Emotional Integrity

The past few weeks I have been thinking a lot about "feeling feelings", and recognizing them in myself. For over 30 years, my MO has been to deny any negative or "unacceptable" feelings that I had, usually before I was even aware that I had it. The reason for this was simple: it was what I learned from my parents, and it was how I survived.

What qualified a feeling to be "unacceptable?" If it would prompt a response from me that would make the other person upset or angry, it was unacceptable. If it would force me to look at a situation honestly that I didn't feel strong enough or ready to look at honestly, it was unacceptable. If it revealed me to be anything other than stalwart, serene, and implacable, it was unacceptable.

My mother is a master of hiding her emotions. There is so much discordance between her demeanor and what is obviously going on around her that it makes the observer uncomfortable. When I was an adolescent. she would spill her guts to me about her emotions and the situations in her life that caused her turmoil--hating her job, hating her body, the strain of having affairs and her unhappiness in her marriage, for starters. But other than these periodic soul-baring sessions (I'll probably post on boundaries and enmeshment at another point), she always had a surface that could not be ruffled, and constant turmoil beneath. I was taught, implicitly and explicitly, that it was unacceptable to do otherwise, especially for women.

Now I am in recovery, years later, and I am learning how this "skill" of showing a game face at all times and portraying an outer image of calm and poise has worked against me. I have begun to think of emotions as a kind of integrity. I always considered myself to be a person of integrity, and in many ways I always have been. But in a very basic way I wasn't, because my emotions didn't match what I showed others or even myself. I have been thinking of this as internal and external. I need a certain level of internal integrity with myself, an acknowledgment of my own feelings rather than denial. And I need external emotional integrity, so that in my dealings with other people what I express matches what I am feeling. In being true to myself by owning how certain situations make me feel, I am also allowing others to see who I really am, which is a kind of integrity.

I don't feel that in order to be a person of integrity, I must wear my heart on my sleeve at all times. For once, this isn't about how others see me so much as me living who I really am. It's not always comfortable to change my old ways; in fact, every time I have to own one of those unacceptable emotions, it makes me want to deflect and deny, as I always have before. But I'm only harming myself by doing this. Integrity is about consistency: "...consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, principles, expectations and outcome," according to Wikipedia.

Without an internal dissonance between who I am and who I portray to the world, I can spend the energy I save on improving my relations with others further. This is a gift of recovery.