Hands of Water

Difficult emotions - and by emotions I am clustering together the physical, mental and emotional package - are tricky little bastards.

Let's take anxiety.

Physically - it's a constant feeling of nervous electricity lighting up the skin, particularly localized as a shroud around the head and shoulders, but present throughout the whole body.

Mentally - it's all the thoughts that attach themselves, from observations to to analysis to the runaway shitwagon the monkey sits on, chattering away as if he will make one iota of difference in the end.

Emotionally - feeling-thought-> emotion. Uptight I'm feeling this way. Tired of feeling this way. Sad and frustrated at feeling this way.

On paper, deconstructing it, it seems so clear and easy. Not to resolve, but to understand at least.

Living it is another matter.

Here's the thing - it's like the huge insight social studies have come up with in the last 50 years that I can't find to quote - you can't observe and deconstruct culture from a first person perspective. Similarly, you can't see and deconstruct difficult emotions from a first person perspective.

Let's take anxiety.

In interpersonal interactions, you feel electrically charged, uptight, scared and irritable at everything. Work, relationships, you name it. From a first person perspective you've got thoughts, the monkey on the shitwagon. If you can get beyond that, you might see symptoms of the anxiety - depression, OCD, emotions. And you might deal effectively with one or all of these. But these are not root cause, they are symptoms of the problem. The actual problem is anxiety - this running on of the autonomic nervous system, intermeshed with emotions and thoughts.

So you can spend weeks or years working on the emotions or thoughts, when it's the underlying condition of anxiety that needed to be treated all this time.

In the case of a relationship, it can be like trying to save a waterlogged plant with hands made of water. You're trying your best to work it, but until you realize what your hands are made of, what they're coming from, not going to do much good.