Episode 65 - Negative Emotions
Welcome to Addiction and the Family, Episode 65, "Negative Emotions."
Welcome to "Addiction and the Family." My name is Casey Arrillaga. I am a licensed clinical social worker and addiction counselor at both Windmill Wellness Ranch and Recovery Tree Counseling. I'm the author of several books, including "Realistic Hope, the Family Survival Guide for Facing Alcoholism and Other Addictions" and the children's trilogy based in my book, "Mommy's Getting Sober." I've been in recovery from my own addiction since 1998, and I'm married to someone in recovery. The first 10 years, we were in active addiction together, and since then, we've been in recovery together. Join us as we share experience, strength, and realistic hope on how you and your family can learn to grow and recover together.
In this episode, we're gonna be talking about negative emotions, and we're gonna find out what those are. How they affect you, how they show up so much in early recovery, both for people recovering from addiction and also for family members. Find out why we call them negative emotions, and most importantly, what can we [00:01:00] do about them?
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Welcome back. Alright, so let's get into it. So what are negative emotions and why do we call them negative? So emotions are full body experience, right? We can say all our thoughts are up here, but our emotions run through our entire body. So we might feel them all over the place, and yet we're always not consciously aware of it.
And yet our brain will tend to sort those emotions into positive emotions and negative emotions. Now human beings love to [00:03:00] categorize things. So it doesn't mean that everything's gonna fit neatly into a box. And we're gonna find out that negative emotions are not automatically bad any more than positive emotions are automatically good, but we do wanna figure out, what are they trying to tell us?
Because every emotion is basically setting or resetting our body ready for whatever we think is coming next. So sort of a quick response system. So what we wanna do is figure out what are negative emotions about and what are they trying to tell us? So let's start with a basic assumption about our brain, and that's that whatever it is that it is going through, it is trying to figure out how to maximize our survival potential, ability to reproduce and when possible, live a good quality of life.
But I will say that for better or worse, our brain tends to deprioritize that last one. That is to say we will settle for survival in being unhappy more than we will settle for being happy, but not making it as long. So thus our brain is gonna pay more attention to negative than positive stimuli, and it's gonna really pay attention to those negative [00:04:00] emotions, those quick resets telling us, "uh oh, something is wrong, need to get ready for it."
So what makes negative emotions negative or the basic idea is that they're uncomfortable and they're uncomfortable for a reason. And that reason is very simple.
It's just that our body thinks that something is threatening our survival, and it needs to get our attention and prepare us to deal with that. Now, what does that have to do with addiction recovery as a family member or as somebody in early recovery themselves? Well, what we find over and over again is that those negative emotions come up a lot in early recovery.
Often because our brain feels unsettled and we're not really sure what's coming next or how we're gonna be able to deal with it. So our brain prepares by focusing on negative emotions. So what kind of emotions really fall in that negative emotion box? Well, here's a few that qualify. Fear, anger, guilt, shame, pain, sadness, things like that.
So what I'm gonna focus on are four in particular that come up a lot [00:05:00] around early recovery. But before we get to those, we wanna look and see just what is it that gets us in trouble, especially in early recovery. Well, one of the things that we find is that when we're up against negative emotions, some part of us usually wants to avoid them.
Now, I grew up near the ocean, and so because of that I'm gonna use a sort of ocean analogy. And those of you that also grew up near the ocean may recognize this idea, or if you spent time down to the beach, stuff like that, in an area where you got fairly decent waves. And I grew up on the west coast, so we got some fairly big waves whenever I went to the beach. And when I was a little kid, I would see older kids out in the ocean and I would think, "Man, I wanna get out there with them."
So I would go swimming up to a big wave, and then I would see this wave coming. I might go part way up the wave and then I would get scared. And the way I'd react to that fear is I might try and turn around and go back the other way. If anyone's ever tried this, you know it does not turn out well. So I would end up tumbling, head over heels, get sea water up my nose, maybe do a face plant in the sand.
It is not good news. [00:06:00] It turns out that when I was dealing with negative emotions for much of my life, I was kind of taking that same approach. I would start to feel the wave of emotion coming up and I would think, "Uh oh, whoop, no, can't deal with this. Need to do something to relieve my anxiety or pain or fear or shame or guilt" or whatever was coming up for me.
And I would try and turn around and take it back. Now I could do that through addictive acting out. I could do it by trying to get somebody to behave the way I want. I could do it by trying to get somebody to react the way I want. I could do it by trying to simply escape into ice cream or a book or something like that.
But I didn't really learn how to deal in a healthy way with negative emotions until I got into recovery. And then I found that wave analogy still works for me.
And this is the same thing I did as a kid trying to get over those waves. One of the ways was to push up over the energy of the wave and come down the other side. And if you've ever done that in the ocean, it can actually be kind of exhilarating. But what does that have to do with emotions? Well, in our emotional metaphor, what it did for me is it meant that I started to [00:07:00] go up the wave and I would ride the energy of the wave up and over, which with negative emotions can feel kind of uncomfortable.
It means I need to feel in my body what is happening and allow myself to experience it as fully as I can. And this was kind of a new experience for me when I was used to escaping those emotions. So I had to learn how to breathe into the emotions to notice where I felt the most of my body. And notice I'm putting my hand over my heart area 'cause there's a lot of emotional information there.
And had to just learn how to deal with whatever it is that I was feeling and discovered that just like a wave in the ocean, it didn't last forever. It would go up, it would peak, it would crest, and it would come back down. Some people actually refer to this sort of thing as surfing the wave of the emotion.
In the same way that people in early recovery around addiction may learn how to do what we call urge surfing, which is to say, we'll feel like the urge come up. It'll start to crest and then it'll come back down. We find the same thing with our emotions. Now as a family member around someone in early recovery, you may have to find yourself also doing some emotional surfing or some urge [00:08:00] surfing when you maybe have the urge to jump in, try and control their recovery, try and get them to recover, try and make something happen, get things outta the way. And we learn in family recovery that we want to be able to get through those urges rather than acting on them in the same way. So we may also recognize that those emotions are gonna come up, they're gonna crest, they're gonna come back down.
And if we don't act on them, we actually find that we can start to feel better and have the wave come back down and not have to have acted on it. So we don't need to act out on those negative emotions. We don't need to act on those urges. We can just feel them, experience them, breathe into them, maybe notice where we feel the most in our bodies, and then let them go back down.
So let's take just a moment and talk about that "noticing it on our body" thing. So one of the things that we can see with that, like I said, there's a lot of emotional information here, but it's not the only spot. I like to say kind of nose to navel. So like around right around my eyes, the top of my nose, all the way down to my belly button, there's gonna be a bunch of emotional information.
So in recovery, I had to learn how to tune them in. That meant to pay attention to what's happening around here in my face. How about my jaw, my tongue, [00:09:00] my throat, my heart. Down in my belly, start to notice what's happening in those areas.
Maybe take a moment and just notice that yourself. Take a breath and notice how does it feel around your face, around your jaw, around your throat, around your heart, around your belly. Sometimes those things will give us clues as to what we're feeling. We might notice, "Okay, my chest is a little tight. My throat's a little tight. My jaw's a little tight." Or maybe these things feel relaxed. Do they feel warm? Cool. How's my heart rate? What's going on in my belly? Are there butterflies? Does it feel relaxed? Does it feel tense? And that will give me some clues as to what emotions I'm feeling. And the more distress I notice, like tension, sometimes heat, elevated heart rate, butterflies in my stomach, closed throat, tense jaw, that'll tell me some negative emotions are going on, which really is a flag going up the flagpole saying "Pay attention." There's something that we are worried about in the same way that our body will react to physical pain.
We'll notice, "Okay, you know what? Something hurts in my arm. Maybe I should pay attention to that spot. Maybe I should treat it a little [00:10:00] gingerly. Maybe I should get attention to it for myself or from others so that I can get some help and start to feel better." For some of us in early recovery, this is a new idea to ask for help or to notice where we're hurting just as much emotionally as we might have trouble noticing it physically when we're used to tuning these things out.
So when we're dealing with negative emotions or positive emotions for that matter, we able to breathe into it, ride the wave, notice what's going on, and ask for and accept help wherever that seems appropriate. So let's start talking about what some of those negative emotions are, right? Let's notice what is happening in our body.
Notice that constellation of feelings and think about what emotions are coming up. So if you did that just a moment ago where you paid attention, see if you can put a name on that emotion. Like if there's butterflies in your stomach, tightness in your chest, tightness in your throat, well, that might be some fear.
If you notice the heaviness in your chest, that might be telling you about some sadness. And these are the kind of things that come up a lot around early [00:11:00] recovery. Now I'm gonna focus on four that we're gonna look at in particular, we're gonna talk about sadness, depression, guilt, and shame. We're gonna find out what each of these things is trying to tell us.
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All right, welcome back. So let's look at those four emotions. We said we were gonna look at sadness, depression, guilt, and shame, and see what is each one of them trying to tell us. Now, notice I didn't name fear and there's a reason for that because we're gonna find that fear underlies all four of those emotions.
So they all, you could argue, are a form of fear, or at least are inspired by fear. And if we can discover what that fear is, we can see whether or not it's valid. 'Cause here's a thing about human beings. We can react to our imaginations just as much as we do to reality. What that means is if I'm afraid that something is happening or is going to happen, I can imagine it happening, I can feel those reactions happening in my body just as much as if I look back at a memory, which one could argue is also a form of [00:13:00] imagination.
So knowing that can be important because sometimes what we're reacting to is not something that's real.
It's something that we're afraid is real or is going to be real. So let's look at that first emotion: sadness. What is sadness trying to tell us? Again, if we think of it as a little flag on up the flag pole saying, "Hey, pay attention buddy. Something's happening here. There's something I need you to know."
Sadness, well, it's an emotion that talks to us about loss. The idea that we have lost something, we are losing something, or we're going to lose something. Now, this is a big deal around recovery, because I've been working in addiction treatment centers for about 20 years, and one thing that I've noticed is a lot of what brings people into treatment or into recovery is loss and the fear of more loss coming.
So what are some of those losses that happen? Well, some of it is outward stuff like money, jobs, transportation, housing. Sometimes it's a little more abstract, but [00:14:00] personal like relationships, marriage, being able to raise kids, things like that.
And sometimes it's loss of even more personal things like dignity, self-worth, sense of our ethics and morals and values. When these things are lost, it can feel devastating. And when we think we're gonna lose them and maybe hit a point of no return, we may be inspired to come into recovery.
Now that might be kind of obvious around somebody who's got an active addiction going on and thinking, "Man, I need to stop that." But as a family member, we can also be looking at that. We can feel a lot of sadness and grief around maybe what we thought life was gonna look like at this point.
We didn't think our loved one was gonna struggle like this. We didn't think that we might feel overwhelmed. We might not have expected to feel so helpless. And in all of these things, we feel sadness about what we thought our lives were gonna look like or what we thought their lives were gonna look like,
what we think this means for us. Sometimes we can feel sadness about anticipated loss, loss of, again, relationships, [00:15:00] self-worth, dignity, things like that. Some of us, for instance, who are parents of a child who struggles, might think, "What does this say about me? Like my own image of myself as a parent, or what I thought I was gonna be like, I thought I could protect them, thought I could save them."
And when it comes to things like addiction and many other mental health issues, we just have to face the fact that we can't save people from their own behavior. Sometimes we recognize that our own behavior ourselves has gotten twisted. "I didn't think I would try and be so controlling. I didn't think I would yell at my loved one like that.
I didn't think I would ever give up." And so in that, we can also deal with some sadness around those losses. So what do we do with all that sadness? Well, like I said before, one big thing is to ride the wave and just allow ourselves to feel it, to recognize that we're going to be okay if we allow ourselves to touch on these things.
And sometimes there is fear around that. Fear that if I allow myself to cry, maybe I'll never stop, or it'll be a sign of weakness and other people won't wanna be around me for that. But what we find over and over again is that's not really true. People actually tend to accept us [00:16:00] more, or at least more often when we're actually experiencing our emotions and being genuine, being authentic.
People often know that we're in pain. Pretending like we're not in pain doesn't help at all. And by the way, if you're a family member and you're thinking, "Well, I need to shield my loved one from my pain, I can't let them see it. What if they feel bad or if they feel guilty?" Well, I'll tell you something. From working a long time in treatment centers, they already feel bad. They already feel guilty. They're already dealing with some of those things. Hiding it from them doesn't actually help. All it does is actually create a barrier because, well, people can often tell when we're not being totally authentic.
So if you're feeling the sadness, feel the sadness. Allow yourself to go through it and recognize that it's going to be okay. Let it come up. Maybe put a hand over the part of your body where you feel it the most. If it's in your heart feeling heavy, put your hand over that and just breathe into it.
Don't be afraid to go to some of those family recovery fellowship meetings that we talk about, like Al-Anon or SMART Recovery Family & Friends, Celebrate Recovery, [00:17:00] Recovery Dharma. Find a meeting where you can connect with other people and maybe talk about some of those feelings that are coming up.
You'll find a lot of people really understand. And if you maybe are part of a family system or a group of friends or a social circle where we're not sure that people will be able to accept us with our sadness, go to some recovery fellowship meetings. You find plenty of people who understand and will support you through that. So, that's sadness. How is that different from depression? Well, depression often is something that people go through on a more long-term basis. It often can feel deeper or it hangs in there for longer.
But there's another important thing. There's a theory on depression, and I'll say that I found as a therapist, this is often the case. The depression does involve sadness, but there's another emotion hidden in there that's not as expected, and that's anger. And there's a special thing about that anger as well, is it's often anger that we feel that we can't express outwardly.
We need to hold it [00:18:00] inside. And some people would say that the holding inside is part of what gets us in trouble. We try and hold it in, that takes energy, we have to push it down, and then we have to push down some more to keep that down and then to keep that down.
And pretty soon people feel like they can't even get out of bed. And that means that if you are feeling depressed, it's important to ask for help. If medication is indicated, talk with your prescriber. Take it as directed, but recognize that also there may be some things that therapeutically or through a recovery fellowship you need to express and dig into and find out what is that anger or resentment, and recognize that some of these are natural emotions that are gonna come up around addiction and recovery.
As a family member, you may have to face the fact that you may carry some anger towards your loved one, or there may be other emotions that come up that need to be dealt with and recognize that stuffing it down and pretending like you don't feel it isn't helping anybody. And expressing it in healthy ways,
and there's lots of healthy ways to express anger: talking about it, [00:19:00] being able to openly acknowledge it. Write about it, work out, deal with it. Again, let yourself feel what you need to feel. You may find that that depression starts to lift more. Many people find that they need help from a therapist. I might be biased being a therapist, but I found that that can really be helpful.
So we have sadness, we have depression. Now we're gonna move on to looking at guilt. So what's the deal with guilt? What's going on there? Well, guilt is another flag going up the flag pole, except this time what it's saying is "I've done something wrong."
And notice that that's something that is a message that really is internal. I feel like I've done something wrong. Somebody else may try and lay down a guilt trip, but if I don't buy that I've done something wrong, I might be annoyed with them, but I'm probably not gonna feel guilty. If on the other hand, I carry a belief, whether it's conscious or even subconscious, that I've crossed a line, that I've gone against my values, that I have not done it the way I thought I should do it, well, I'm gonna be dealing with some guilt. Now, that's another [00:20:00] emotion that is very common in early recovery for a lot of people, whether they're family members or the person directly struggling with the addiction or other mental health issue. And that's because it's really hard to be dealing with these things and not at some point slip up and go against your own values.
Like if we value honesty, we can find that maybe we haven't been so honest. Dishonesty is a part of addiction to the point that is considered just a normal symptom of what happens, but family members are often shocked to discover that they, too, have been dishonest. Like, for instance, if I've ever called in to work for my loved one, or when people ask how they're doing, I'm like, "Oh, no, they're good."
Or they go to treatment and I start lying about where they really are. "Oh, they're on an extended work trip. They went to Europe. They're camping out by the lake." Whatever it is that I tell people, that can be dishonest. But often the dishonesty comes up for family members in trying to do people pleasing, trying to walk on eggshells, tiptoe around, pretend like we're okay when we're not okay, whether it's to our friends and neighbors or to our loved one directly who's struggling. I find that if I'm not being emotionally [00:21:00] honest and open with people about what's going on, well, I can start to feel some guilt about that, too. But often family members also feel guilt because they're afraid that the addiction or other mental health struggle somehow is their fault.
They might deny it if you ask, but deep inside there's worry about it. "What if I played my cards differently? What if I'd said something earlier? What if I had never said anything at all? Maybe I should never have brought it up." Whatever it is that we tell ourselves. It's easy to say, "Well, there were some missteps along the way." And for most of us, it's true.
We did blow it sometimes. Human beings do that. That means we're gonna have some guilt to deal with. And luckily there's some tried and true mechanisms that we know can help with that. And many of these can be found by talking with a therapist, but also by talking with people in recovery fellowships.
In fact, all the recovery fellowships that I'm aware of, and again, Al-Anon and SMART Recovery Family & Friends are the two largest and best known that I can find for family members, although there are many others. All the family recovery fellowships that I'm aware of all have mechanisms to deal with guilt, because [00:22:00] it's so common. So if we go to Al-Anon, they'll say, talk honestly about what's going on in meetings,
claim responsibility for your part, get a sponsor. And that's just a mentor, somebody else who's farther down the path who can help guide you, listen, and share their own experience, strength, and hope, what helped them to get through their own guilt, which can be super helpful to hear, partly 'cause we know we're not alone.
And also we can hear that it worked for somebody else. And then of course there's the 12 Steps themselves. And in Al-Anon, the 12 Steps are exactly the same as they are in AA with the changing of one word in Step Twelve. Other than that, it looks exactly the same, which means we're gonna go through this similar process and be able to discover things about ourselves and let things go, and that's very powerful.
In SMART Recovery Family & Friends, well, it's gonna look a little bit different: working through the workbook, going to meetings, but again, we're gonna share things, talk with people. We might get a SMART mentor, but we're also gonna be learning tools, many of which will help us dispel some of those old ideas, claim responsibility for the part that is ours, and be able to move through those things so we can let that guilt [00:23:00] go.
And last but not least that we're talking about today is shame. So what's the difference between guilt and shame? Is shame just super guilt? Well, shame is also an emotion, but it is a social emotion in some ways. And I'm gonna tell you my own theory on shame, what I think it's about. 'Cause some people talk about shame, like it's a terrible thing and everyone should get rid of it and it's just inherently bad for you.
But what I think is, I think it is an early warning system as a tribal animal. Because human beings grew up in tribes. That's how we evolved. That's how we came to be. And it's been said, it is a rough estimate that everybody is on an evolutionary scale, really well suited for life about 20,000 years ago.
And here's the thing about human society 20,000 years ago: life was much shorter, whatever you learned as a kid was probably gonna apply for the rest of your life because about 50% of people didn't even make it to adulthood. But on top of that, you weren't gonna know that many people. Most people knew,
I'll say roughly a thousand people. And that meant that most people were gonna know the same people [00:24:00] most of their lives. And without that tribe, it was very hard to survive, which meant exile from the tribe could be torture and possibly death.
We don't wanna die. So that meant that we had a strong, protective instinct saying, "Do not do anything that goes so far outside the norm that you are exiled from the tribe."
And I think shame is our early warning system, saying your behavior is getting so far outside of the norm that you better get a handle on it, or you could get exiled. And so where does shame come into that? Well, shame is something that happens when we don't just think we've done something wrong, but we decide that there's something wrong with us.
And remember what I said near the beginning of this episode, and that's our brain will settle for unhappy and survival. And I think shame is a way where we might just be doing that.
We start to tell ourselves, "Well, if I remind myself there's something wrong with me, maybe I'll keep my behavior in check. I'll keep my head down. I won't make such a big deal. Or maybe on the other hand, I'll deal with my shame by trying to be [00:25:00] larger than life. I'll do something different, try and reshape my personality, powered by that shame, and that will keep me alive.
It will keep me from getting kicked outta the tribe." Well, life has changed a lot in the last 20,000 years. If we're not getting along with the people around us, we have an option to pull up stakes and go to another community, move to another city, find another group of friends, and that means that we have this protective mechanism that isn't as necessary anymore.
Now, that doesn't mean our behavior should go wild. Shame is there to remind us, "Don't go too far." But what we should do is pay attention to it, but also check and see is it true? Kind of hold it up the light. Is that a true thing? Is it true that there's something inherently broken about me? Well, unfortunately, addiction and other mental health issues can convince us that the answer just might be yes.
But I believe that is not true. We are not broken people trying to become unbroken. We are not bad people trying to learn how to be good people. We [00:26:00] are often around addiction, sick people, trying to learn how to be well. And that means that inherently, I believe this very strongly, we are good people. That if we can learn to find that true self,
in other words, to recover who we are, that's what I think recovery means, then we can move forward, let go of the shame, some would say, convert it into guilt. If I wanna look and say, "Well, I'm not broken, but I've done some bad things," well then let me get a handle on that. Work through those mechanisms like we talked about, whether it's the 12 Steps, the SMART tools, working through it in therapy, or all of the above.
We can work through that stuff and learn to feel better. So what are some things we can take away from looking at this today? We can recognize that, first of all, feeling things like fear, pain, sadness, guilt, shame, depression. These are all pretty normal, and they're things that people learn to walk through, allow themselves to feel, deal with, deal with any underlying emotions, correct any behaviors and [00:27:00] past errors that need to be corrected,
and then they can move forward and recover in their lives and learn how to be much more happy, joyous, and free. Can't guarantee it's all gonna be rainbows and sunshine and cupcakes, but I can say that things can get a heck of a lot better when we learn to feel with and deal with our negative emotions.
Thanks for watching and thanks for listening, and we'll see you next 
time. 
Thanks for tuning into this episode of "Addiction and the Family." This program is recorded, produced, written, floors swept the whole bit by myself and my wife, Kira. Just so happy to have you with us. If you'd like, you can always look us up on Facebook, we are tweeting on Twitter, whatever they're calling it these days, and we can be found on Instagram, we can found on Blue Sky, we can be found on Pinterest.
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