The Only Way Past It, Is Through It

We have to go through challenges to be good, and we have to go through hell to be great. This may be especially true for elite athletes and performers, despite the frequent sense of needing to be unemotional and perfect. Recent events have brought the emotions and humanness of NFL athletes to the forefront of the national conversation on a level that is not often recognized. This brings up an obvious, though not generally understood issue- we all have negative emotions. All of us. It's unfortunately a universal part of the human experience. The other dirty little secret of being a human is that we can't get past our emotions without experiencing and actually feeling them. We can't control how we feel, but we can control whether or not we feel it. Denying those feelings (or judging them, or avoiding them) works against our ability to feel them and move past them, and they get stuck. This is a potentially terrifying concept to many of us.

I spent seven years working in Addiction Medicine at Kaiser Permanente, and addiction is an issue that affects people from every demographic identity and all levels of “success.” I routinely worked with people who were abstaining from daily use of substances for the first time in many years, and one of the major themes of the work frequently became about processing through emotions of things that happened years or decades ago. The substances numbed the emotions, but did nothing to process and move through the grief, anxiety, anger, etc. The avoided emotions sat in their guts like a lump, building over the years, only coming out in accidental regrettable ways when the pressure got too big to be contained. This process is not unique to people struggling with addiction. We all have hooks from our past that create patterns of reactions and behaviors that are often unhelpful in the present circumstance, and can greatly affect how we show up and how we perform.

So the important question becomes: what are we doing with our negative emotions? Are we feeling them, churning them, processing and moving through them? Or are we stuffing, avoiding, wishing they would magically go away without the unpleasant experience of feeling them? Are we putting them through the garbage disposal, or are we pushing them into an overflowing garbage can?

Most of us spend significant amounts of time and energy pushing away our negative feelings, trying to avoid them, trying to shove them down into a place that doesn't have the space to hold them. Distracting our brains away from negative feelings at times can be helpful, and can even be a crucial survival mechanism. However, it is only effective in the long-term if we learn how to compartmentalize, and find or create other times to take our feelings head-on, so we can churn through them to dispose of them. Most of our efforts aren't fruitful because we don't do the latter part. When we get antsy and start to feel uncomfortable we numb and distract ourselves with substances, TV, social media, video games, food, and so on. If we don't use the disposal or take the garbage out, our feelings just get further packed in and the pressure builds.

Setting aside time to just feel it all, talking about our emotional experiences, exercising with and through our feelings, listening to music, spending quality time with quality people, journaling, meditating, breathing: these are blades in the disposal that churns and grinds those feelings, and sends them through. We have to experience them, we can't just stuff them down or push them aside. I believe sports, and all that comes with the dedication to a sport, is the best garbage disposal we have, though one that we often misuse (I know I did). If the sport is just another distraction, it's not as helpful, but if we can learn skills to compartmentalize and get in touch with our emotions, we can recycle them into rocket fuel to propel our performance.

Being fully in the moment, totally committed to your actions, being with others- teammates, coaches, etc- sharing a goal, supporting each other along the way, engrossed in the task at hand, and being in your body more than in your mind. Tapping into the well of emotions, getting in touch with what's in there, tolerating the experience, then concentrating the feelings into the performance. Not a distraction, not putting it on the shelf, but using it. That's churning and moving through, that's processing, that's healing, and that's the way to get the most out of ourselves without the hooks of past emotions holding us down. We have to go through our emotions to get past them. We have to go through challenges to be good, and through hell to be great.