How to Process Emotions Without Talk
Don't talk, metabolize
I write this for a specific young man who is dear to me. He is struggling with a Big Life Event, and when I check in with him, his response is, to quote Terry Real, “I Don’t Want to Talk About It.”
This is hard for me because I’m a psychotherapist. I listen to people talk about their emotional experiences all the time. Verbal processing is our major currency, and because therapy is having its big moment in popular culture, people believe that This Is the Only Way. If you’re sad, fearful, lonely, etc, you have to talk to your therapist, you have to process, that processing through 50+ minutes of monologuing once a week is the only way to Do The Work. That narrative leads a lot of people away from therapy. If the options are to talk about it forever, or stuffing it down, a lot of folks who feel like they don’t have the skill or emotional access to talk will stuff it down.
Talk therapy is only a part of how I work with people. Some folks want to go through guided meditations; others will process through EMDR, somatic (body-based) therapies, or psychedelic experiences. Sometimes imagining the pain in the chest is a spiky yellow ball, then squeezing it, shaping it, befriending it, and letting it go can be just as helpful, if not more, than talk therapy.
In the book Radical Healership, Laura Mae Northrup offered steps on how to metabolize emotions. If emotions sit in the body, unprocessed, you might feel like you’ve eaten too much at Thanksgiving. Bloated, sleepy, shut down, maybe a little sick. Those stale emotions can come back later as depression, anxiety, or physical symptoms. She wrote that to metabolize, or process emotion, they needed to be 1. felt, 2. understood or witnessed, and 3. expressed (Northrup, 2022).
Emotions need to be felt. The feeling part can be the hardest, especially if you’re conditioned to believe that experiencing emotions is a sign of weakness. It’s ok to spend a very short amount of time with the feelings. Maybe they are too big, so you sit with them for 30 seconds, then get on your phone to watch some funny videos. That’s ok. It takes practice to sit with emotions and really feel them.
Emotions need to be understood or witnessed. This isn’t necessarily about opening up and speaking directly what’s in your heart, if that doesn’t feel safe. Sometimes we don’t have the words. Maybe it’s telling a friend: “this sucks, man.” And hopefully your friend responds, “I get it.” Or maybe they don’t even say a word, but they are there, available for your experience. You have to know who’s the right person in your life who can handle it. Someone who can get it, someone who gets you. Someone who won’t try to solve the problem, someone who won’t run away or mock you if you shed a tear or two.
Emotions need to be expressed. To finish metabolizing, feelings need to be expressed. Don’t think of express as talk. Think of the other meaning, like how you express juice out of an orange. We need to emotions them outside our body. There are a lot of different ways to express them: physical movement, artistic expression, ritual.
Body movement: put on some energetic music and dance. Go for a hike and shout into the clouds. Scream into a pillow. Shake your body like Kermit.
Artistic expression: I’m not talking about writing the greatest Torch Song ever. Strum violently on a guitar. You know any Violent Femmes songs? Hit some drums. Scribble on a piece of paper. It doesn’t have to be good, it has to be felt.
Ritual: I’m a big fan of ritual. Ritual can really be anything. Maybe it is as simple as writing your feelings on a piece of paper, then burning that paper. The ritual itself is a container. You offer to yourself: whenever I am ready to be done with this feeling for today, that’s when I’ll burn this paper.
When I used to write cover letters for jobs, I would get really anxious and stressed. The ritual I developed was as follows: I would write the most self-centered, offensive, obnoxious cover letter I could think of. I would read it back, and laugh. Then I would delete it. Once I got that out of my system, the anxiety was done, and I could write the real letter.
Any of these activities can be a simple distraction, an activity to keep your mind off whatever’s going on. Distraction is necessary, when you’re going through something big, but it’s not sufficient. Maybe you want to hunt down and shoot zombies in a video game because you’re angry, or go for a long run because you’re sad. In that moment, are you displacing the feeling with the other experience, or are you feeling it move out of your body? Let yourself feel whatever it is you’re going through while you’re expressing the emotion, and that will help it move through more quickly.
What did I do when I was in high school?
I certainly didn’t have access to a therapist, and I’m not sure I would have talked to one if I did. I spent a lot of time walking my dog, or running, or wandering around town. I would hitchhike to the beach, because even then I understood that nature made me feel better. I wrote in my journal until my hand felt like it was going to fall off.
I wrote a ton of terrible, terrible poetry.
Sometimes I overdid the feelings part. That’s who I am. After my first high school breakup, I watched Say Anything. If I let my mind go there, I can feel echoes of the pangs of pain I felt when I saw that movie. It felt like the saddest dragon was belching fire all around my guts. Sometimes you need to stare the horrors directly in the eye. Maybe you need to make the saddest playlist you can think of (oh hi Nick Drake, let me introduce you to Elliot Smith) and listen and cry.
I hung out with friends. Sometimes your friends get it, sometimes they don’t. They also might Not Want To Talk About It, but you can do things with your friends: play music, video games or pickup basketball, make some food together, find things to laugh about.
There are a lot of ways to do this, without talking nonstop or pushing your feelings down. We don’t always have to talk about it. To the young person in my life who’s feeling really hard things right now, if you like the idea of burning something, please use the fire pit in the backyard. Also, I bought you some ice cream. 💕
References
Northrup, Laura Mae. Radical Healership: How to Build a Values-Driven Healing Practice in a Profit-Driven World (p. 74). (Function).