carrying around a red-translucent force field that was absolutely visible to anyone who cared to look and, frankly, looked a little ridiculous. Maybe it would be better to interrogate Anger and ask what he had to say to me.
ME: What’s up?
ANGER: I am a LION! ROAR!!!
ME: No, really. What’s up?
ANGER: Hmph. Been sick for months.
ME: Yeah, and?
ANGER: I can’t do much about it. Those goddamn germs keep pushing past the barricades. I WILL DEFEND THE BARRICADES! I AM A LION!!!! ROAR!!!!
ME: OK.
ANGER: I’m doing everything I can — trying to eat right, getting my rest. Nothing works. I’m sick of being sick.
ME: Anything else?
ANGER: I. Am. Powerful. It CANNOT be COVID. I WILL NOT infect someone else. I CANNOT get sick enough to die. I WILL NOT let someone else get sick enough to die.
ME: So, you feel like you’re the germ? Nothing but a dirty vector of disease?
ANGER: Yeah, maybe… Shit.
Shame
After sitting with this for a bit, something called Sadness showed up. A little while later I thought, “No, not Sadness. It’s Shame.”
I ended up choosing a shitty brown colour for the layer of Shame.
Shame was a heaviness of heart and a weight on my shoulders. Shame wiped the smile off my face. It dropped a layer of filth on top of me. I tracked it around with me wherever I went. I couldn’t help it; it’s just who I was.
I had managed to live with it by ignoring about half of it. Like Anger, it was still there, just not quite as visible. You could still kind of see me through the filth.
Interrogating Shame
ME: So, just a dirty vector of disease, then?
SHAME [despondent]: Seems so.
ME: You know it’s not your fault that you’re sick, don’t you?
SHAME: I know.
ME: And that you are not the cause of all the sickness in the world?
SHAME: Yes.
ME: Do you really know that?
SHAME: I know it in my head, but I don’t feel it in my heart.
Fear
Anger was not only covering Shame, but also Fear.
Fear surrounded my eyes and mouth, reducing them to slits. It filled my core with an intense arousal, a heightened over-attending to the smallest sensation. My breath quickened and became shallower. I could feel my heart palpitate. I was suffused with a harsh, searching light, leaving me nowhere to hide.
This state is unsustainable. In the wild, fight or flight is over in a matter of minutes. To keep going, I had to ignore about half of my fear.
Interrogating Fear
ME: The lions and tigers after you again?
FEAR: No! Worse than that!
ME: The little virus?
FEAR: Yes! And don’t mock me.
ME: Do you think you have any control over the situation?
FEAR: No! Does anybody?
ME: Nothing at all you can do?
FEAR: No! Yes. Maybe…
ME: Such as…?
FEAR: Wear a mask. Wash my hands. Stay away from big indoor crowds.
ME: See, you do have some agency in all this.
FEAR: But is it enough!?
ME: Who knows? Nobody knows.
FEAR: So just do what I can?
ME: Yes, just do what you can.
All the Layers
Anger covering Shame covering Fear, all damped down and laid over a layer of physical discomfort. What a sorry mess!
Except that it isn’t. Cumulatively, it all added up to a feeling of being “off”, but only because I didn’t meet the different parts of it directly. Damping down the emotions does not get rid of them; it just makes them a nagging background buzz that sucks the joy out of life.
Better to ask them what they want — what are they angry at, what are they ashamed or afraid of? They won’t go away, but they will have been heard. That’s all they’re asking for. When they have been heard, they can let go a little and take their proper place in your being. When that happens you can relax and breathe a little easier.
