Conflicting Emotions
At the height of the pandemic, I helped a friend move after he filed for a quarantine divorce. As we sat in the kitchen of his tiny rental house eating takeout, I asked how he felt. He became very quiet and replied, “I don’t even know anymore.” Ever the therapist, I pulled up the pdf of an emotions wheel that I keep on phone and handed it to him. After a few minutes of perusal, he settled on “relieved, hopeful, resistant, and vengeful.” I considered this response to be an appropriate “feelings cocktail” under the circumstances. He, in contrast, just blinked and reflected, “That doesn’t make any sense,” and put the phone down. I let the moment pass and just kept eating my cold noodles and enjoying the novelty of being outside my home.
Conflicting emotions are something that we all must face and process at some point in life. Like blinking or occasionally needing a haircut, they are just another part of being a human in the world, a facet of who we are individually and collectively as people. For many of the clients who come to see me, holding opposing feelings about the same person, situation, experience, object, concept, or life change is often baffling and overwhelming. They have been taught that “inconsistent feelings” equate to “invalid feelings”. They label the contrast as “irrational” and come searching for emotional alignment about issues that are often complex, messy, ambiguous, and triggering.
I have seen conflicting emotions take many forms for my friends over the course of my life. They have existed as the bride-to-be who is excited and madly in love but cries in her closet every night. They have taken the shape of the father of an adult child who resents her for being financially dependent yet is paralyzed in terror by the thought of her moving out. They have presented as a successful attorney who loathes her underperforming partner but likes the validation of being the “competent one”. They have been a spouse marinating in the guilt of six figures of credit card debt while basking in the dopamine high of booking a luxury safari in West Africa for Spring Break.
Oftentimes, people with these types of internal conflicts seek my professional services to find consistency and alignment. They want that moment when the emotional dissonance lifts and they achieve emotional certainty. They hold the expectation that when their feelings are no longer conflicted, they will find the path forward and step onto it with commitment and purpose. My approach as a therapist is to help them do just the opposite. My philosophy is to support them to accept their contradictory feelings, to stop judging themselves for having them, to probe why they exist, and then discern how to move forward with this new knowledge, even if there is no certainty.
A professional mentor of mine once schooled me on the distinction between primary and secondary emotions, meaning that some feelings exist in a state of purity, while others are just masking what lies beneath them. She liked to say that her fear of rollercoasters was “just excitement without the breath under it.” Once she started breathing, the excitement could find its way in, and she could enjoy the ride. In the past two decades, I have become attuned to the pattern that anger is often a response to vulnerability for me. For my friend who got divorced during the pandemic, therapy has provided him with a pathway to understand that his post-separation vengefulness was just hurt and regret colliding with his vivid imagination. The bride who was crying in her closet every night came to realize that her sadness was just healthy grief over leaving behind her single self. The father of the adult daughter let her be an adult, understanding that his fear of her moving out was masking his panic at the main source of purpose in his life no longer being there every day. The attorney dissolved her partnership, finally facing that her love of the ego strokes came from being bored with a profession she no longer found challenging. The spouse with the debt finally accepted that spending money was an act of defiance in response to the chaos and misery of cancer treatment, a way to get back some sense of joy after so much had been stripped away.
Feelings are like onions. They contain layers. Those layers can seem contradictory and inconsistent. They may actually be contradictory and inconsistent. But if we keep peeling and probing and searching and accepting, we may find the connections, the threads that link guilt to joy and vulnerability to anger and sadness to love and purpose to anxiety and boredom to condescension. Just because these emotions are contradictory doesn’t mean they’re invalid. Probing the contradictions is often where insight begins.
Written by Deanna Diamond, LPC
Check out her other latest blog here: The Overlooked Aspect of PTSD: Avoidance and Disassociation
