Undercurrents

a reflection on the complexities of emotions and relationships

For months, I’ve been wrestling with words tumbling in my mind. When I shared my ruminations with my friend, she said it sounded like anxiety. When I heard that, I knew she was right.

Over the past year, I’ve struggled with a feeling of being stuck, like I’m in a riptide, being swept out to sea. I’ve explored this stuckness with trusted friends as I tried to find the language and roots of the challenge. Part of this stuckness had to do with a couple of relational challenges, another part has to do with a stirring in my soul that I’m not quite sure how to name. The former, I’ll explore here; the latter will come later when my intuitions become clearer, and pieces fall into place.

My parents divorced when I was only three, so I don’t remember the event or how I responded. I do know that it significantly impacted my life, as it was my first experience with death.

I rarely asked questions about my childhood, but when I asked my mom how I handled the divorce and the subsequent transitions, she said I handled it all just fine. Then, almost as an afterthought, she added that I screamed every night for hours on end during the first week in our new apartment. She had no idea why or how to console me, so she called her mother and asked what to do.

My grandmother said, “Place her in the shower and turn on the cold water. That will make her stop screaming.” At her wits’ end, my mother followed her mother’s counsel.^[1] When the cold water hit my small body, I stopped screaming immediately. I do not remember this happening, but when my mother told me this story, I knew it was true; I felt it on a visceral level. Tears welled up in my eyes, and my breath caught in my throat as I listened to her recount the events. My mom didn’t realize that, though my screaming stopped externally, it didn’t stop internally. All those screams produced by my young voice were stuffed deep within like a corpse tossed into a mass grave.

Years ago, I exhumed that corpse and analyzed it. I grieved with the small girl who was silenced for her big emotions. In that silencing came mistrust of people, as well as mistrust of pain, grief, and longing. In that silencing of the screams also came a silencing of my voice and an inability to communicate the complexity of my internal world in healthy ways. I learned at an early age that I was too much, especially when I shared my emotions. I learned that sharing emotions could lead to perceived emotional abandonment by those I love. So for decades, I stuffed my feelings down as best I could.

But stuffing and denying feelings doesn’t erase the feelings. It just causes them to come out sideways. Those emotional undercurrents looked like anger, people-pleasing, and perfectionism. They looked like me, longing to be seen, heard, and loved, and seeking that validation in unhealthy ways. I didn’t realize all this occurred in my life until I started meeting with a counselor when my daughter was going through a difficult season of life.

I often tell my students that to fully live, we have to move closer to death. I’ve done that in a number of areas of my life, including the one mentioned above. But it would seem wounds carefully tended and healed still impact how I move in this world.

A friend of mine posted a quote that said, “Avoidance is incompatible with intimacy. You cannot dodge conflict, vulnerability, or hard conversations and still have a close, trusting relationship. The two things cannot coexist.”^[2] When I read the words, I knew that my rumination on the complexities of my relationships stemmed from my avoidance of hard conversations and potential conflict, and, even deeper, from a fear of abandonment.

During Lent, I spent the days praying for the challenging relationships in my life. Every time the person I didn’t want to have the hard conversation with came to mind, I prayed for them, which soon led to me praying for myself, which then led to God revealing a truth that was buried under my anxiety and fears.

Reading Len Sweet’s post, “We Are All Salem Now,” helped bolster my courage to wade into the messy middle. I reached out to the people to invite them to a conversation. In the weeks leading up to those conversations, anxiety rolled through my body at unexpected times. I was a mess, and I knew deep in my bones that the only way out was to move in a non-instinctual direction. Like swimming parallel to the shore to escape a riptide, I knew I’d have to share the many feelings I’d bottled up over time.

While the people I needed to visit with were ones I loved, respected, and trusted, those old fears still surfaced: What if what I shared was too much? What if they shut down and walk away, breaking all contact? What if…?

Living in the “What ifs” is paralyzing. I did that for years, and for reasons I cannot explain, I found myself back in that place of perpetual fear. But with the guidance of God’s Spirit laying a foundation of deeper understanding, I was able to move (imperfectly, mind you) in a posture of humility and curiosity, a willingness to apologize and ask for forgiveness.

In the “conversation I wanted to avoid” meetings, I initiated the meeting and invited the person to first share what was on their heart, what their experience had been, and what needed to be said. I listened with an open heart, the best I could, and welcomed their presence and vulnerability in the space of sharing. After listening, I shared, noticing how every story has two sides with vastly different perspectives and experiences.

What I realized was that in each case, assumptions were made that led to particular choices, and rather than having an honest conversation at the points of hurt or misunderstanding, we chose to disengage.

I realized that in my efforts to avoid abandonment, I abandoned people I love, and I inadvertently abandoned myself by neglecting my voice, my presence, and my agency in the situation. Consequently, I become invisible to myself and others, leading to distress, disconnection, and distrust. In many ways, this protective posture feels safe, until it doesn’t.

I also realized that when I muster the courage to move closer to the tensions in my life, name them, and give them space to breathe, reconciliation and life emerge in new ways.

My leadership coach recently asked me, “When you show up, how do you show up?” While I’d need to poll those who know me best to have a fully formed answer, my hope is that when I show up, I do so with quicker-to-act courage, curiosity, grace, kindness, compassion, forgiveness, and love. And while I may not do that perfectly, I do hope to do so honestly, and that in doing so, others will have permission to do the same.

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Photo by Eduardo Madrid on Unsplash

^[1] I share this story as background information, not to judge my mom or grandmother. They were doing their best in a difficult situation. I know because I, too, made significant parenting decisions that adversely affected my children.

^[2] Todd Baratz, posted on IG account @yourdiadnonsense.